Korean Job Discussion Forums

[celticjay]

I go through a teaching rollercoaster. I feel that I'm not adequetly trained to teach ESl sometimes. I've been doing it almost two years and one class will be great while the next will be average at best. Am I alone in this thinking? Is anyone else up and down like a toilet seat with regards to their confidence as a teacher.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

Of course not. I go from great class to mediocre class to great class to hyper-active class to great class to too-dead-tired-to-do-much class to great class all week long.

Hang in there and be positive! Your next class might be the best of the week!

[UncleAlex]

I sometimes feel that I've been a bad teacher when I regret having become
visibly angry and upset in front of my unruly groups of students instead of remaining
cool, calm, and collected. If I sense that I have compromised my status in any way
before the students, then I temporarily feel like a failure.

[C.M.]

I did that just last night. Got irritated with a group of high-school students after a near perfect day. Back to work today; forgotten about tommorow.

[crazylemongirl]

Sometimes. I think I'm used to getting a lot more praise than I would in Korea. Often I would recieve a lot o criticism from the prinipal and/or other teachers about my teaching yet when the education office came to do assessments they were always good I even recieved some sort of commendation from them.

[Ya-ta Boy]

[UncleAlex]

I agree that a teacher should take the different personalties of students
and the 'collective personality?' of each group into account when conduct-
ing a class. Although the teacher may be using the same lesson plan with
seventeen different groups, as in a public school, he should make some
adjustments or minor changes to accommodate the different body of pupils.
If a teacher believes that his lesson plan should go exactly as it has
been written down with each group, or an individual one, and stay in sync
with the time slots that have been arranged for each section of it, then he
might feel that he has failed as a teacher when things don't go according to
an exact plan.

[celticjay]

It's been 4 or so hours now from my initial post and yes I'm fine now. The rollercoaster is on the upswing, doomed for the inevitable free fall once again.

Good advice about changing expectations for different classes. I intend to have some flexibility with each lesson plan I make, in a effort to adapt the ever changing atmosphere.

Thanks for all the posts. Sometimes just venting it is enough.

[captain kirk]

Aside from xenophobic indifference, management often aims a 'belittlement ray' at you to attempt to shrink your yarbles over time and make you feel insignificant (thus you're more managable). Resist!

[kathycanuck]

I can relate. Had a great day today, lots of positive energy, productive classes. Yesterday, I was down with my cold, no energy, felt like I'd really let the students down, lackluster classes, grumpy teacher. I think all you can do is let the bad ones slide and try to start the next day with a better attitude. No-one can be 100% on their game all the time, but I think feeling bad about the less-than-perfect classes is a good sign...you obviously still care.

[Homer]

Put it all in perspective.

Bad classes happen. You just need to put those bad ones behind you and move on as we all get those bad classes sometimes.

What you need to avoid is letting one bad class affect you so much that it spills over into your other classes.

[tomato]

[Examfreaker]

God, this is exactly how I feel.

I've just had a woeful class where a cattle-prod would've been useful just to liven them up. Yet I've taught this lesson 6 times before, to a much better reception.

I'm in a public high school and the difference really is enormous from class to class. Yes, it does make me question my abilities sometimes, but it also reminds me that I have a job to do, regardless of the less-than-ideal situation.

On a slight side-note, I'm also often reminded how ineffective many Korean English Teachers are. Out of 5 co-teachers, 1 is excellent, 2 are good and 2 are awful. Really poor. Little or no English ability, unwilling to provide me with any back-up in class (other than to laugh when a student is rude or unruly) and very much a I-couldn't-care-less-what-happens-in-this-class type of attitude.

Rant over. Hopefully the rest of my classes will go better....

[EFLtrainer]

Do I ever feel like I'm a bad teacher? No. But I do sometimes feel I may be a bad person. Or maybe a poor teacher.





On a more serious note, but my notes are often on tangents others don't get or don't see the value of, so....

What I took from your post is a great hopefulness: an English teacher that gives a damn!!! The money is so easy that many (most?) get sucked into/beaten down to just collecting their checks. Your rollercoaster is a sign that you give a rat's butt. Let that be a motivator so that noticing it helps you focus on continued improvement rather than giving in. Let's face it, there are precious few English "teachers" here that have anything like adequate training. There are so many that never question or examine what they do.

How many people do you know that are charming, very popular and just assume that they are also teaching effectively? Do they track their students? Do they assess them? If so, do they use a standard that is recognizable beyond "He's better than he was, cause I remember how he was?" (Studies have show that teachers' observations are only about 60 percent accurate in assessing student improvement, yet this is the sole barometer in the vast majority of hagwons in Korea, right?) How many think that because they have been teaching they ARE tachers, though there has been absolutely zero measurement of this?

I'm getting off on tangents... Your distress is a signal to yourself. Just try to go with the interpretation of it that is more objectively self-critiqueing and less of a cop-out.

There's only one variable you can completely control in your classroom.

[lastat06513]

I felt like that for a while, and i can honestly say I was the worst teacher on earth before. I would stand up and do jokes and funny things just to make students laugh. I found my enrollment dropping from 30 students at the beginning of the month to 4 or 5 students by the end of the month. At one point, some of the teachers I worked with wrote a letter collectively asking the director to fire me because they thought I was giving the school a bad name.

I spent 7 weeks soul-searching before I decided to do something that did help me in the long run.


Self-evaluating and self-reflection

At the end of every month, I would sit down and think about how the classes went. Think about what I did wrong and what I did right and how I can fix the wrong parts while enhancing on the good parts. Then I would go to some KOTESOL meetings and listen-in on some of their seminars and stuff. And also talked to some more experienced teachers.

Can I say I am a perfect teacher now?
Not by a long shot~!

But I can say I am more confident about how I teach and how my students percieve me in class.

Another way to improve is by diversifying the type of subjects you teach.

I have taught, ESL, tourism English, Business English, Business Presentation Skills, Speech classes, telephone English and now I'm teaching Military English.

By being expose to different types of classes that are out there, you can get a better grasp of your teaching ability.

And if you intend to stay in the ESL teaching field, you might want to head off to places like Japan, Brazil or even the Middle East (where I am at the moment) to get a broader understanding of how ESL is taught elsewhere in the world.

2 years is not a good measure of how well or badly you feel about teaching. Give yourself some time, you might get the hang of it