A Day in the Life of an English Teacher

Some people have been asking us what our typical day looks like as an English Teacher in South Korea so I decided to write about our usual weekday schedule....

9:35- Leave our apartment, get our bikes from the bike rack and ride to work (consistently ringing our bells to try to get people to move as we swerve through the swarms of people and parked cars on the sidewalks)

10:00- Arrive at work

10:20- Start working with our kindergarten classes.  All of the students have English names they use at the English academy, either given by their parents or teachers.  Eric has a group of six boys (Mike, Alvin, Alex, Jerry, Johnny, David), ages 5-6, who are all first year students.  Stephanie has a group of four girls (Emily, Laura, Elizabeth, Sophie) and two (soon to be three) boys (Tommy, Matthew, and boy-to-be-named tomorrow), ages 3-4, who are also first year students.  We have a curriculum book that we are required to teach.  (The curriculum that we use for ALL of our classes is produced by Sogang University, a large university in Seoul.  That is also why our school is called Sogang Language Program.  It is supposed to help children be prepared to get an education at Sogang University when they are older.)  For my young class this consists primarily of coloring and learning the ABC's.  For Eric's class that is a little bit older, they do a lot of writing and reading simple words while they learn phonics and practice writing.  (Side note for any teachers that might be reading this: There seems to be no debate about phonics vs. whole language approach when it comes to teaching kids how to read English here.  It's phonics only with all the curriculum we use and from what I can tell pretty much all of the private English academies here.)

11:00- Eric continues working with the curriculum, reading books to the kids and playing games in the classroom.  Stephanie takes her class to the gym where the kids can run around, listen to music and build with blocks.  I have to say my kids have learned quite a bit from our gym time.  The first day they did not know how to line up, how to share or say anything in English.  Now they know exactly how to stand in line, sometimes share the toys with each other and tell me about what they build in English. 

11:40- Stephanie takes her kids back to the classroom.  We continue with our coloring while also singing the ABC's, the phonics song, the wheels on the bus and the itsy bitsy spider.

12:00-  (Tuesdays/Thursdays)  Eric takes his class to the gym where they play an organized game.  The first day they did not know how to play (or say) "duck, duck, goose" or "red light, green light."  Now they are experts and they love it.

12:40- Get ready for lunch

12:50- Lunch time.  Lunch consists of rice, soup, kimchi, meat and a side dish everyday.  We eat lunch with the kids and then they go to the gym with the Korean teachers to watch a movie or look at books.

1:50- Students go back to their classes and we continue teaching (or coloring or singing).  Although our kids do a lot of coloring and singing they learn a lot from hearing the same language over and over and repeating after us.  Since we both got the first year classes none of our kids knew much of anything on the first day.  We are both very proud of what most of them know now :)

2:45- Kindergarteners gather in the gym to sing the good bye song and get taken to their bus.

3:00-4:20- First period of elementary classes.  The curriculum that we use for these classes is also laid out very well and is also produced by Sogang University.  The classes range in size from one or two students to about ten students and in age from seven years old to about fourteen years old.  Each class is forty minutes so we teach two classes during this time.  The students get 40 minutes of instruction from a Korean teacher (vocabulary, reading and grammar) and 40 minutes of instruction from a foreign teacher (talking, listening and writing). 

4:30-5:50- Second period of elementary classes, same as above.

5:50- We both are finished teaching and can use the rest of the time to plan or do whatever we want.  On M/W/F Eric does phone teaching and on T/TR Stephanie does phone teaching.  This is when we call some students, kinders and elementary (they all get called by a teacher once a week), and just have a short conversation with them on the phone so they can practice their conversation English some more.  Each week we have to write a lesson plan for the kindergarten class (this takes about five minutes) and each month we have to write a monthly lesson plan for each elementary class.  This is also very quick since every lesson is laid out in the curriculum.  We also give monthly tests to our elementary classes which we then grade and write report cards for (probably the most time consuming part of the whole job and it's still easy to get done during our break time)

7:20- Go home

7:40- Get home, cook dinner and relax

The days might seem long but we really have no complaints.  They go by very quick, aren't difficult and are fun.  It is sure exciting to see how much the kids have learned in the ten weeks we have been here.  We can't wait to see what they can do by the time we leave!