Recent EPIK Developments
I’ve been somewhat busy over the last couple of weeks. My partner teacher has taken a more active interest in our lessons together lately since our school is getting it’s very own dedicated English classroom. So lately I’ve been helping him out with his ‘classroom English’ as well as teaching English in English. He told me last week that he thought at first it would be too difficult and not very effective because he doesn’t speak very well but he has since changed his mind. What we are working on is how he delivers language in the classroom. Small bite-sized pieces with lots of repetition for the students sake. For example, while I set up the textbook CD he now does the introduction which goes something like this.
Hello everyone!
Today we will study:
Look and Listen
We will watch TV and we will learn some new sentences.
We will study:
Listen & Repeat
We will practice our new sentences.
Finally, we will play a fun game!
Please listen to Glenn Teacher.
It’s a good way for him practice speaking in front of his students and it also helps him to develop confidence in his speaking ability. We’ve also been working on developing concept checking questions and eliciting language from the students. Sometimes it’s a simple ‘what does this mean in Korean?’ Other times it’s done through leading questions. Generally the kids understand the language they see in the videos but aren’t equipped to discuss it in English. So instead of broad questions like ‘what was the video about?’ or ‘did you understand the story?’ we ask some simple yes/no questions to determine what the students did and didn’t understand. Previously I’d do the lesson plan by myself, jotting down a few notes about the target language and how to convey meaning.
Nowadays I’m explaining the logic behind the plan and rehearsing the language with my partner. It’s a lot more work as opposed to when I was teaching with minimal input from my partner, but the students get a better class out of it which is what counts. It’s actually closer to my first co-teaching experience which is what led to my teaching in public school in the first place.
Beyond that, I’m also weighing my options for the coming year. Two of my placements have been great but one has been a little difficult. **** K says best keep the beefs off the blog while I’m living out here**** Sometimes I feel like an ELS version of the littlest hobo. There are other things but I’ve no intentions of wasting keystrokes on the issue. I just wanted to be a little more balanced in my presentation of my EPIK time. Overall, despite the difficulties and challenges presented by a bad placement I’d still say it’s probably the best job I’ve ever had.
So my options at this point are to put out résumés for university positions; Re-apply for another EPIK position elsewhere or extend my current contract. My school has already asked me about returning for a second year but I haven’t yet decided what I will do. The university option would be nice but it’s a step down in pay if I did get it. Staying on for a 2nd year with my current placements is also possible but I don’t know about whether or not I want to go back to the bad placement. Going elsewhere in the public school system is a gamble, there’s more than one bad placement to be found in the program. Oh well there are worse things in the world than having options.
One Reply to “Recent EPIK Developments”
yeah only having one sucky option