Full of Scrap

Several things of no particular import.

1) This morning, to my surprise, I achieved my first year weight-loss goal for Korea. Just a shade under 9 months early. This allows me several options.

a) Go on an enormous eating and drinking binge and get about half of that weight back so that I can be challenged, again, to lose the weight

b) Stop worrying about it. “Mission Accomplished” as a far greater man than myself once noted.

c) Adjust that target down a bit more.

Since I am still technically a “Jelly-Filled Fat Fuck” (thanks HYS), I think I shall adopt the third strategy

2) There is another job-opening in administration here at BPU and some administrators are suggesting I go for it. It’s more money, but it is a 9-6 gig, which would completely eliminated the excellent schedule I have that allows me to roam around like a rabid dog. It might serve me well in a job-search in the States (it is something like a dean of student services) but it would be a fall-back position behind my plan to become a world-famous editor and critic. I think it’s too early to be working on fallback plans.

It is tough to not know what you want to do when you grow up… and you’re 30 years beyond growing up. ;-)

3) I was contacted by a University up North, that probably wanted to hire me AND the OAF, but had to bow out due to my contract with BPU. Amusingly, two days after I sent my email saying that I could not accept the job, it popped up on Dave’s ESL Café.

4) Another reason I don’t particularly want to take the admin job (did I mention it supposedly pays substantially more money?) is that I’ve just figured out a couple of aspects of my teaching style that needed fixing and have begun to fix them in this semester. I’d really like to have another full semester in the classroom to get this stuff cemented in my head (fight cement with cement?).

BPU tossed us into the fray so quickly that I didn’t really have a chance to thoroughly check out the textbooks (a different one for each class). They also wanted a weekly lesson plan, so, for the first 10 weeks of the semester, I was pretty much cloning the first one I came up. In the short weeks following the mid-term I took a longer look at the books and decided what in them was useful. Most of them contain pretty pointless skill-n-drill, but each also has a bit more.

I also decided I will scale back the money system next semester, using it only for in-class participation. Finally, that look at the books set me to re-evaluate my blackboard style. I had been using the style – essentially outlining the topics to be taught and modeling one or two sentences – of the guy who developed the money system. It didn’t work that well for me, so I had strayed away from using the blackboard for anything but random points and explanation of things that came up.

Looking in the books I noted that I could extract things in terms of vocabulary, grammar, and meaning and those things would outline the lesson in a more useful way (as well as leave theoretical and practical models on the board for students to study). This seems to have worked much better, and I plan to continue it next semester.

Finally, I did a few things that made the class more interesting for students. I added some competition between the men and women and broke long slogs through exercises with brief spelling games (which the students both love and are good at), and in general tried to break the monotonous pace. This also included adapting some things in the textbooks to be more local. If the textbook had an exercise that requested my students “brainstorm all they knew about Rome,” that brainstorm would last all of 1-second in their heads, as they ransacked them for anything they might know about Rome, and then it would last for 5 agonizing minutes as no one could come up with anything and no kind of prompt I offered would help. So wherever these popped up, I made a “Korean” version, trying to focus tightly on Daejeon. This seemed to help some.

Heh.. all of that will become part of my analysis of my teaching plan, if they ever get around to asking me to do that.