The happenins in April, part 1

Since my last update, a lot has changed. The single biggest thing has been school starting back up. At my main high school, I have the exact same class schedule as last year--eight groups of the best first-years, one small group of mid-range second-years, and the bottom two groups of third-years.

My high school has three main subgroupings of students: university- or college-bound kids, Korean language students, and commercial-track students. The first group comprises the eight classes of first-years that I teach. The third-years I teach are commercial-track, and the second-years are the Korean language group. I just have recently discovered this, which explains practically all of my difficulties with the second- and third-years. The only students at my high school who take an English oral communication course are the ones I teach (it took me a stupidly long time to put that together), and everyone else just sort of floats along. That means that, by the time I get the third-years, they haven't had class with a native speaker of English since middle school.

The third-year classes so far feel like last year's: the kids don't know much English, and have almost no desire to learn anything. I've talked to one of the two teachers about it, and he doesn't have much of a problem with just playing English games all the time. Crosswords, word searches, pictionary, the telephone game--anything is fine with him. I'm sure the other one doesn't expect me to push the students like I do the first years, but he might not be okay with just playing games all the time. Either way, I won't have to stress myself out making a lesson plan for the kids that pushes them as hard as the first years.

The second-year class has nine students this year: seven girls and two guys. All last year, there were two first-year girls who would come pester the teacher sitting next to me. Whenever they did, they would also say hi to me. One of them would, without fail, give me her full introduction each time: "Hello, Adam, my name is __ __, nice to meet you." She and her sidekick would look at whatever I was doing on the computer and ask me questions about stuff. Since almost none of the students talked to me outside of class last year, I got a kick out of this, and we hit it off. I never had them in one of my classes, though, since they're in the Korean language division. I was so overwhelmed during the term last year that I never realized that this year, since everyone's been promoted, last year's Korean-track first-years are this year's Korean-track second-years, which means I have class with them. Thanks to those two girls (plus another who recognizes me from chorus club), I don't have to work on getting the class to warm up to me. If anything, they'll probably end up being too rowdy, but I'd much prefer that to dead silence.

The first-year classes are obviously the most daunting, since there are about 150 of those students, and as they're all being groomed for college, the bar is set pretty high. Something I fully anticipated was the fact that I know who the middle school ALT was for nearly all of the new kids. (Two of them transferred in from middle schools off the island.) I didn't think it'd get much reaction, but most of them perked up when I told them I know each of their former teachers.

The first class with each group went a lot like my very first lessons last year: a powerpoint presentation of pictures and such about me, my family, my old job, etc. This time, I was able to find a projector and screen, which meant I didn't have to walk around the class showing pictures on my laptop monitor. I also incorporated youtube videos. Last year, everyone loved hearing about Sanford Stadium (hearing about a building that seats 90,000+ people when your whole island numbers about 38,000 is pretty shocking, I guess) and Uga, so I found a a video of each. I also found a couple of videos of hibachi chefs doing their thing--one of a chef's juggling show, and another of an onion volcano--which improved that portion of my introduction a lot.

My goal this year is to learn the names of all of my new first-years. With that in mind, I ended my introduction lesson by playing a name memory game. There's probably a proper name for this game, but I don't know it: each person must say their name and an object that starts with the same letter, but must first repeat the names and objects of everyone before them. The looks on the faces of the kids as I explained this were priceless: pure shock and skepticism. However, almost every class handled it easily. It served all kinds of purposes all at once: the kids learned each other's names, they helped each other out, and they practiced English vocabulary. Of course, my ulterior motive tucked away in all this was having an excuse to hear the students' names repeated 20 times. After each class, I jotted down the list of names and the words each used. I've now got this for all eight classes, and I'm trying to learn at least one new name per class per day. I'm proud of myself.