Open Court Reading Book 1 Class

Open Court Reading is another of the American language books my school uses. This class is my last class of the night (8pm) on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. There are six kids--Wesley, Denny, Gyu-ho, Emily, Losa, and Rose. For a week or so I though Rose was named Lose because of the whole Asian L/R phenomenon, and I thought her name might be a foreign name related to Losa, like Marie and Maria. But no, her name is just Rose. Haha.

These kids are about ten and eleven by our count and are my second most advanced class right now. They have a speaking ability at a similar level to native speakers not too far below their age. They just have trouble with complete sentences and minor, common errors like omitting articles. Articles are apparently one of the most difficult aspects of English, and I'm constantly correcting almost all my students over them.

Wesley is my favorite student out of all my classes. He's a good kid. I think he's going to be a little heartbreaker when he grows up. Wesley participates the most of all the kids in his class, and usually gives pretty good answers. A lot of his responses are totally irrelevant, though, and I'm glad that we have kind of a casual environment so I can make fun of him in a nonmalicious way. It's funny when he says something that he sort of knows is wrong, so he says it softly, and then covers his face and says, "No no no" when I ask him to repeat himself.

This is Wesley. He's the only kid to let me take a picture of him in this class. He started reading my blog, and wrote me an email about how much he enjoyed it. His favorite part was my remark that the picture that I sent with my application to teach was horrible.

Denny has the habit of saying something and then reneging, too. He participates often, also, but doesn't always get it as well as Wesley. He's pretty bright, though. He and Wesley fool around a lot, but at least they're not as out of control as my Avenues B class.

Gyu-ho is a funny guy. He's a great student in that even though he doesn't have the best idea of what's going on in the class, he still tries to answer as much as he can. I think he's improved a little in his ability to speak since I first got here. At the very least his participation has increased. I'm trying to get him to improve his writing, though. Every time we read a new story, I assign vocab sentences as homework once or twice, and I'm encouraging everyone to write sentences that show me they know what the word means. He hasn't gotten it perfect yet, but we're working on it.

Emily is the only girl in this class who participates. She's pretty smart. She seems to have a good comprehension of some of the more advanced ideas I present, even though she doesn't always fully understand. The best thing about Emily and the boys is that they ask questions when they don't understand, instead of allowing themselves to dig a deeper and deeper hole of confusion.

Losa and Rose don't say much. I have to call on them, and I usually find that they have very little to say. Losa I think just doesn't like speaking in front of others, because her homework is generally quite good. Rose I think may be in a little too deep for her level. She was tested into my class a couple weeks ago, but she rarely is able to finish her homework, so maybe she just had a good testing day.

2/27 Update: Rose is no longer in my class, as of the end of last week, I think. I find these things out from the students, as opposed to being told by my boss, so not only do I not know about it until after the fact, I also don't know the reason for it. Poor Heather--she's got so much to do running the place that she doesn't have time to get it all done.

I brought my camera to class today to take pictures of my OCR classes, but this class did not let me. They did ask for my blog address and my email addresses, though. I wonder if I'm going to get a bunch of emails from my kids now.

Avenues Level C Class

Avenues Level C is my second smallest class. It started off with four girls: Dorothy, Ruby, Melanie, and Michelle. They are in first and second grade. The first day of class, I told Dorothy that that is my grandmother's name, and the other girls started calling her "grandmother" after that. Dorothy stopped coming to my class in February, though, so I was down to three. I will lose Ruby in March, too, so that's another two-kid class for me.

Ruby is the dominant one in the class. I think she gets it from her mother. A couple times Ruby handed in her homework with a message from her mom that I should correct it immediately so she could take it home that day. I told her her mom could wait one day. Jeez.

Ruby is extremely smart, and has a really good grasp of English for her age. Apparently her mother paid our Canadian teacher about a thousand dollars (a million won) a month to tutor her privately for a few months. I wish some parent would do that for me. That's fifty percent of my income.

Ruby is really stubborn and overbearing frequently, though. She interrupts other students, tries to sit in my chair while I'm writing on the board, and often refuses to do things she doesn't like. A couple times she's told me she wasn't going to do the homework, but I think her mother

interfered when she looked at her assignment, and forced her to do it.

Michelle and Melanie are both smart, too, but get overpowered by Ruby a lot. Michelle likes to participate and Melanie doesn't as much. I think they'll both do much better without Ruby in the class. Update: I just found out that Melanie is also moving to another class next week. So it will be Michelle and a boy whose name I don't know yet, but who Heather says is a troublemaker. I hope it works out okay.

Michelle and Melanie

These girls do this funny thing where they number their turns in advance. If I say we're going to read a story out loud, Ruby will say "Me first!" and then Michelle and Melanie will both say "Me second!" and I give the second turn to whoever said it first. Or sometimes one of them will want to go third, so she'll say "Me third!" When there were four of them, they had to do a few rock, paper, scissors games to determine the order. When I took their pictures, they refused to get together, then argued over the order. Michelle got first, but the other two wanted to go last, and neither would back down. So I just snapped candids. Kids are jerks.

These are my best students in terms of entertaining writing assignments. I have them write stories a lot (which they recently got tired of), and they come up with some funny things. This week I had to give them a writing test, the prompt being "Write a story about something that chases you." Michelle wrote that a lion chased her, but she went to her family and then they went to the police and told everyone in the world, and they killed on lion, but the others just went to the father lion, but then he died, and the other lions cried for hundreds of years, and then they turned into sand, which we can play in now. But wait, there's a lion!

Avenues Level B Class #2

This is my smallest class. It's just Bunny and John, and they can barely speak any English. They seem about seven or eight years old, by our count. We only meet on Thursday and Friday afternoons. I'm glad it's not a daily class, because it's very difficult to teach them. It's kind of fun sometimes, though. I draw a lot of pictures and demonstrate a lot of the vocabulary to make them understand what I'm saying, and vice versa.

Bunny understands significantly more than John, so she often has to explain to John in Korean. I wish I understood more of their language so I could explain things to them better. But I guess the point of immersion is that you have to try all the harder to make them understand the new language.

Once my new schedule starts in March, I think this class is going to be absorbed into a bigger class, if my boss can work out the schedule right.