Engrish

It’s my first day of teaching and I’m standing in front of a classroom filled with thirty-six Korean middle school students. Three-dozen pairs of eyes. “Hello, kids,” my voice cracks, “my name is Noah and I’m your new English teacher.” Only nine students understand what I’m saying. The rest don’t speak a word of English. As I try desperately to get through what seems like a never-ending forty-five minutes, the same question keeps repeating in my head: how did I end up here?

I went to teach English in Korea because I had just finished college and I was knee-deep in student loans. It seemed like an easy way to make money – I would be earning a decent salary with great benefits, plus the plane ticket and housing were provided. Go to school, teach English for four to five hours, go home. How difficult could it be?

Needless to say, I was overwhelmed – I was ill prepared for oversized classrooms, unmotivated students, disinterested coworkers and the educational bureaucracy. To further complicate things, I had to teach the entire school of eight hundred students every week because I was the only native English-speaking teacher in the faculty (the other English teachers were native Koreans).

Thing started to change when I began teaching the English Club, an after-school program. The students (eight junior high boys) ranged in skill level, but their enthusiasm and level of participation were equally shared. To be honest, I’m not sure how much my teaching improved their skills. What I am certain of, however, is that I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of working with them. I took comfort in knowing that there was a tremendously positive aspect of teaching – helping students reach their potential and exceed their expectations. This was the single most rewarding accomplishment from my experience in Korea and one of the chief reasons why I am pursuing teaching as a career.

First Post

My first experience with technology in the classroom was in the fifth grade. We were taught how to use qwerty keyboards using word processors, which would also measure our wpm typing speed. At the same time, PC computers were becoming more prevalent in the classrooms, though they were usually tucked away somewhere in the corner. If we behaved well and completed all our assignments on time, we were sometimes rewarded with playing time on the computer. Oregon Trail soon climbed to the top of coveted playtime activities list among all my friends and classmates.

When I was in junior high, I attended a private school and was fortunate enough to have had access to technological resources. We had a computer lab and library with over dozens of PC computers and, as any typical adolescent boy would, I spent countless after school playing video games with my friends. I still remember the tech specs of these computers (120 MHz, 200 MB of disk space, 15 MB of RAM) and feeling envious because the Apple II computer I had at home was nowhere near as fast and powerful. One of our elective classes was a computer course in which we learned how to use Microsoft Office programs and the Internet - a novel and rapidly developing technology at the time. Our first lesson was on web browsers (Netscape, Explorer) and the use of search engines (AOL web search, Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo, etc.).

Since that time, technology has made giant strides and advances, evidenced by the gradual changes in my high school and college classrooms. From Gmail, to Wikipedia, to Google Docs, to the use of personal clickers, my experience with technology in classrooms has always been fun, exciting and rewarding.