Heck Yes!

I just got some big news today, right as I was sitting down in my chair after lunch getting ready for my 80 minutes of chill time. My main co-teacher, (who is also my closest Korean friend), mentioned to me that the English teachers had a meeting yesterday afternoon in which I was not invited to. This doesn’t offend me, those meetings are so boring and once they realize how useless it is for me to sit there, they have stopped making me go. Anyways, during this meeting they discussed my classes. They came to a consensus that the book material that I am asked to cover (the most monotonous English dialogues you’ve ever seen), is too boring for me to teach. They all agreed that my strongest point is my creativity, which they’ve witnessed in all of my camp books that I made from scratch and in a few fun filler lessons at the end of each term. Because of this, they decided that I should only spend the first ten minutes of class covering the book materials, and should spend the rest of the time doing fun, off-topic lessons.

My jaw dropped. This was the last thing I thought she was going to tell me. I sat in my chair, nervously playing with a pen, expecting her to tell me that I needed to cover more in the book. To my surprise, I am now given the freedom to teach whatever I damn well please….it’s nuts!

With a sudden rush of excitement, came a pause of reflection. This means that I cannot simply resort to altering lessons from last year that I have already used. Those lessons were specifically text book centered, and boring because they had to stick to a certain grammatical point or part of speech. Now I am asked to scrap all of my past plans and come up with completely new, fun material. My teacher suggested I adapt materials from my camp workbooks. It sounds like a good idea, until I realize (after she points this out to me), that the students who attended camp actually wanted to learn English, were higher end students and participated a lot.

So now I have to come up with fun, exciting, creative lessons that are going to involve the entire class (ranging from 20-35 students). The more I think about it, the more I realize how much work I have in store for me.

My co teacher told me I could start in September, so that I had some time to plan. That gives me a week and a half.

Although I am anxious about using creative, out-of-the-box lessons on students who are used to lectures, memorizing and drills, I am so thankful to have been given this opportunity. These past few days have been rough. Getting back to school after a vacation is always tough, but considering my lack of enthusiasm for all things Korean right now, this was just the boost I needed. Thinking about spending the next 3 semesters creating fun activities that engage students instead of put them to sleep has me smiling from ear to ear.

And to think I was planning on a nap after lunch. How my afternoon has changed! I just spent 30 minutes quickly looking over camp materials and searching online for lessons. Hopefully I can come up with a few strong lessons to get me through the first month, then I should be able to get into the swing of things.