First Day of Classes

Today I taught my first class since the break. And why, God why? Guess who it was? 2B. The worst class in the history of organized education (well, perhaps the term "organized" is a bit of a misnomer...) Actually, it wasn't so bad today, either because they were better behaved, I had build them up a lot worse in my head over the break, or because I was expecting it and went in with appropriate expectations. Today it was my class, I planned everything and ran the class (only not really, the JTE and the judo coach were running interference the whole time). 

I decided this semester to put more effort into my work. This job can be really easy if you want it to be, you can just sit back and get by without doing much. I never wanted it to be that way, but last term I was really confused about my role and what I was supposed to be doing, so I kind of decided to hang back and just go with the flow, instead of following a course I chose. Now I know how things work here a little better, so hopefully I can direct my course a little more instead of letting it direct me.

Today I only had the one lesson, and the JTE asked me to prepare a lesson about Korea and New Year's in America. Normally for this kind of cultural thing I do a listening activity where I just read off a sheet, and the kids read along and sometimes fill in the blanks. I put pictures up on the board as I speak. I've always thought this was fairly boring, but I wasn't sure what else to do, and this somehow became the mode of doing things. This time, as part of my resolution to get involved in the actual grammar and such, I decided to find out where the kids were in the textbook and design an activity incorporating that and the Korea/New Year's stuff, which, really, is what I'm supposed to be doing. So I came up with this game where the kids are in teams and one person from each team comes up and they write the answers on the board. Each team has on the board a paper ball and post, and if they get the question right, the ball drops another notch. It's the Ball Drop game, and I thought it was quite clever. We managed to get through it, though not completely successfully, I had to cut some corners because we were short on time and the JTE had inserted a dreaded wordsearch into the middle of class, taking away 15 minutes. 

I spent 2 hours last night and all morning today working on this game, which I never did last term, and I'm hoping this will be a better term, where I'll actually be doing work and feeling like I'm accomplishing something.