I’ve just finished the first class-and-a-half worth of testing for the week. I have a couple of recommendations for students: If you find English difficult, then I recommend studying harder, and more, as a solution to the problem. Not studying, I find, tends not to resolve the problem at all. If you fail English in your second year and require the class to graduate, and if you don’t manage to improve your English skills somehow, the least you can do is not leave it to the second semester of your 4th year, because you’ll probably still suck at English then. …

No, it’s not yet snowing in Jeonju. It’s just that we had a camp meeting last night and Myoung and I are preparing the documents for the camp. That means a lot of paperwork and preparations. I’m trying to make the worksheets for the kids look a little more interesting, as well as easier-to-read, so it’s a bit of work. But I have it mostly finished now, though having printed them and seen how they look, they need a little more work. Layout onscreen always differs from layout on a printed product. But the hardest thing, I’m discovering, is explaining …

Today my teaching was evaluated. It was pretty nerve-wracking, really, knowing that it was coming. I think I was maybe second or third, though I’d thought beforehand that I was first. I didn’t think much about the relative benefits (real or imagined) of being first, or not, but it was nonetheless nerve-wracking. Well, my supervisor qualified his evaluation pretty heavily beforehand, saying it was just one person’s opinion of one class session on one day—for he did it alone, and only during my 4:30pm class today. And sure, I got to choose which class he would evaluate—naturally, my best class, …

Yet another activity sheet, this one done up for the girls at the high school, using a bunch of common verb phrases and some question & answer patterns for expressing like or dislike of a given activity, frequency of the activity, and schedule of activity. It should take a good hour of class, and follow-up activities can be interviewing another kid in the class, making a daily schedule, (after teaching, “What do you after that/next?”) and anything else you can think up. Not pretty, but usable.

Here are some lines and snippets of conversation from student-prepared dialogues I’ve heard this week during conversational English exams: Student A: What are you doing these days? Student B: I’m selling drugs. Student A: (shocked silence) Student B: What? It pays well, and I sell drugs, but I don’t take a medicines! Let’s change the topic of conversation! What are you doing these days? Student A: I’m studying criminology. You’re a really good subject of study! How often do you go out to sell drugs?… At this point they launched into the “How often do you____? Where do you ____? …

I have another question here, and anyone who can answer from experience would be appreciated if they could give me a little information. Can you please describe, in whatever detail you like, what the standard kinds of teaching methods are in a standard Korean classroom? I’m not especially interested in a language classroom; history, civics, art classes, and other subjects are just as important to me. Last night I went out to dinner with the English teachers from the high school where I am teaching a few hours a week, a sideline approved by my current employer. The English staff …

Today I saw a presentation by Steve Gershon, who is the author of the English Upgrade series which my University uses in its conversational English classrooms. After the presentation, I was asking a coworker about how much of the ideas Gershon presented would be successful in the classes we teach here. Judging by the fact his University even offers post-graduate courses, I would assume that the student body is perhaps a little more selectively accepted than at the place I’m teaching. That, of course, can make all the difference in the world. But the question of pedagogy, and my role …

I didn’t want to use my own resume as an example when I taught resume-writing in my writing class, so I modified it and used a made-up character, Isaac Wolgren. What’s included in this file are two examples of a resume: one is experience-based, and one is skills-based. I’m assuming most of my students have no work experience and will have to use the latter form. And yeah, a dragon-slayer’s resume is a silly idea, but it was the first thing that popped into my sickly mind. I’ve had dragonslayers on the mind lately, so what can I do? When …

Today, Cheolseong and I were laughing like madmen when a student of Mike’s came in and started to talk to him. Why? The first thing she said was something like, “Uh, it’s Chuseok.” Mike said, “Are you in my class?” When the girl claimed she was, he asked, “Then why have I never seen you before?” This got us laughing so hard we couldn’t stop for a minute. Why? As of today, there have been nine classes. Any student who has not bothered to show up at class by now has, as of the end of today, automatically flunked their …

Another ESL teaching aid: A description exercise for use with lower-level students. This one’s for kids. And here’s a template for a board game. You just need to write “Start” at one end and “Finish” at the other, and then fill the squares with whatever information you want students to get from, or tell to, their partners. You can use this in many ways: write a word and have students use the word in a sentence; write a requested piece of information that you want students to ask their partners for (“Father’s name”, for example), or write instructions for advanced …