Since I have been here, I’ve been involved in many public relations things with my school. This last week, the school PR pamphlets were finally published which includes pictures of myself in the “Foreign Language” section. I thought I was finished with PRish type stuff, but yesterday one of my co-teachers came in and told me that some people will be shooting a PR video. I was fine by that because I just thought it was for the school. Well today it turns out, it’s for the city and will be available on the municipal website. So I had to scrap the lesson I originally was going to do for another one. The one I was originally going to do was part II of my Cartoon/Comics lesson which involved watching a video, answering some questions, and doing some dialogue.
Even though the kids were explained into Korean what was going on, they were their usual crazy selves. They were super loud despite there being two co-teachers in the classroom. Usually when the teacher tells them to be quiet, they would, but they didn’t. In my opinion, they acted like that because the teacher didn’t punish them…haha that’ll look really bad if that was on camera. I guess they took advantage of the situation. This class is one of my favorites, BUT they could have been more well behaved given the cirumstances! They are representing their school, for crying out loud. One girl flat out refused to answer my question! One of my favorite students kind of saw that the class was getting out of control and helped me distribute the papers and pens to the class.
After like 20 minutes it was all over with. But then I had to do an interview talking about the benefits of a native speaker at school. I just said some basic stuff like “kids will be more comfortable with using English and with foreigners” and “we can teach them some aspects of the language not commonly known by many Korean teachers. For example, slang.” For all the qualms I have about the English education system, I do believe those points, especially number one. For the last week, I have had middle school kids randomly come up to me to say “Hi.” 50% of the time it was more than just “Hi.” They’ll try to make some small talk to me and they’ll gossip about their homeroom teacher or about some other people in class.
Well I hope that these PR things works out and get middle schoolers in the area interested in applying to my high school. If it could be the ones that I talked with a few days ago, that would be GREAT. I need more people like that in class!
Life At The End Of The Blue Line 