Cheonan, Korea Rep.

To sum up the past week of teaching English to middle school boys: it was great but I am sick to death of the sound of my own voice giving my introductory lesson. Each week I see every boy in school once only. I teach about 20 lessons per week & because each boy has only one conversational English lesson a week, I really only need to prepare one lesson a week. So by the end of it I have done the same 45 minute lesson about 20 times! This is so completely different to when I taught biology last year and had to prepare at least one lesson per day, more often than not it was 2 or 3 lessons a day.

All the boys seemed to enjoy my first lesson where I introduced myself. It showed photos of my family, including Maggie, our human disguised as a dog. They all went “wow! Handsome! Pretty!” when the photos of my mom and dad came up. Some shouted out “litchi! Litchi!” which I soon realised meant “rich! Rich!” When photos of my brothers came on they said “wow” even louder, and “handsome”, but when photos of my sister appeared they all went “WOOOOWW!!!!” so loud the roof nearly came down and said “pretty! Pretty!” One boy asked when Katie is coming to Korea… If she does come visit me I am definitely bringing her here for “show and tell”. They all thought Maggie was huge and “handsome”, as here they mostly have teeny little toy dogs (or “doogles” as they are pronounced here!).

We discussed hobbies and I was again shocked and saddened to realise that just about the only thing that kids do here other than schooling is play computer games. Other hobbies mentioned were watching TV, sleeping & eating. A small percentage said reading books, playing basketball, playing guitar & playing soccer.

At the end they had a chance to ask me questions which usually needed some encouragement. The most common questions were “how tall are you?”, “do you have a boyfriend?”, “are you married?”, “do you dye your hair?” & “what is your favourite Korean food?” Two boys asked me how many countries I have travelled to, one asked what I think of Korea and another asked if anyone was ever attacked by animals when I lived in the bush. I discovered that very few students understand what the heck I am saying and I have to repeatedly repeat myself! I was told all this before I even started but it still takes some getting used to!