Korean Job Discussion Forums

[legalquestions]

As the new teacher on the faculty, I've been assigned six writing classes for the upcoming semester (each class meets once a week for two hours).

The good news is that I will only have to prep for one lesson per week (all classes will be the same). The downside is that six writing classes will require a tremendous amount of marking.

Any advice?

[ghost]

I taught reading and writing at GIFLE (www.gifle.go.kr) for the past few months, and was only responsible for 60 students -actually teacher trainees - and even with that low number, I never had enough time to correct everything. I would just skim and correct, but it was not in depth - not enough time. How many students are you responsible for? If you have more than 60-80, you will have a lot of trouble finding the time to correct. That is why in North America, we have 'graduate assistants' to do that.

One of the writing teachers at our College told the students to do a lot of peer editing and self correction. Another teacher only corrected the first page.

You will have to find creative ways to do less correction and make the students more responsible for their writing, otherwise you will be spending 24 hours a day correcting papers.

Ghost in Korea (www.gifle.go.kr)

[articulate_ink]

It depends on what type of writing you're talking about. In my first year here, I taught TOEFL writing at a hagwon. The previous teacher had caved in to pressure to make the students write an essay in each class, which he would then take home and score. I put a quick end to that, and had no problem telling the head teacher (in more polite terms than I'm using here) that I didn't move to Korea to mark essays 24 hours a day. Besides, having the students write an essay in every class wouldn't have left time to actually teach them anything. The memorize/disgorge paradigm doesn't work with writing. Yikes, scary Westerners and their logic. I had the students do a lot of peer editing, then take the edited essays home to rewrite. Then they'd turn in both versions, which I'd compare. Sometimes they'd do no more than make the minimal changes, but some of them actually got it, and benefited. This also kept my workload reasonable. Now and then there were subtle and not-so-subtle hints that I should be assigning one essay per class, but I stood my ground. If this is the situation you face, I'd encourage you to do the same, politely but firmly. No one will benefit, otherwise.

At my university, I've taught a couple of writing courses per semester. If you're teaching at this level, out of the hagwon mindset, you've got more options. Finding a good textbook is helpful. I've been happy with the Effective Academic Writing series from Oxford. They contain good exercises which enable students to build up to paragraph and essay writing. When you do have to grade essays, it might also be helpful only to focus on specific grammatical features or skills you've covered in class. I'm not certain editing in fine detail is always helpful. Plus, I've found that giving back a paper covered in corrections often discourages the student more than it helps. If individual students want that, you can offer it to them, but don't set a precedent where that's expected. It's one thing to go above and beyond, but there's also a lot to be said for using your time effectively and not burning yourself out by trying to do too much.

[Ya-ta Boy]

You've got 6 classes doing the same thing? Stagger them. Teach 1/2 of them a lesson one week and let them write to practice that lesson the next week. You'll cut down the total number of lessons by 50% and the papers to correct by 50%.


Second suggestion: Hire me to correct essays. I love to correct student essays (if the topic is interesting).

[bassexpander]

Icky... I hate correcting essays!