A day in the life of a Korean teacher
11:04 Thu 12th Jan 2006 (GMT +9 Seoul)
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For those who are interested I thought I would break down a typical day as a teacher here in Korea. Lets take a look at yesterday.
The starts about 8-9am when I manage to drag myself out of bed. From then on till 1pm I have my own personal time to do whatever I fancy before making the 20 min to walk to work. The usual school day begins at 1.30pm with a 5-10 minute meeting of the current days events and paperwork required before a break till 3 for lunch. For the first 4 work hours at our school we do what is called "visiting classes". This means we visit a Korean teachers class for about 13 minutes to practice the current works pronunciation. This generally involves memorization, games and general playing around with the elementary kids. 7pm rolls around all too quickly at which point I take a special classs called "WonGangBan". This is run and taught solely by myself for the high level elementary children and absolutely no Korean is allowed to be used in the classroom. We cover all sorts of subjects from History to Math and English Grammar. This is probably the most enjoyable hour of the day as my class is really cool (and smart).
The last hour and a half of the day 8-9.40 is spent teaching middle school children. Though not the most enthusiastic of students the classes I have at the moment aren't that bad and tend to be warming up to having some fun while doing work.
So all in all the day is not a bad one. Some feel longer than others, but generally the days and the weeks are going much faster than usual. A wednesday night ends here in Bucheon with a teacher dinner for those in the area finished work and wanting to socialize. (As you will see in the photo taken last night).
That completes a typical day in the life of me in Korea
