The Breakdown

The school where I’m working is called a hagwon, which is just a private school that specializes in a certain area. My school is an English language hagwon, but there are math hagwons and martial arts hagwons and everything in between. From an early age there is tremendous pressure placed on the kids here to do well and make good grades because there is tremendous pressure to get into a good college and get a good job. To get into a good college you need to be in a good high school, taking higher courses, and to get there you need to have taken higher courses in middle school, and so on and so on. Families will pay top dollar to give their kids any advantage, even at an early age. Our school offers an English language kindergarten program, where instead of going to normal Korean public kindergarten, the kids learn in English, so not only do they learn the basics of reading, writing, and math, but they do so mostly in English. Kindergarten lasts from 10am to 2pm every day, and then the older students come for their after-school programs. So from 2pm to 8pm there is a steady stream of elementary schoolers coming in for an hour-long English lesson.

I have 6 to 8 phonics classes that I teach to the kindergarteners during the week, and then I have three afternoon classes teaching kids of varying ability. Two of the classes are higher-level classes, which are a lot of fun. The students are old enough to have a good sense of humor and their English is good enough that we can communicate on some level. My third class is a beginner class, which is basically learning the alphabet and sounds now. This is going to be a difficult class to teach, but I think it will be very rewarding as the year progresses.

So that’s the breakdown, best as I can tell three weeks in. Once I get the hang of lesson planning and paperwork and I learn the materials I’m supposed to teach and how to teach them more effectively, this will start feeling a lot less like busy work and possibly be a lot of fun.