Korean Job Discussion Forums

[discostar23]

Just wondering, does anyone teach students who aren't Korean?

At the moment in my youngest kindergarten class, I have an iranian boy and a ukrainian boy. Both boys only come to my part of the class (our kindergarten has 3 parts).

If you have non-korean students do you find them easier or harder to control? One little boy was pretty hard in the beginning but turned around after about a month. The other boy was up playing the first day.

Just interested if anyone else has a similuar situation to this.

[peppermint]

One of my kids in grade six is ethnically Korean, but was raised in Guatemala, and moved here a few months ago. He's a good kid, thought a bit of a goody-goody. ( more to do with his parents being missionaries than anything else though)

[HamuHamu]

I had a 7 year old in my afternoon program who was from somewhere in Eastern Europe....but I can't remember where, as it was a while ago.

His English was much better than the other students in the class, he should have been with the 10-year olds, level-wise, but they put him with his age group instead. It was reaally, really hard for him, as the kids teased him and made fun of him, mainly because of the way he looked (very blond, blue-eyed) and the fact that he barely spoke Korean. His English was really good, and for some reason they laughed at him for that too. They also made fun of his name, because it sounded like some Korean word that was funny.

I felt really bad for him, the level of the students was not high enough to demand only-English in the classroom, and my school had no policy on that. His mother was much easier to deal with than a Korean mother, that's for sure, as she wasn't concerned about what book-level he was at, how fast he went through a book, what level some other kid was in, etc etc etc. And, she actually wanted THE TRUTH about her son, instead of being told "Johhny is a perfect angel with fantastic pronunciation" every month.

In the end, she pulled him out of the school because the other kids gave him such a hard time. She decided to put him in a Korean hagwan instead so that he could improve his Korean language and then once he could communicate with his peers, she would put him back in English again. I was really sad about it, for both the mom and the boy. But, I was amazed at how quickly he was picking up Korean in just the few months he was in my English class

All in all, it taught me a lot about teaching English, because his pronunciation and grammatical errors were much different than Korean students, and having them together forced me to teach much differently.

[trevorcollins]

Yeah a Filippino kid who speaks fluent English, but no Korean. He goes to the local elementary school also. Seems to be doing okay. He's actually pretty cool.

[Son Deureo!]

I had a Japanese woman in one of my advanced classes. She didn't show up very often, but I was always very glad when she did, because she was very communicative and always had a different perspective on issues than her Korean classmates. At the end of the month I found out that she was actually dating one of the male students in the class. They had met in the States and came back to Seoul together. The funny thing was that before they told me she was CONSTANTLY disagreeing with him in class on every subject.