Teaching.

I've realised I haven't actually written anything about the actual work I'm doing here, so I'll try to remedy that.

I teach English to young kids, from 5 to 13 years old. I have about 5 classes a day, each lasting 50 minutes. So it sounds like a day should be really short but I often have long breaks, so I generally work from 9.30am till 6pm. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have six classes because I only teach the really young 5-year olds on those days (they are a handful and a half).

Teaching itself isn't too hard. The kids work from a variety of textbooks and as a teacher I just get them to do all the exercises and hopefully learn the english. With the young kids it's mainly vocabulary, and the older kids are more about the elementary rules of grammar.

Whilst teaching itself isn't too hard, controlling the classes can be, especially the 6 and 7 year olds. Not being able to speak Korean means I can't really reason with them to be quiet, so I just end up shouting a lot of the time. They have a sticker reward system going on at school here, so I can use that to control a little, but it often falls flat on its face.

The books teach American English, which is a little hard to come to terms with, so I often have to check in them to see what phrases I'm meant to be teaching.Two of my6 older classes are learning aboutthe planets in different textbooks, and the accompanying tapes pronounce them in different ways, so I'm incredibly confused about whose learnt how to say Uranus the amusing way.

I just had an incident with some 6 year olds, one was standing oin a chair cleaning the whiteboard and another pulled it out from under her. Crying ensued. There's a lot of bashing and falling over, but most of the time they seem to bounce, so there's not too much crying for me to have to deal with, maybe one every two days.

So teaching is doable. The breaks give me time to catch up on emails and maybe do some fun worksheets for the kids. Also, as it's Christmas, we've been asked to decorate our classrooms, so I'm busy with paper chains (homemade is always the best in my opinion).

Well, this has been rather a long blog. Congratulations to anyone who actually made it this far! Don't fret though, it's over now.... or is it?

Yes. It is.