Korean Job Discussion Forums

[crazy_bagman]

So the deal is that I start soon for a Middle school close to Dongducheon under GEPIK. I've been a tutor of english but never a class environment and certainly not in South Korea.

I don't know what to expect when it comes to training and how to the best I can.

Any advice or wisdom to sort of get me in the mindset of what to expect and how to succeed?

[Fishead soup]

Really useless training. Lots of "When in Rome do as the Romans"
When you first go to your school they won't know what to do with you. Expect to have at least a week or two of doing nothing with no computer connection.

Don't expect your students to ask a lot of questions on the first day. Or at least write some sample questions on the board.

[sinsanri]

Which school or town? There are many near Dongducheon.

it depends if you are their first foreigner or the next one in line. Go slow, feel things out and what works in the west usually doesn't work in the east.

[English Matt]

Your school should allow you to 'observe' classes for the first week, but in practice you may just spend a lot of time sitting around the office (they are not supposed to just chuck you into a class in the first week and expect you to teach). I observed a couple of classes (by the only teacher who really spent most of his time teaching in English - the other classes would have been pointless to observe as 95% of the time the teacher was speaking Korean and the kids were mute). The first week will be spent going to immigration, being shown around town, taken to the supermarket (basic settling in stuff).

You will likely be teaching for a few weeks before you get sent to a week long 'Orientation'. Your orientation will give you a few useful ideas and introduce you to other GEPIK Native English Teachers - this will provide you with a support network of others in the same boat as yourself, and may also be the source of solutions for some of the problems you may encounter while teaching in Korea).

Your coteachers may be fluent in English or barely able to form a sentence. It really is pot luck. As regards coteaching, the name itself can be misleading. In most instances you will be 100% responsible for lesson planning and the Korean teacher will act as translator and classroom enforcer (helping to maintain discipline - although some teachers let the kids go nuts in class and don't do a thing to try and stop them). It might say Assistant Teacher on the contract but in practice you will be the teacher. This means that you will need to learn how to keep the attention of a class of 40 hyperactive kids, how to maintain discipline, etc.

Anyhow, expect the kids to be excited to see you when you first arrive and eager to learn about you. They will however be scared to move away from their 'comfort zone' and ask you questions that they might be curious to know the answer to; instead you will be asked if you like Korean food, do you know Park Ji-Sung, and do you have a girlfriend.

A good idea for a first lesson (which I wish I had known about in my first week of teaching here) is to play a game of bingo, with the Interrogative Pronouns (What, Who, Where, Why, What and How) arrayed vertically along the left hand side, and the Auxilliary Verbs (is, are, was, were, do, does, did) arrayed horizontally along the top of a 6x7 square bingo grid. Split the class into, say 5, groups and tell them to construct questions to ask you using an Interrogative Pronoun and an Auxilliary Verb. If they successfully ask a question, you give them the answer and they win that square. The objective is to get three squares in a row.

Afterwards, get them to ask eachother some of the same questions and have a few students introduce their neighbour to the class. It'll definitely make the first week's questions more interesting and also allows you and the students to get to know eachother. It'll also give you time to discover the students levels and plan lessons accordingly for the following few weeks.

Your school will very likely be unsure about what to do with you - my advice would be, be flexible. You may only be given minutes notice about changes to your schedule, or you may suddenly be expected to go to dinner with the Principal or another teacher....just be very agreeable for the first little while, until you've been here for a while and know where you stand.

Finally, there is quite a bit of xenophobia in Korean society - the academic body of any school will reflect this. Some teachers may not be happy that you are here, and may not like you - this will most likely not manifest itself in the first few weeks or months that you are here (and indeed may never) but be prepared to encounter the odd teacher who will treat you badly or give you the cold shoulder.