Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Ya-ta Boy]

Have you noticed how kids respond to changes in the weather? The teachers at my old high school back home used to talk about it. We never got all of the details of the theory worked out.

An example. Yesterday was really nice here and the kids were pretty good. This morning it was raining a little and the kids were kind of glum, but after lunch it was raining heavily and the boys went from wiggly to wild. (It wasn��t ALL the weather.)

Unfortunately, my co-teacher is a first semester teacher, so she��s still learning her chops. Even worse, we��re starting a new unit and she wanted to teach vocabulary and grammar, so I didn��t have anything specific to do. At first the boys weren��t too bad. They settled down OK, but got increasingly restless as the grammar explanation got longer and longer. Then disaster struck. My co-teacher hadn��t located the right spot on the tape before class, so she stood there fast forwarding and rewinding, over and over. The noise level got higher and higher. Finally, after more than 5 minutes she decided she and I could just read the dialog. By then the boys were out of control. We read, but it wasn��t very effective. Then I told her I��d take the final 15 minutes of class.

I started demonstrating the difference between simple present and present progressive, but the boys had lost what little focus they had had at the beginning. So I had to stop teaching and do the old ��Why are you acting like boys? You��re 17 and almost men�� routine. (I was going to have her translate, but she��d run away. I��m pretty sure she was crying.) It��s a bit hard give the maturity lecture when you are reduced to stick figures and baby-Korean, but I got the point across. And we finished the lesson and they did begin to grasp the difference.

But the point is, isn��t it odd that kids react to changes in the weather way more than adults do?

[JacktheCat]

At that age they're so bubbling with hormones that any little thing will send them over the edge. Weather, new unit in the book, my wearing the cat tie, the handsome new geography teacher.

Teenagers, bless their hearts. It's nice to know some things are universal and not culture based.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

My morning classes were just perfect - taught them solo no problem, only had to wake up one student. This afternoon during the last block I had a class of 40 1st grade HS students (with a co-teacher, thankfully). It was all the two of us could do to keep them entertained, but we managed it. It's probably a good thing I planned the last 15 minutes to do group work, as I think the collective attention span suddenly expired around that point. Not that many groups did that much work, but it was probably better than trying to force a full 50 minutes on them as comparatives and superlatives can only stay interesting for so long. I'm not sure if the weather had anything to do with it - maybe, but I think it's more of a Friday afternoon thing.

[Ya-ta Boy]