Understanding Your Student's English When you first get to Korea there will be a lot of things that you don't understand. Unfortunately some of those things will be what your students are saying, in English, in an attempt to talk to you. I always always try to at least pretend like I know what…
Teaching
Tips for Surviving Your First Day as an EPIK Teacher
Tips for Surviving Your First Day as an EPIK Teacher If walking up to my school on the first day amid a literal sea of students staring and gawking at me wasn't enough to make me nervous, then standing in front of my first class of 30 something 15-year-old boys was. Your first few…
Continue reading ➞ Tips for Surviving Your First Day as an EPIK Teacher
Teaching Middle School with EPIK
With EPIK placements for the Spring 2018 intake coming up I know that many of your are in the horrible in-between waiting period. With nothing much to do other than think about packing and study Korean, I know that I spent a lot of time just desperately trying to envision what my life was going…
The Oscars Lesson: Part 2
I made a post a few weeks ago about a lesson that I did that went surprisingly well. It was called The Oscars lesson. The activity is essentially just "write a dialog" but disguised as "we're all going to the Oscars next week and you have to present a script." And it worked shockingly well.…
The Oscars Lesson
The Oscars Lesson (One matter of housekeeping before we start. I accidentally just published a post that I was still working on titled "Things my students have said to me part 2." So if you are an email subscriber, you might have received it. I've removed it from the site as it is not yet…
If You Give a Kid a French Fry
I'm sure I'm not alone in this, but for many of my classes I can pinpoint the exact moment that things took a turn for the better. For some of them, it was right of the bat. The little ones, for example, aren't hard to please. They like me because they just like everything. The…
How I Stay Organized At School
For the record this is not a suggestion. I have absolutely no idea if there is a proper way to keep these things organized, and I'm certain that there is a better way than what I'm doing now. However, I do know that when I started teaching and suddenly had 24 classes to separately keep…
Building Relationships At Work
Being the single non-Korean person in an entirely homogenous workplace is quite a unique experience. In some ways I feel like I benefit greatly from it, and in other ways it's quite difficult. So today I'd like to talk about the relationship between the Guest English Teacher/Native English Teacher/Foreign Teacher however you like to call…
“Desk Warming” Days
For better or for worse, this is something that gets a lot of attention when it comes to teaching with EPIK. Most people hate it, and to be fair I do too on the grounds that it is completely arbitrary and inefficient. Why do I have to be at school when English Camp is finished,…
Korean Middle School Summer English Camp
I'm writing this from my desk on the LAST OFFICIAL DAY OF THE SEMESTER! Well the last day has been long gone for the kids, but for my co-teacher and I today marks the end of our two weeks of English Camp. English Camp is something that get's a lot of attention at EPIK orientation…









