A Day In The Life...

I've had some questions about what exactly I do here in Korea, so I figured I would take a moment to run through a typical day. My working hours are from 2 pm to 8 pm, so my mornings are completely free, which I sometimes love and sometimes hate. It's great having time to go to the bank and run other errands that I wouldn't be able to accomplish with a public school teaching schedule, but for the better part of my first two months here, I spent my mornings doing absolutely nothing. I was so bored and tired of just sitting in my apartment all morning that I found a training plan to run a 5K. Now I get up and go to the gym right down the block from my apartment most mornings.

My day really gets started around 1:30 when I have to catch the bus to head in to school. This quarter I'm teaching 5 classes a day, except on Fridays, when I only teach 4. My classes are 50 minutes long, and my largest class is ten students. For each 50 minute class, I only have to cover a page or two of material, which means that I spend most of my time trying to come up with games and other activities to review the material we've covered and keep my students occupied. All of my students go to public school in the morning, and most of them go to at least one other private school in the afternoon, so by the time they get to my class, they've already been sitting for 6-8 hours, and they might have another 2-3 hours of school left in the day, depending on how old they are. Because of this, I try to play active games, which is a little difficult in my tiny classroom.

My last class of the day is a class of middle school students. I have two classes, and I teach them on alternate days. One of my middle school classes has started a beginner's level book to prepare for the TEOFL, the exam they'll have to take if they decide to study abroad in the US. This is one of my favorite classes to teach because I feel like I'm actually being useful in my job. My younger classes are lots of fun too (most days, anyway), but some days it feels like I'm just doing crowd control, and other days it's like pulling teeth to get some of my students to talk. It's hard to blame the students in this equation. Their schedules are ridiculously packed, and Korean society is incredibly competitive. Between the crazy schedules and the pressure to be good at everything, it's little wonder that some of my students are completely off the wall crazy little balls of energy and others are tired and burnt out.

After classes are over, I have phone teaching. I call each of my students once a week to ask them questions related the chapter we're covering in class and practice speaking over the phone with them. Phone teaching usually takes between 10 minutes and half an hour, depending on how many students I'm calling that day. After phone teaching I eat dinner with the other teachers at my school, and then catch the bus home.

Weekends are theoretically my time to go out and explore, but I haven't been doing very much of that lately, as evidenced by the lack of pictures and entries I've posted here lately. Hopefully that will be changing this coming weekend...