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| Our kids never left school! |
At ECC our new school year starts at the beginning of March. The elementary schools also start a new year, so the kids who graduate from their kinder programs then move on to
“real
” school. Even though it is the start of a new school year we don
’t get much of a break. March 1st is a national holiday in
Korea – to celebrate an independence movement against Japanese in 1919
– but aside from that there is no vacation. The elementary schools do have more time off, but ECC runs throughout the year.
The past week has been a lot of work both preparing for graduation and getting ready for new classes. On Tuesday we held a graduation ceremony for the students who were moving on to elementary school. Three out of the five kinder classes graduated, so it was a big event. We helped the kids prepare speeches and practice songs to sing to their parents. Several of the foreign teachers also spoke during the graduation, but since I didn’t have a home room class I was not one of them. We also tried to get all of their books finished a few days in advance so we had extra time for rehearsal.
It was a hectic few days, but I think the graduation went pretty well. I didn’t see most of it because I had classes to look after. There were actually two ceremonies; the largest of the three classes (with 11 students) had its own graduation, and the other two were combined for one ceremony. At least one parent showed up for each kid, and they were all taking pictures and videotaping the ceremony with their smart phones. It seemed a bit over the top for graduation from what was essentially a preschool, although maybe not in Korea, where education is taken to extremes.
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A typical scene on the Seoul subway - almost
everybody has their smartphones out! |
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| Maybe the only thing people cherish more than technology...education! |
We were also busy preparing for our new classes. My schedule looks totally different for March; my morning classes are all new, and even most of my afternoon ones have changed too. We had to prepare syllabi for several of the classes, mostly the ones in the morning that had new books. Many of my afternoon classes already had syllabi made, but I still had to orient myself with the material. We have always had to fill out weekly lesson plans for the kinder classes, and now we have to do the same for several of the afternoon classes as well. For each subject we only need to write a few sentences about what we will be covering that week, but it still takes some time. In addition, we have to fill out monthly progress reports for our afternoon students.
Now that I am a homeroom teacher in the morning (for two of the new classes), I have to fill out a weekly and monthly report about my students. The weekly report is a few sentences about how the student has been doing in class, and the monthly one is a more detailed overview of their performance. On the positive side, I only have two different kinder classes to look after. They are both classes of new students, so I’m hoping that if we get a good start they will be easy to manage for the rest of the year. The kids are really young though – some are only 3! So it will be a challenge, but hopefully not too much work!
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| The kids will be young! |
I’ll post more on my schedule and the new kids in a few weeks when I have a better feel for the classes. Thanks for reading!
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