It’s been a while since I’ve written a post. I would have to attritbute that to the cycle of sicknesses that have occured since the last post. Usually the cycle goes like this:
Week 1: I’m fine and dandy.
Week 2-2.5: Sick as a dog due to allergies
Week 3: Fine and dandy.
Week 4: 2-3 days out of that week will be dedicated to recovering to some bad food I ate(which just happened to not be street food and usually is the school lunch)
My most recent bout is with some school lunch I’ve eaten three days ago. I have lost my appetite, my stomach has been upset off and on, and doing the simplest things like walking can easily drain me of energy and i want to sleep all the time. I think today is one of my better days though SO I hope I’m snapping out of it. Thank goodness all of this is happening during my vacation, which I just started suprsingly enough…on the day I got poisoned by the school lunch LOL.
I’m happy that I’m on break. It will give me time for my immune system and stomach to recoup from school and will give me some time to work on things for the next semester. I have a few goals to improve as a teacher this upcoming semester:
1. Be Better On Classroom Control
I did quite poorly on classroom control with the second years. I tried to go over rules, but it failed miserably. My co-teachers told me that the second year class is a pretty violent class overall and many of the classes act out just as bad in the Korean teachers classes. Even some of the other Korean teachers told me this. I’ve been told to just ignore their actions. This upcoming term, I am going to post the rules in the classroom and give them a copy of the rules BOTH in Korean and English so they won’t try to play the whole language barrier chip when they break a rule and I punish them. I’m going to try the approaches mentioned in the book I read in December called Setting Limits in the Classroom. The overall message is to cut out the constant warnings and get quicker with dealing out the disciplinary action. In other words, warn the kids once, and then pursue further action if needed. I will have to say that the incoming second year class is faaaaaaaaaaaaaaar better than the current second year class(incoming third year class). They have far more respect and are far more well behaved than the second year class. I was told by some of the Korean teachers that they lucked out on this class because they got the cream of the crop from most of the middle schools in town. I hope this is the case for the incoming first years. It might be so because the school was ecstatic that they only had a surplus of one student when it came to the number of people applying to the school and gave out free rice cake to everyone. Also, they are apparently cutting the incoming first year class by two classes.
2. Teach more colloquial phrases
This semester at the beginning of each class, I am going to dedicate a good 10 minutes on teaching the kids some slang. I know that the kids love to learn slang and can’t get enough of it. I’ll have ways for the kids to reinforce these phrases through skits and such. I bought this book on American slang and am using some of that material for this part of my class.
3. Teach more about world cultures
Of course, I teach the kids about my country’s culture, but the kids need to know more about other cultures. I’m going to focus on cultures in which English is one of the offical languages and show them that places like the US, Canada, UK, and Australia, etc. are not the only countries in which the people speak English. Even though there are a lot of South African foreign teachers in my town, I doubt that they even know they speak English in South Africa. I would say I would find this appalling, but it’s not like American high school/college students are any better on this front from my experience being a TA. I will probably focus on the Philippines first given some of the kids have gone there on a home stay program set up by the school and my boss also went on this program(thus has many pictures and stories to share).
4. Refine my reward system
The stamp card system/English Idol competition worked pretty well. Modification is not needed for the English Idol competition maybe other than changing up the prize. The stamp card system needs to be modified though LOL.
Other than some good ol’ goal setting, I have a trip planned to Hong Kong in two weeks. I’m going to see some friends I haven’t seen in a while. In the meanwhile I am just going to work more on making these goals a reality and getting some REST.
