Korean Job Discussion Forums

[crazykiwi]

Of course i feel like an imbecile! what other job to you get to act like a complete tool and get payed well for it! the crazier i am the happier kids seem to get! And the rewards are far greater than with older kids or adults, as their learning styles are already determined. with the kindies, you get to shape and mold them into a learning style best suited to there language needs. The only drawback is the time i have to start in the morning.

[polarbearbrad]

My previous job is one such case. I was a professional mascot and let me tell you, lunacey is not just an advantage but a pre-requisite!!!

Now that aside.

I have been doing Kindy for 14 months and there are days I want to dangle the little ones out of the window by their ankles.

Then there are the days where they are great.

It has been my experience that the latter exceed the former.

Do I feel less of a man because I teach kindy? Nope. Teaching is teaching and each level brings its own unique challenges. The challenge I find is keeping them interested in what you are teaching them long enough to let their little sponge brains absorb what you are talking about.

Now the problem with discipline is that these kids are FAR more cunning than many like to accredit them with. My school had a problem, the teachers would go into class and if a student didn't want to sit and listen they said the magic word...bathroom. Then we let them out and 5, 10, 15 minutes later they would return. I stopped letting them go. I was told by the directors that we have to let them go until I pointed out that on our field trip every one of them could go three hours with no potty break. Since then bathroom breaks have stopped.

I try to be kindergarden cop Arnie on the SECOND day. I don't let them leave, they will line up, they will clean up and you have to be the meanest cuss on the block so they will listen to your rules. Once they know who is in charge THEN you can be their giant playmate and THAT to me is when the real fun begins. I mean let them draw but then they must tell me in English about their drawing.

Sometimes the Koreans feel that I am too harsh and perhaps I am but I do the best I can to ensure that the children have a safe place to learn and still be fun.

Just my two won on the subject.

Cheers,
PBB

[Sage Monkey]

[R. S. Refugee]

This has been possibly the most enjoyable thread I've read here at Dave's. I'm looking for a uni job right now, but in case I don't get one, I've been doing some thinking about how I would feel in the other alternative teaching situations.

Now, I'm pretty sure that I will feel quite positive and I won't shy away from teaching kindy, since I think that some of my strongest teaching aptitudes would be well-suited to it.

Thanks. (Even to the neanderthals. )

[some waygug-in]

It's not so much that I felt like an imbecile, but more that I felt useless as a teacher. I just had very little luck finding things that would work with them. I didn't teach kindie, by the way, I taught the next levels after kindie, so perhaps that had something to do with it.

But it seemed to me that the younger they were, the more trouble I had with the classes.

If I tried some games with them, sometimes they would be useful, but often they would just ignore me and take to jumping off the desks, fighting, wrestling, you name it. I wasn't allowed to discipline them, so they basically knew that they could do anything they wanted.

Coloring was useful sometimes, but there always seemed to be some students who weren't interested in anything unless it was a game.

I did play a lot of bingo, crazy 8's, go fish and some other games that I made up. I did have some good times as well, but like another poster said before, the bad days outweighed the good at least 4:1 at the start of the year and about 3:1 by the end of the year.

[Son Deureo!]

[Yu_Bum_suk]

Well this has been an interesting thread. When I first came to Korea I was given two kindy classes. I managed to swap a middle school class for a kindy class and got it cut down to one. I sucked. I hated it. I felt like an imbicile.

First, let me say that some men can be just as nurturing as any woman when it comes to little kids. I'm just not one of them. I now teach middle school and high school. I play games with my students. I sing with them, sometimes even teaching them actions. I act out skits, I'm as animateed as I can be, I do funny voices, and I try to make my lessons as entertaining as possible while still being educational. I love it. With little kids, I hated it. I didn't hate the little kids per se and was genuinely concerned about things like their saftey, but I just absolutely loathed having to work with them. I felt like a complete imbicile, because I was doing something I had almost no aptitude to do.

However, I don't think that all guys who work with little kids look like imbiciles. Guys who can do it are, in fact, a very valuable comodity; I think it's really best if kids have both.

[laogaiguk]

[poet13]

Someone a few pages back wrote, " "Playfulness" and "frivolity" is generally discouraged in "grown men" ... then when they become fathers (or hagwon teachers), these childhood qualities suddenly have to be excavated in a rush."

When I came to Korea, I understood my youngest students would be about 12. The youngest now is 6. Nope, not diapers, but a whole lot younger than I imagined I would have. Having decided to teach after having had a career doing more serious work, I never thought I could deal with the little.....darlings. I became a daddy 20 months ago, and I have taught little kids for more than a year. In that time, I have experienced several revelations.

-Spit bubbles are fun, especially when they get so big you can see them when you look down.
-Picking your nose is nasty, but PRETENDING to pick your nose and eat it can turn an unhhappy sleepy class into a pack of little laughing wild people in seconds.
-You can drop a laughing boy on his head and he will keep laughing, but merely tapping an unhappy boy on the shoulder to get his attention can reduce him to tears.
-As a daddy, a man is free to make stupid faces, and noises in public.
-Before I was a teacher, I would have looked cross-ways three times at any man who hugged a child not his own. Now I understand.
-My students make me feel more a "man"(protector, nurturer, educator, superhero, etc) than any hottie sighing and doodling her fingers through my chest hair ever could.

Womans work?

OP, you're silly.

[rothkowitz]

Its funny isn't it...

A foreigner taken out of the foreigner bin and then expected to work wonders without training in something that is acutely specialised.

Funny as f-k.

God I loathe young children.You know how vacuums have a retractable cord on the back.Children should have that built in.

That will be all for today.Push.......

[Yu_Bum_suk]

Another thing I find funny: in Canada, a woman has to do a lot of specialised training to do a job that pays $10-14 / hour and probably also includes toilets and wiping and cleaning up after the little tikes. In Korea, some guy with a degree in computer science can just step off the plane and get the same job for $2,500 / month but without the toilets, wiping, and cleaning.

[endofthewor1d]

i didn't feel like an imbecile. quite the contrary, i felt like a god compared to how i felt with the older kids. the kindies were so much easier to keep in line.
whenever any of them started to get out of line, i'd threaten to send them to the (fictional) 'baby class'. none of them ever figured out that they were already in the baby class.

but 'power' aside, the rate of progression in english, from absolutely nothing (not knowing 'hello') to being able to make simple sentences was observable in a matter of a few days.

and there was always a korean co-teacher playing with a handphone nearby to handle the poopie.

[jinju]

[SPINOZA]

I thought I'd feel like an imbecile working with kids - pERIOD!

Never what I wanted to do at all.

10 months of working in middle school later and I almost feel it's what I've been put on the Earth to do.

Strange how things work out. But even saying that, I don't think I'd ever find kindie appealing. I'd rather do it than do my previous job in England however - in a bank, full of beepsucking motherbeeps - ANY day!

[bucheonleon]

A few posts back, I finally saw the word I'd been looking for all along: aptitude.

Some people are just natural fits for little kids. They have the caring, playful, parent-like thing down, naturally.

I am simply not one of those people, so kindergarten will always and forever be a bad option for me. I've worked with little kids before. I'm bad at it.

On the other hand, many who are naturals with little kids find themselves bad at earning true respect from older kids. I'm a natural there, as I'm relaxed enough, cool enough (to kids anyways), and have tons of interesting new things to teach them... that I get along SO well with middle schoolers.

I'd be curious sometime to know... lots of teachers complain about their middle schoolers being dead silent. I wonder how many of those are the same people who love the little tykes?

Simply different aptitudes.