Public School Teaching

I have successfully completed my first two days of work at Guji Public Elementary School!  I was pretty nervous Monday morning since I was starting a week later than I should have been and knowing I would be the only foreigner in the whole school, but the day flew by!  It is very different than the hagwon we worked at for the past year, but so far they seem to be very welcoming differences!!  I am teaching all of the third and fourth grade classes.  There are five third grade classes and six fourth grade classes, so I teach eleven classes for forty minutes twice a week.  Those teaching hours are less than what I did just in afternoon elementary classes at the hagwon, not counting the four hours I spent with kindergarten every day.  It's also really strange to be home and have dinner before dark... I haven't had a work schedule like that since maybe never!

Lesson planning is quite easy and I seem to have more than enough time to do it.  I only plan four different lessons each week, two for third grade and two for fourth grade, then I teach those lessons over and over.  I taught the same lesson four times before lunch today.  I think I'm pretty good by the fourth time!  Korean public schools start teaching English in third grade so the lesson I have been teaching all the third grade classes the last two days is very basic speaking.  We learned how to say "Hello, my name is... What is your name?"  (I'm not sure who helped them choose an English name last week before I started but some are quite interesting... like Dragon and Pooh and Jespel and Call and Apple Pie just to name a few...) They don't start learning the alphabet or anything with reading and writing until second semester of third grade.  There are, of course, some students who have been going to a hagwon since they were kindergarten age and can learn English at a much higher level than I am teaching.  Then there are other students who are learning how to say "hello" for the first time.  Each class has about 25-28 students.  There is also a Korean teacher and we co-teach together.  Since many of them don't understand any English I usually teach part of the lesson in English and she teaches it in Korean.  The school is huge.  There are about 950 students and the building has five floors.  I have my own desk, classroom and computer.  More things I've never had all to myself before that excite me!  I'm the only foreign teacher in the school and only two or three other Korean English teachers speak English so there's not a whole lot of conversing for me to do in the halls, but I do hope to learn more about how their public schools operate here.  I'm very excited to have my first official public school position!!