Sunday, April 6, 2014

The New School Year

As most of you know, I absolutely adore my school and the students at my school.  They are wonderful little smartasses and it is great.  However, there was a slight change to my first year classes and only my first year classes.  This year the students whose English abilities are good enough, get to be in my class.  So my first year classes are divided in about half (12 to 18 students per class), with the lower level students receiving extra grammar lessons from the Korean English Teacher and the higher level students getting to be in my class.  This split is supposed to help with classroom participation, improving the lower level students English levels and to be a sort of reward for studying English.  Like: If you do well on the assessments and show progress you get to be in the fun class with Kara and not in the boring class with the Korean Teacher.

The thing is, I have found that they don't want to participate because the class is so small and they feel dumb.  Mostly my girls but sometimes my boys too.  Three of my five classes are great,but the other two are horrible.  I feel like I am pulling teeth to get them to say anything.  They don't want to do anything or say anything.  The sad thing is my boys are the problem, it is the girls.  They just don't want to participate and I have no idea what to do.  Give it time or something but I have no idea.

I genuinely love these kids and I love teaching.  It hurts that these classes are confident enough to speak in English.  I am hoping that things will turn around or something because I just don't know what to do with these two classes.  I guess two out of eighteen isn't horrible though.  My other classes are brilliant.

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