Slooow Wednesday

So, I am sitting here trying to find things to do. I have made another nice worksheet, this time for use in my after school class. 

I've reached a bit of a difficult patch concerning the 1st grade after school class I teach Tuesdays and Fridays. I think I've said they are a bit of a pain, mostly because there are two girls who are very outspoken and good at English (for their level), two students who are about where I think they should be, and two who basically need to go back and learn the alphabet or something. So, it is a challenge to keep the advanced ones busy, give the middle ones a chance to speak and answer, and keep the really low ones engaged. I have actually not managed it at all so far. I can cope with the middle and top students, but I am really losing the two lower guys.

I think I also said that one of the staff room ladies is coming to this class now too. She's there to half help me with the lower ones, and half because she wants to improve her own English. So, naturally, she's sat next to the problem kids. I thought this was going to be really good, but after class yesterday, it turns out she'd telling Mr Beak my classes are too hard. He told me I need to make them a lower level. This is fine, I don't mind that at all, BUT what about everyone else? The two top girls get everything 90-95% correct, the middle ones are somewhere in the 70's, so I feel I'm about right on that count. The lower ones, however, will barely look at the worksheets (probably because they have no idea what they say). I tried to explain this, but Mr Beak kept talking over the top of me in Korean to Chloe (the offending office lady). I think he understood what I was trying to say, but then just started saying something about next year, and how I need to make winter camp really easy and stuff. Well, that's all good... I can certainly make lower level lesson plans. 

Sadly, what I was teaching yesterday was already an elementary grammar point (and these are almost 2nd year middle schoolers). All we were doing was categorising nouns into 'can count' and 'can't count', and then using the correct quantifier (I'd simplified it down to only much, many, and a lot of). The whole rest of the class, by the end of the lesson, were free forming correct sentences from a picture I put on the OHP. They were saying things like "There are many trees", "there are many children", "there is a lot of trash", etc. They were even getting the 'is/are' difference correct. Just this one kid, the one Chloe was next to, could only look at the picture and burst out with "trees!", or "people!". He looked so proud of himself for these words. And he can totally almost do the worksheets if Chloe helps him in Korean, he just can't speak or respond to questions from me.

So, the boss is telling me to dumb it down, but in my opinion that's ruining it for 5/6 students. I'm not too sure what to do. Luckily (or maybe unluckily because I actually don't get a chance to solve the problem) I have only two more lessons with them left anyway. Come next year, they will be new students in that class, so I actually will have to dumb it down to basics. I'm looking at some new textbooks that might help me do this. With higher level learners, you've got a bit more leeway, but I feel lower level students need language to be covered in a really systematic way so they can kind of get 'building blocks' to work with. Being such a new teacher, I don't have much idea of how to go about this, so a beginner text book would be good. I do have some at school to work with, but they seriously lack a speaking component. Some of them have no speaking at all! That's fine though, I can obviously just design my own speaking activities. Ideally, I'd like a book not made here in Korea though, I am not particularly impressed with them so far.

Ok, enough about work. It's almost lunch time - woohoo!

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Wow, ok, lunch sucked! Stale-ish bread roll with a small amount of chobbled lettuce-mayo salad and some kind of meat cut into 1cm square bits and sprinkled 5 to a roll; a tiny pro-biotic yoghurt drink; kimchi; spicy octopus salad; and an incredibly bland, incredibly thick chicken rice soup. It wasn't bad tasting, so much as no-tasting. Ah well, that pretty much sums up my feeling about today so far. It's pouring with rain and has been all day. Which mirrors my mood pretty well. I had bad dreams all night and woke up this morning a bit down and a bit homesick. It's not that I actually want to go home, but I miss it.

*sigh*

Only four hours till home time.

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Well, after school class went really well, and it's made my day much better :)

And now I've got a hot chocolate... perfect.