Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Teacher training, day 2

It's Tuesday night, and I'm in a dorm room, chatting with 1 of my 2 roommates. He's also named Sean. He runs a lot. And eats.

The conference is going fairly well. It's about half as boring as I thought it would be... well, now that I think of it, that's an incredibly pessimistic statement. What I had meant to say was... it's twice as exciting as I thought it would be! =) Yeah, that's the ticket.

You know, I hear that zero times two is still zero. Since when? That's what I want to know...

Let's see -- we've had talks on teaching philosophy, classroom management, team teaching, contract issues... wow. Ha, it sounds boring when I just type those words in that order. Let's rethink this thing, huh?

Tonight we got placed into groups of three, and we practiced doing our teaching demonstrations. In a nutshell, we chose from a list of topics (we got "How Many Cows?" from the 3rd grade textbook) and we have to prepare a simulated lesson. Well, part of one: we've got 10 minutes and we have to incorporate certain elements from this checklist. So we need an attention-grabbing hook, a brief synopsis of the elements to be covered (in this case, plurals vs. singular), a quick demonstration of the material (Sarah, the most artistically-inclined of the three of us, drew cows on a paper -- 1 cow, 2 cows, 3 cows... whoo-ee!), and then an interactive group activity, followed by a quick evaluative activity to make sure they got it. In 10 minutes, mind you. So we each have a role -- Sarah is playing the foreign teacher, I'm the native Korean teacher (yeah, that's right... annyeong haseyo, bitches) and Eulla (who is actually Korean, by the way) is our average 3rd grade Korean student who speaks very little English. We've decided to break them up into groups, assign each group an animal... well, technically the students will pick their favorite animals, but Eulla is going to speak in Korean and I'm going to "translate" for Sarah to make sure we get fun ones. Anyway, then I'll assign each group an animal. Also, (ha... this story sucks -- sorry for all the backtracking and shit but I didn't plan it out very well) our "students" are actually 30 other foreign teachers. We're going to have them stand up one group at a time and pretend to be the animals we've assigned. We're gonna have monkeys, elephants, tigers, and alligators. And then when the monkeys are standing up pretending to be monkeys, they'll ask the rest of the class "How many monkeys are there?" and the first group to get the right answer (in full sentence form -- "There are 7 monkeyS." gets a point. Yeah... good times, I tells ya.

Anyway, this is really my first attempt at lesson planning. It's rough. I kinda suck at it, to be honest, but probably with a wee bit of practice it'll get better, and easier.

Fun story of the conference so far. They told us that we're not allowed to drink alcohol on the premises. They also suggested that we not leave. Now, this wasn't really an issue for me, but several people (who aren't me -- I swear) had a huge problem with this, and made an earnest effort to find the closest bar last night and stick it to the man. So, I ain't tryin to be all anti-social and shit, so I tagged along. Wait, what? I was one of the first people out the door, you say? Pshaw... you don't know. You weren't there... =Þ But anyway, we had to walk for about 20 minutes, but sure enough... paydirt. Tok's. Bar. Beer. Yes. Unfortunately, they didn't see all of us crazy waegookin coming, and they failed to stock the necessary provisions. So about two hours later, we came to a sobering (ha! get it?) realization. We had floated the entire bar. No more draft beer, no more bottles. They did still have liquor, but we weren't about to go down that road... so we rolled out and decided to hit up the noraebang down the street. Emily was right: that is a whole different ballgame with drunk Westerners, compared with drunk Koreans. I guess we were a little too rowdy (and also brought in a little too much smuggled booze from the corner store) because after about an hour of singing the owner came in and told us to leave or he was calling the cops. So, uh... haha. Yeah, ballgame over. The visiting team forfeits. Please clear the aisles and have a safe drive, folks. We hopped on a bus and back here we came. The funny thing is, we got back before midnight and didn't even really have the chance to drink that much... but a fun night, nonetheless. Tomorrow I gotta be on my game with this presentation so I decided to stay in and keep it chill tonight. Tomorrow night though, it's on like Donkey Kong.

Alright -- it's just now turning midnight so I've got to get to sleep before I turn into a glass slipper or whatever. Annyeong-hi gaseyo!

1 comment:

emily said...

Isn't it way more fun with the wae-guk-een?

How'd your presentation/animal activity go?