Korean Job Discussion Forums

[adverge]

I've been doing topic based writing classes with my middle school students. We have a reading and discuss the a topic. We also do short answer questions, short essays, and making up questions based on the reading. We work on vocabulary and some minor grammar points (I didn't think I was supposed to teach grammar since they take grammar with a Korean teacher). I try to get them to write for content, flow, and style.

At the beginning of the summer season the director told us that we didn't have a curriculum and had to come up with topics for our classes. Each week was supposed to be a different topic. I'm a new teacher but I found the Write Time for Kids series tucked away into a corner of the hagkwon and used that. The kids seemed to enjoy it and they had a lot of work to do, which the parents seemed to like. The director wanted us to give homework so I was giving one bit of homework per week but the students rarely did it (about a quarter of the time) so I started marking them down when they didn't tdo their homework.

Yesterday I got a review passed down to me by the head foreign teacher from the director who told him to tell me (director never speaks to me directly about what I'm doing) that I'm supposed to be teaching a small point and then doing an exercise on that but also that I'm not supposed to be doing any writing in class. All their writing is supposed to be homework - which they don't do. I'm also supposed to give in-depth markings of each item they pass in an explain to each student in person why things were marked the way they were (I have about 100 students at that level).

I'm really lost right now. I don't have a proper curriculum to base lesson plans on and I'm supposed to talk for 40 minutes about grammar/style (I think) without having them doing any writing during the entire class and hope they do their homework so I can mark that in depth and then explain individually to them sometime around my 45 hour work week that was supposed to be only 30.

I really don't mind the school but this is getting ridiculous. The director wants me to design a writing program that he can use in the future without paying me extra for it. The other foreign teacher (not the head teacher) says to just do slipshod work and get by the next ten months. I want to teach the kids something useful they can use but apparently how to write is not something to be taught in a writing class.