Mr. & Mrs. Vandebilt + kids

I suppose this post is long overdue seeing as teaching is what I spend the majority of time doing. It’s something I’ve put off for a couple of reasons. One, it’s hard to write about an everyday occurrence and make it interesting and two, it took me a little bit to actually figure out what I was doing and how to do it.

I’ve been teaching now for almost 4 weeks. My first day was chaos and it has only slowly become more manageable. When I showed up to school on my first day I asked what I would be teaching and the only answer I got was, well you’re English, this should be easy. They couldn’t even tell me where I was in the books, or what I should do with the kids. I think I’ve started to get the hang of it and thoroughly enjoy most of my classes.

A typical day for us (now that we’ve gotten into a “routine”) is to sleep in until about 930, slowly get up, go to the gym, for a hike or run into town and do some touring or shopping. I come home, have a nap eat some lunch and go to school for 3. I have between 7-8 classes a day and am done of work at 9. Pretty sweet gig if you ask me.

My entire purpose as a teacher is to get these kids to speak English. I can do whatever I want with them, but they have to learn to speak and pronounce their words properly. We have books that we read out of for about 30 minutes then the last 10 minutes of class we play some kind of game. Hangman is strangely popular, so are word puzzles, word racing games, bingo, simon says or eye-spy.

My kids range in ages from about 6-16 (Korean ages) which is really 4-14 everywhere else in the world. These kids are incredibly smart and their lives are terribly sad/boring. These kids go to school all day at public school starting at about 9am. When they finish school they start their rounds at the Hagwons. Most kids won’t go home for supper, and won’t see home again until as late as midnight for the high school students. Then when they get home they do their homework and start it all again. My 10 year olds do homework until about 1am. While it seems to pay off for them intellectually, my 4 year olds can spell elephant in their second language – they have no fun, and less social skills.

A popular game amongst the kids is rock paper scissors; they decide EVERYTHING using Gai Bai Bo. If they don’t need to decide anything then they still play but the loser gets flicked in the forehead by the winner. They practice their flicking all class long into their other hand until they have bruises.

The kids love to both hit and tattle on one another. Neither of which gets any reaction from the other students. It is perfectly acceptable to rat your best friend out to the teacher about anything and everything. And if they decide to handle it themselves they just smack each other around.

Some days, especially with the younger kids, the language barrier is nearly impossible. I do a lot of gesturing and pointing at the front of the class and have learned a few key phrases (sit down, be quiet, write, read etc.) The kids love to teach me Korean and is how I learn and practice new phrases. While getting my instructions across to them is difficult, it is a lot more challenging to understand them. You have to constantly keep in mind that L’s are R’s but R’s are L’s, F’s are P’s and any word ending in a consonant can have a y attached to it. For example

Teacher: “Hi class, how are you today?”

Students: “Hi, teacher, I’m pine.”

T: “How was your weekend?”

S: “Teacher/B-sam, I had funny this weekend. We went to the beachy. We went to eat with my pamily and had lice for supper.”

That’s teaching in a nutshell. It’s one of the most laid back jobs I’ve ever had, I’m mostly there to entertain the children and they leave me to do that however I want. While there are some kids that I’d love to smack and then chase down the halls of the school – I’ve already made 2 kids cry – most are adorable. Really it’s a pretty sweet lifestyle/job. I think I can handle it for another 11 months anyway 🙂

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B-Sam is a pollener englishy teacher = Brynn (Sam means teacher in Korean, and since they can’t say R’s I just changed my name) is a foreigner english teacher.