Trials and Triumphs of Teaching

My lesson on the Laurie Santos’s article “A Monkey Economy as Irrational as Ours” did not go as well as I had hoped. The computer in the room was broken and it took about 15 minutes to get it working somewhat. I did the introduction for the article and the experiment, which the students participated in well. The results were very different that the author and I would have anticipated. Some of the students left class in the middle of the lesson so I did not have enough people to read the 6 sections in pairs. The cooperating teacher in the room offered to represent the last section of the reading. The students did do a good job of summarizing their reading and creating an overview of the most important points. They seemed comfortable talking in front of the class and did a good job reviewing their section of the reading. The Inside/Outside circle part of the class did not go very well, more students left the class. The ones who were left were not at all familiar with the concept and not very comfortable with it at all. They tried to answer the questions with their partners and did a good job of rotating when it was time to switch, but I could tell their enthusiasm for it was very low.  Book club is a required after school activity for which the students receive no grade. I think this leaves them with little desire to work in the class. I was also not able to use the video because the computer sound did not work. I think my frustrations over the computer and the students leaving the class clouded my feelings about the lesson. In the future I would try to use inside/outside circle again with more clear instructions maybe even with a video to model the activity. I think the reading in pairs and working to create a summary of a complex text like “A Monkey Economy as Irrational as Ours” was a good way to break it down for English language learners. I would use that technique again in future lessons. 

Reading "Monkey Economy"

Presenting sections of article



Student Work



Trying to do Inside/Outside Circle

This week I also taught two lessons about Halloween both went very well. I created a Who Wants to be a Millionaire? PowerPoint game for the English Conversation class and did a Halloween write-around story. The students really participated well and liked guessing the answers in the game. I had to make some rules for the second time I did the write-around because some of the students used their classmates’ names or swear words.
I also did a Halloween themed lesson for the second Book Club lesson I taught. I printed out some scary stories and ghost stories that we read aloud, the students took turns reading paragraphs. I then did the Who am I game? I taped the names of characters from the story and some other Halloween themed things onto the student’s backs and they had to talk with each other to figure out who they were. We also did a Halloween Mad Libs. The students did a great job in all of these activities. I think using three different techniques in the same period really helped to keep their attention focused without getting bored. 

English Story: Modeling Write Around

English Story: Writing Around Story



English Class: Who Wants to be a Millionaire?



English Class: Student Story



English Class: Reading Write Around Stories

Book Club: Mad Libs Game

This week I also observed my co-teacher lead a lesson in which the class was broken into groups and made presentations for foreigners about Korean culture. The class was observed by many other teachers from outside the school as well as the principle and Seoul Global High School teachers. The students did a great job in their presentations They were broke into groups that presented the Korean life cycle, and showed how Koreans mark different times in a person’s life, like their birth, marriage, 60^th birthday, and death. I learned a lot about Korea just from those presentations.

In counseling this week we talked more about the pressure that is placed on students to get into the SKY schools (Seoul National University, Korea University, and Yonsei University). They told me that less than 1% of students in Korea get into these schools each year, yet all students aspire to attend them. There is so much stress related to their GPAs. I asked the students what they wanted to do for their careers, two of the girls wanted to be lawyers, one wanted to be a news reporter, one wanted to be a CEO of a business, and one wanted to go into global relations. I am always very surprised by the immense amount of stress the students are under.