I TALK TALK ENGLISH

Perhaps I should talk about what I've been doing all winter. After the semester finished on December 22nd, I had to start teaching English camps on the 23rd! While it was a bit depressing to work clear through Christmas and New Years, being busy prevented me from feeling too lonely around the holidays. Above is the banner from my first camp- the aptly named "I Talk Talk English Camp" held at my elementary school.

Unlike teaching during the year, the camp lacked a ridiculously lame textbook...so I got to do whatever I wanted! a.k.a. make ice cream, decorate for Christmas, do morning yoga sessions, etc. Most activities went over well, but the kids (10 boys and 4 girls) were just out of finals (yes, elementary school kids have finals) and SUPER hyper.

Morning warm-ups in preparation for yoga. I'm reviewing vocabulary ("put your HANDS on the FLOOR")



No recollection of what I'm forcing them to do here. If I had to make a guess, I think we're playing the Samantha-enhanced game of red light/green light and they're in transition between a crab walk and a crawl.



I wasn't sure how to handle the kids during a particularly rowdy afternoon, so I called off class, took them into the gym, and made them do "running dictation". Having been informed of this game many times by veteran teachers, I was always hesitant because it struck me as some sort of punishment. I'm not a good judge of what's not fun for Korean children because they were OBSESSED with it. Literally. I've never seen such ruthless competition for pieces of suck-on candy in my life.

In Running Dictation, you post a sentence at one end of the gym - e.g. "Your English teacher is beautiful." Then you put the students into pairs and have them stand at the opposite end of the gym. One person is the "runner" and the other the "writer". When the teacher gives the signal, the runner hurtles him or herself back and forth across the gym trying to memorize bits of the sentence and dictate them back it to their partner. The first team to get the entire sentence down correctly wins. Sounds easy, but for kids who barely know their alphabet let alone whole words, a short sentence will make for a ten minute game and very exhausted competitors.

It's priceless to see the look of anguish on a runner's face when he or she shouts "P!!!!!!" and their writer jots down a B, frantically erases it, and changes it to a V. It's even better when a team triumphantly shows me their finished product and I tell them there's a mistake...at some unspecified location in their sentence. Muhaha!



I used to have this notion that teachers were like mothers in that they were required to love all their children equally. Either that's not true or I'm going to be a shit parent. Here are my two most awesome students from the third and fifth grade.





I'm now pretty convinced that ESL is most effective when the focus is not actually on the English itself. When I had to teach from a text books, my kids zoned out. When I taught a cooking class, they really tried to understand what I was saying (seeing as not understanding meant the potential demise of their batch of ice cream). Just some food for thought (har har) but I think it would be totally awesome if extracurricular classes in the US were offered in other languages. Like how awesome would it be to take ballet class IN FRENCH?!?!? Maybe there's not really a market for that sort of thing, but I think its a cool concept.

Sadly, I don't have many more pictures. I do like this one from the closing ceremony. I was given the duty of awarding a certificate of attendance to each student. A lovely chance to practice reading Hangul, the kids took delight in hearing very badly bastardized pronunciations of their full names. I just like it because I think I look very official standing next to my co-teacher under a Korean flag with a bunch of students gathered around.



My name is spelled wrong on the certificate. Tee hee!