One Year in Korea

I have been in Korea for a year. Today is the last day of school and I'm writing this from my desk as the office is descending into utter chaos while the grade three students storm in and out with questions for their home room teachers about if they're having a snack party later, what…

Video: Fall in Korea

Fall in Korea was brief but lovely. I come from a state where fall means that the weather might dip below 80 degrees and we can comfortably wear jeans outside. So proper fall, where the leaves change and the weather starts to take a nosedive towards freezing, was completely new for me. It admittedly didn't…

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.…

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…

Korean Middle School English Speaking Tests

One would think that after having the same conversation with 700 students, about the same topic from the same script, I would have pretty much heard every answer there is to hear. And while yes, there is not much by the way of variety, still out of the blue some of them surprise me. There…

First Class Without A Korean Co-Teacher

    So the protocol here is that all of the native English teachers have another Korean English teacher from the school in the room when we are doing our lessons. Their degree of involvement from any point after that completely depends on your situation. I feel incredibly lucky to have the co-teachers that I have,…