Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mrt]

On average, how much time do you spend preparing for class each day?

Also comment where you teach, and who you teach.

[mrt]

At University about 20 to 40 minutes a day.

When I was at Hawgwon 5-10 mintues.

At Kindergarden about 20 minutes.

[jinju]

About 40 minutes or so for one class. Thats because I work at a public school and teach the same lesson whole day. So I pepare only 4 lessons a week for 21 classes.

[canuck in Ansan]

I'm at a hagwon, and I teach kindy to middle school.
I spend about 5-10 minutes a day, which is mostly for the one kindy class I teach a day. For all my other classes, I take about a minute to photocopy vocab sheets, and get all the books out, since we're working out of "text books".

[Intrepid]

Back in my hakwon days, the ten-minute break was both my coffee break and prep time--and that never seemed to cause a problem. At the university, an hour or more is average, but the prep is so much more interesting anyway.

[SPINOZA]

a little too long for my liking. My school's books aren't up to much and whilst I prefer to do my own thing rather than that, it does take up some of my free time.

[Homer]

Depends on the type of job and on the teacher's level of motivation.

[the_beaver]

Over 2.

Yesterday I was planning from around 2 to somewhere around 11 (I even forgot to eat).

[pet lover]

[plattwaz]

When I was teaching "real" classes, my rule was 2x the length of the lesson...that was about what I needed to put in to know that my lesson had been planned properly and that it would work. On top of that planning, then there were materials (supplemtnal teacher-created worksheets, etc., that I sometimes needed to do). That was when I taught at a good school with relatively few hours of teaching per week, and lots of paid preparation time.

Now, at my academy, we are usually only told what classes/students we will be teaching an hour or so before classes start. The syllabus of what is expected for that lesson will follow sometime in that hour . . . often only 10 minutes before. So, the way I see it, they don't actually expect me to prepare, so I don't put in any more than 5 minutes, and that's usually just photocopying the things that I am required to copy, checking to make sure I have the correct books and materials.

Although it's pretty laid back in that sense, I really do hate being halfway through a class and thinking "If only I had known yesterday, I could have done xxxx in this lesson."

Just another problem with education-for-profit hagwons and the Korean way of doing things...

[harryh]

I prepare lessons for one hour each day.

I teach 38 lessons a week (40 minutes - one lesson).

[steroidmaximus]

I do 'consulting' work, and each one of those is about 20-60 minutes of prep a 'meeting'. Each client is reading a novel, so I must:

-review the day's reading
-review the question sheet for each reading
-review the topics of discussion
-review the further at home work options
-add the day's notes to each individual client dossier.
-prepare specific grammar and writing focus lessons for the next meeting to deal with the individual problems of clients that were noted during the previous meeting.

When I've taught the same novel several times, the amount of prep is less time consuming; I could recite some novels in my sleep at this point. The question sheets, homework options and discussion topics are recyclable as well, so that helps too. What takes up the most time in the long run is the individual dossiers for each student, but I need to do this so I can more accurately judge a client's progress. Granted, I only have 20+ students, so that makes it manageable. When I'm working uni or public school, I can't remember all their names let alone get to know them personally since there are usually 400-1000 of them. I still keep a dossier on each class and add general thoughts and observations to that, however.

So: when starting a new book, about 3-4 hours of prep time on the book itself, plus the time to read it 1-3 times, then 20-60 minutes of review of notes and student progress before each meeting.

[ajuma]

I think it depends on how long you've been teaching, and how often you teach the same material. When I was a newbie, I spent quite a lot of time preparing lessons for my classes (maybe 20 minutes for each 45 minute class...or more), but now that I've been teaching the same material for the past 4 years, I need no prep time. That said, I wasn't really happy with what I had been teaching for the 2nd half of the semester, so I spent around 6 hours coming up with some new plans. I think these will take another 1-2 hours of "fine-tuning", but after that, I'll have no prep time for the next few years!

[Lizara]

As long as it takes me to find whatever books I'm teaching that day...

[Homer]

Bad sign....