Korean Job Discussion Forums

[wanderingsalsero]

I'm enjoying my first day at my new job. It's a middle school in Suwon.....my first middle school. My previous school was a high school in Namyangju.

I don't believe in reinventing the wheel and I'm always willing to take well-meaning advice from more experience individuals so.......

Who are some of the people on the board here who have good ideas on teaching public middle school kids? I'm already acquainted with Dave Deubeliss(maybe I'm misspelling that....sorry) and I will definately be going over his site in more detail in the next week.

But I'm looking for as many resources as I can find and I don't want to rule anything out. I know that just one or two ideas could make all the difference.

I'm told that I'm supposed be going to a foreign teachers workshop Wednesday. Just a one day affair. I'm looking forward to that because I did get some important ideas from the high school workshop I went to when I was at my previous school and I'm hoping this'll be the same.

I don't know about you guys but it's always amazed me that every class in these schools is different. Even the same class section can be different from week to week.

So I'm trying to evaluate these 'first day' classes as I go along here today.

The first class was a 'grade 1' and it really wasn't too bad. I just sorta broke the ice because I knew they've got tests all next week and I won't really start teaching til week after that. And even at that point, as I understand it, the Winter vacation comes along soon too.

But the second class.....which was also 'grade 1', was totally different. It was much noisier and less well behaved.

The primary variable between the two classes was that the first class was a class belonging to my supervisor, a Korea lady, whereas the second class belonged to some Korean teacher guy they've got here who, according to my supervisor, is a nice guy but his classes are totally out of control and he doesn't know how to teach and/or control them. She even told me that lots of the kids don't like the class very much.

My guess is that I might have some 'breaking in' to do with the guy's classes because they're used to running wild. That's why I'm looking for material and ideas to model after. I understand that these kid's level of profiency won't be as high as my previous high school kids but I'm also wondering what the differences are in disciplinary tactics for middle school vs. high school kids.

Thanks,
Art

[Fishead soup]

Use material made by Andrew Finch. I've had quite a bit of success with this

http://iteslj.org/t/tmm/.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

I'd suggest going back to read Crazylemongirl's and Jaderedux's posts. They had a lot of good practical tips - stuff that's worked straight from the trenches as opposed to ideas that sound neat straight from the university seminar room. While they could be real biatches occasionally and I had my moments with them, 90% of the time they were right. Bosingtang was also someone who struck a very sensible balance between ideals and reality. He's probably the first person I'd go to for advice about a problem, and a few times basically did just that.