Tone Setting

Ooh, what a long week. Things are finally a little busier, but now I'm extra tired =) I found a small job teaching English on Fridays. Its an English school, and its only for an hour, but at least its something. Today was my first day, and it was pretty crazy. First of all, I wasn't really told much going into this. A friend helped me find the job, and then she talked to the manager for me. And although I was present during this discussion, it was in Korean so I only understood a little. I thought since today was my first day I would probably meet with someone first and find out what the basics are. But actually that wasn't the case. I thought I was told the job started at 4pm, but it was actually 3pm. Luckily I know another person that works there and she told me I had to be there at 3. So then I was going to meet her and go together since I didn't know how to get there, but I was late. She couldn't wait, so then I just took a taxi and barely made it on time. I found out that I'm supposed to take off my shoes and wear slippers. And then my friend told me this was my classroom and my kids were inside already.

Now comes the fun part =) So theres 8 kids, about kindergarten age - 2 girls, 5 boys. They're already running around and wrestling with each other. When I came they were really excited when I told them I was from America and I sort of introduced myself in Korea. My friend had given me some flashcards with letters and numbers to practice with them, and a music cd with songs to help learn the letters and numbers. However, I'm not very good with being strict. My method is usually patiently wait for them to listen. This was totally the wrong way to deal with some of these kids. Haha, I think if the president of the school saw my classroom I would have probably already been have fired or something. I started by trying to get them all just to sit down in chairs, about 5 of them sat down at at time. They liked to rotate running around the room. It was definitely an interesting experience trying to talk/command them in my limited Korean. And then they started asking me if I knew what certain words were, and I didn't and they started laughing. Hopefully they weren't bad words =) I wasn't sure if I should be really strict and yell or anything, so I didn't yell. I tried grabbing some of them and sitting them down, but they didn't really follow that either. So I just tried to work with the 5 or so that would cooperate. They liked the flashcards, but they actually already knew almost all the letters and a lot of the numbers. I tried to play a game with the letters and numbers, but it was difficult trying to get them to listen let alone explaining it in my limited Korean. One game sort of worked for a while. But then more kids were running around and some were kind of wrestling/fighting so then I tried using one of the songs on the cd i had. At first they liked it and some of them were dancing around, but the troublemaker kids kept trying to push the buttons on the cd player to make it stop and they tried turning up the volume and everything. When I stopped one, the other kid would come. And so that didn't really work. So then I thought maybe I would try another game - duck duck goose. I got most of them to sit down next to me on the ground, but they were too noisy for me to try and explain how it worked. Whenever I told them "hey!" or "stop it" or "you can't do that" or various other phrases in Korean they would laugh because I was speaking Korean.

Basically it ended up being an hour of them playing and me trying to keep them from fighting with each other too much or from breaking anything. Four of the kids were really good, but the other four were rascals. I felt bad for the good kids. Afterwards, my friend that works there told me that you just leave. That was kind of weird, cuz I felt like I should meet or talk to someone about how the first day went or something like that. But no, just come, spend an hour with the kids, and then go... So yea, the first day was definitely a failure. I asked my friend who also teaches kids somewhere else about it, and she said yea you have to set the tone. She told me to slam my hand on the table, bring a book and slam that on the table. And that they listen to yelling. Maybe next time I also shouldn't smile so much. And I should learn how to say be quiet in Korean.