my teaching journal

ABOUT me teaching in Korea:

I am an English teacher in South Korea. I arrived here in early October 2008 and am based in Sangju, in Gyeongsangbuk-do province.

I teach at a Middle School for three days of the week – Seongshin Girls Middle School – and at a High School – Sangju Girls Commercial High School – for two days a week.

I am part of the EPIK programme in Korea: English Programme in Korea.

ABOUT my teaching situation:

I teach 20 lessons a week, 4 lessons a day. In each lesson I have between 30 and 35 students. I see each class once a week (Except for the high school 3rd garde class which I see once every three weeks). This means I see about 650 students a week – not an ideal situation, and certainly not conducive to measuring progress, remembering names etc!

I am supposed to teach with a Korean co-teacher for every lesson (i.e. local English teachers), but sometimes this doesn’t work out. Some of them like to skip classes.  The co-teacher’s role is dificult to describe, but in my classes in mostly entails translating my instructions and some more difficult content, and taking care of discipline issues.

My students’ level of English varies a lot. Within each class there are HUGE level differences: there are usually 3-5 top students who go to Hagwon’s (after hours English Academies) and then there are the rest: they are pretty low. It is very difficult to come up with lessons that reach all 30 students at all levels. I get around this by including lots of teamwork activities and games in which the higher level students can help the lower level students, and in which the higher level students can practice a lot and the lower level students hopefully have fun and maybe learn something new.

I submit lesson plans for every lesson I teach. These are meant to help my co-teachers to play a role in my classes but this is a bit of a farce as most of them don’t read my lesson plans.

ABOUT me:

My name is Jessica and I am a proud South African! I studied Entomology (=the study of insects) at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa.

I have a wide variety of academic interests: entomology, ecology, agriculture, sustainable rural livelihoods, push-pull technology for pest control of grain pests, IPM: Integrated Pest Management, Conservation, Invertebrate conservation, Indigenous knowledge, languages-people-science, science journalism, environmental education etc etc. The list keeps growing!

When I am not reading about these interesting things I love spending time outdoors, and am most at peace out in nature. I enjoy hiking, walking, the odd jog and picnics. I enjoy reading all types of novels, especially if they have a historicalwar theme, a nature theme or a ‘people from different cultures’ theme.

I enjoy travelling and exploring new places, new cultures etc. I enjoy trying different foods (although after Korea, I may have my fill of this:)), I enjoy cooking different foods. I love a good glass of wine and an ice cold cider with potato chips!Spending time with the quality people I am fortunate to have as family and friends is a big thing for me…something I miss at times in Korea!!

ABOUT my plans for the future:

I am going to spend a second year in Korea. My first contract here started in October 2008 and I will sign a second contract in October 2009, which will end in September 2010.

I will then return to South Africa and hopefully make plans to start a masters degree – an MSc to be more specific. The topic for this…well as you can see from my academic interests….narrowing these down to a single topic for a masters is going to be tough.

At the moment I am leaning towards something in the direction of push-pull pest control in a sustainable rural livelihoods context. I would like to use my training in Entomology to help people living in poverty…there is so much need for better agricultural practices that are environmentally aware and I hope I can contribute to this somehow. Whichever direction I end up taking for my MSc, I hoep to one day work ‘at the interface of science and people’. I feel this is an important area of work which needs more attention: there is so much good science research being done, but not enough of it is being made accessible and useful to people who need it.