Korean Job Discussion Forums

[politica]

Man, oh man . . . its been a b*tch of a day. And its that way pretty much every Tuesday and Friday.

You see, most of my classes are okay. I'm in a public school teaching 3rd through 6th. Sure, there are the occassional "I'm-too-cool-for-school" and class clown types, but generally speaking, they are dispersed over many classes and don't cause too much distraction. In fact, I would say that most of my classes receive menial disciplinary action. An occassional "Close your eyes!" or "Apologize to the person you hit!" and then things roll along their way.

And then there was the dreaded 6-5 class. I discovered early on that they put ALL of the 6th grade trouble makers in one class . . . because they have one 6th grade male teacher. First of all, I seriously feel for this guy. His life must be a living hell. I'm in my 7th month at this school and every week, I DREAD the two hours (two forty-minute sessions) I have to spend with 6-5. Basically, there are about 8-10 troublemakers in the class, and the rest is fine. But these 8-10 manage to disrupt my class beyond reach. They are increasingly late, they mock me, they have fist fights in class, they'll start screaming obscenities in Korean, paper fights occur behind my back, you get the idea . . .

Its just this ONE class.

Things have gotten so bad that this is what the last two periods looked like:
Friday- The big tough male homeroom teacher had to intervene. Took about 8 boys out into the hallway and made them standing in "downward-doggie" (yoga position) the entire class period. I had a semi-normal class with the others.
Today- Taught for less than ten minutes before thing got out of control. My co-teacher had the entire class sit with their eyes closed for nearly 30 minutes.

Now, its my understanding that I am here to teach the students English. ALL of the students. The troublemakers certainly aren't learning anything, and thanks to them, neither is anyone else in 6-5. I think I might porpose to my co-teacher tomorrow that we separate the class into two sections.

Tell me about your "trouble" class. What have you done with them?

[Fishead soup]

Look on the bright side. Eventially they'll graduate and they'll be someones elses problem. Just feel glad you made it this far without losing it.

[KYC]

I hate Thursdays and Fridays because those are the days I teach the 6th graders. 6-1 through 6-6...there isn't even a half decent class. They are all horrible.

I must say my 6-5 is also the worst. They've made my coteacher cried twice now. Once with me in the room, and she ran out leaving me alone with them for 35 minutes. I went off on them on a separate occassion and since then have stopped giving a d@mn.

I'm tired of trying and spending hours making games and activities that they won't even participate in. Forget that.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

This year it would be my 1-3 HS class. My grade one academic HS classes are divided into an A, B, and C class. My high school should really have only two academic classes and three vocational for each year, but instead it has three academic and two vocational. The main reason for this is that if the standards were higher for our academic programme their parents would send them to other schools in the area that have even lower requirements for their academic programmes, all in a faint, usually vain, hope of getting them into university.

It always happens that the C class gets worse as the year goes on. The A, B, and C classes are rearrainged four times during the year based on their entrance scores and then each subsequent mid-term or final. By the last quarter it contains a number of students who have pretty well given up on high school English. On their last mid-term eight students got less than 30% and the class average was around 37-38%. One student who started off the year in the B class got 20% on her last (multiple-choice) mid-term.

This is the only academic class for which I'd like to have a co-teacher (mostly so that they'd have no excuse not to understand), and while I have one on paper I rarely do in the classroom. They're all right with certain things, like vocab lists, dialogues, straight-forward phonics excercises, and basically anything straight-forward and teacher centred; but for some things, especially listening to instructions and then completing tasks, it's really bloody difficult to get them even to try. They also seem to have a limit of around 20-30 minutes after which it's almost impossible to get them to do any real work. Oh and did I mention that I teach them from 4.00-4.50PM after they've been at school since 8AM?

Oh well, compared to what I read here I guess it could be much, much worse.

[Rob'sdad]

See how it is?

In 1998 our vice-principal in an unnamed HS told us, "don't beat the kids in class, it disturbs the others, beat them in the hall."

Sound advice if you ask me.

[Illysook]

It's always the last class of the day that is the worst. They don't want to be there any more than you do at that time of day. You have to make it fun and try to trick them into learning. I've been playing a lot of vocabulary flashcard games with them and today, something beautiful happened. I told them that we could play a game after we finished one page of the workbook. It's a super easy workbook, almost a joke but there's always a couple of kids who don't want to be bothered with it, so today, when half the kids were finished, they started helping/bullying the others to hurry up and get on with things!

[Draz]

A class of six 5th grade girls. I find boys easier to control, personally, and this class is just generally unpleasant. Irritating, lots of attitude. This thread cheered me up about it a little though - I could be back attempting to teach giant public school classes after all, and come out feeling drained and stressed out instead of "sort of annoyed".

[Snowkr]

I used to have a pretty tough class of HS first graders when I worked in a public school. I think I could have handled 24 kids acting like animals but I had 48. They tore the classroom apart, threw things at each other, danced around like they were on speed and basically wasted 50 minutes of my time each week.

The co-teacher did nothing. I took a whistle to class and a microphone and told them off. Not sure how much they understood but they chilled out afterward... for that day at least. I left the school shortly there after...

[Easter Clark]

Perceived misbehavior is directly proportional to how much you give a damn. Stop caring and the behavioral issues magically fade away!

Just kidding, btw!

These days the worst classes I have are the 8:40 ones, which are thankfully only twice a week. My 2nd grade vocational high school kids can't be bothered to stay awake, regardless of the lesson content. I've tried everything I could think of to get them to be active in class, but it just hasn't happened. The truth is, I'm barely functioning myself at that time of day, and count myself lucky if more than half of the class stays awake. At least they're not being destructive.

[Soju808]

I can relate to you on a lot of levels with these kids.

For me, all my grades are pretty well behaved except for my 3rd grade. When I have to teach them alone it is a nightmare. About 6 boys in that class don't give a crap about English and do nothing but disrupt the whole class, and makes it impossible to teach anything.

I resorted to all kinds of punishments. Having them putting their hands up, slapping them on their backs, sending them in the hallways kneeling and putting their hands up. None of those seem to work because the minute they return to the classroom, they continue to do what they are doing. It drives me crazy.

The only thing I can do is report them to their homeroom teacher, which I don't like to do, because its sending a message to my school that I can't control the kids.

[yingwenlaoshi]

My trouble class is gone. I complained about it and they gave it to someone else.

[yingwenlaoshi]