English Land 2

I know I've been in Korea for only a few months, but the novelty factor is still very much there. At least once everyday it hits me, when walking out my apartment in the morning or watching my classes talk amongst themselves. I still have yet to even explore the country, but spring is here now, finally, allegedly. But aside from the climate, it's great to be in Korea, and whenever the novelty of being here hits me, I can see just how lucky I am. As of now, I love the place.

But fuck me, catch me on a Friday morning around 11am and you'll see a young man wrecked to tears and losing his hair.

This is around the time when I am grappling with the monster known as the English Land 2 activity book. This yellow, happy looking tome has to be my only bugbear right now, and my god I hate it. Hate it as much as the English Land 1 activity book.

The student book I don't mind, featuring the extra-curricular adventures of the Toy Story gang and Lilo & Stitch et al (non-canon). Some of the songs on the CD get me singing, though really I'm always singing with the kindergartners, orders repeated and given a melody or ending in an upward lilt. Sometimes I rap a little too. The kidz rarely notice.

Amidst this singing & dancing, I have to make sure certain pages are done by the end of the week so as to appease the paying mothers and rightly so, this is easy enough. But my English Land class has 2 & a half hours a week to complete 6 pages in the student book, and an additional thousand plus pages in the activity book corresponding to that week's unit. And of course I have to make sure what I'm teaching actually stays with them afterwards.

I start as early as Wednesday to get cracking through the pages but even this isn't enough. The kids all work at different speeds with this particular book. Some of the smart ones are slow, and some of the smart are so fast that I have to tell them to wait for the others to catch up. This all piles up when there's a listening section and I have to ask the Korean whizzes to skip it because the CD tasks are best completed by the class as a group, not played each time one of them lands on that page when they then have to strain to listen to the poor audio as the other kids chatter with their crayons.

Ugh, just typing this is fraying my nerves. What makes it worse is all of the kids asking for help with everything on all these different pages when I'm trying to help 1 particular child, or just wanting me to draw a 'snail' on each page they complete (the snail being a big red crayon swirl).

And on Friday I devote a whole hour to this nightmare when I should be teaching one book per each half hour, English Land followed by phonic studies. The kids get restless. One girl inevitably gets up to write on the board how much she hates the other girls. They can see me turn from Mr Bean into Kim Jong-il. My guts tangle.

My school's solution was this - do the best you can and the kinder principal will catch up on the rest of the pages when she teaches this class after lunch on Friday. Ok I suppose. And last week I poked my head into her room, seeing the kids scribble away in perfect unison, feeling my confidence as a teacher wane a bit.

And then I heard her say 'spaceship'. The kids waited. And she said it again, in Korean. And they ticked the right picture. I realised her miraculous method. And sure, it's not helping their English that much, but it sure gets those pages snailed!