Teaching

Overview:

I have been teaching, in some form or other, since I was an undergraduate student giving saxophone lessons for pocket money, but I started my teaching career in earnest in graduate school, where I worked as a “Teaching Assistant” in name only: my contractual duties and work were identical to a sessional lecturer hired for a single course. (In my case, the course was the Advanced Reading and Writing course–the most challenging class assigned to a teaching assistant, which I taught for four semesters consecutively.)logotecso_home

After that, I worked briefly in the field of educational content development, working at TECSO, Inc. (Montréal, Canada; defunct since 1 August 2002) on the development of news instructional courses (and updating and translating of existing French-language courses) for automated interactive instruction of computer skills for blind and visually impaired persons. At the time, TECSO was the world leader for this kind of program.

At the end of December 2001, I relocated to South Korea and remained there for eleven years and a few months, during which time I taught students at practically every level and age group, from kindergarteners to senior citizens. However, the vast majority of my students over the decade were University undergraduates, and two-thirds of my time in Korea, I spent teaching as part of the Department of English Language & Culture at the Catholic University of Korea. (Which is to say, I was teaching primarily content courses alongside the inevitable EFL courses. My old classblog, linked below, gives an idea of the vast variety of courses I taught, as well as the general student level, to which my posts there are geared.)

After marrying in early 2013, I relocated to Vietnam as a break from Korea to spend some time with my wife, developing film and writing and traveling. We returned to South Korea in 2015, where I am now once again teaching at a university.


 

Resources:

Currently there are three sets of resources available in the Teaching section of my site:

  • My old classblog: This collects all the syllabi, handouts, materials, posts, and supplementary material for the seven years (2006-2012) during which I taught at the Catholic University of Korea. The template is old and probably a bit dated (and still has the old, defunct address, gordsclass.com, in the header images), but since I’m not using it at the moment, there’s no great impetus to overhaul it until I start university teaching again… which should happen soon, if things go according to plan. (There are also plenty of old student classblogs on this site, though I’ve only preserved them as static HTML pages, in order to cut down on unnecessary hosting server resources and foil the inevitable spambots.)

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  • Updated Site link: ArduinoPunks of Hoang Anh Gia Lai 3: ArduinoPunks of Hoang Anh Gia Lai 3: an information resources and social site for a kids’ arduino club I coordinated in Saigon in 2014, to help some Korean kids with advanced English, who wanted to use English as the language of instruction for a subject more interesting than grammar. (External site, hosted on Google Sites.)

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  • Interactive Stories from HAGL3: a webpage that hosts interactive stories I coached students in designing and writing using the Twine software. There are three complete (albeit simple and basic) stories there.

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