How to allegedly teach TOEFL class and not go insane.

One of the things I didn’t bargain for, when I took my current job, was how poorly suited to my talents it would be. Previously, I’ve spent most of my time doing speaking classes, and/or working with small children; absolute basics, fun stuff, demonstrable results. True during most of my time in Korea; true even when I split for last year’s stint in Poland (disastrous) and Turkey (more enjoyable). Not this year. This year I got stuck doing writing classes and TOEFL test prep – with teenagers – which adds up to three angles of torturous boredom and no discernable improvement.

There’s also the fact that the school I work at only opened a year ago, and the people I work for (bless tham) are completely ignorant of how language is effectively taught in most of non-backwater Korea – to say nothing of the rest of the world. As well, they’re too cheap to spend on proper supplemental materials, and too distracted to design any real program. To top it all off, they insist on using coursebooks designed for AMERICAN ESL  CLASSES, which are a whole different ballgame from what’s needed over here. (To explain why is a subject better suited for another post.)

One of the few bright spots in this mess is that I can sometimes get away with carving out my own turf, in an area they haven’t given much thought to. To justify my white-faced presence on the payroll, I was handed a “TOEFL Listening” class. The idea of which, as near as I can guess, was to give everyone some exposure to real-life English media, beyond the academic turgidity of most test-prep books. Since they had no idea what they wanted me to teach (beyond some vague directives about news stories) I just grab  whatever seems approachable. Thank God for NPR and YouTube.

The enjoyable part about this approach is that it has its own serendipity, particularly as I’m trying to keep middle-school students awake. For example, a directive to include more science-oriented material led to my rediscovery of Bill Nye the Science Guy:

The above item is the opening salvo of episode 69: Pseudoscience. The kids are all old enough to have at least a passing acquaintance with science topics; on the other hand, at their age, they haven’t really given much thought to the actual scientific method, or its required thought process. (And in fairness, I should add that I haven’t given much thought to the sciences myself in recent years, not helped by the fact that I reached my Peter Principle point when I attempted Pre-Calculus. And flunked. Twice.)

So imagine my delight earlier this week, when I stumbled onto this series from prolific YouTube poster Thunderf00t: Why Do People Laugh At Creationists?

This is a man after my own heart – with yours truly, he shares a love of his subject and an extreme revulsion toward ignorance. (Not to mention a delight in making fun of dishonesty and stupidity.) Unlike me, he’s an atheist; but since he’s pretty much limiting himself to hard-fact discussion in most of the series (instead of theological speculation) I have no qualms about sharing this with my own students.

After all, I’m teaching English, not Sunday School; I’m employed by a private business, not a tax-funded public school; and luckily, I’m not in the USA, with its large crew of lawyers, paranoiacs, and assorted Perennially Indignant Blackguards. So I intend to get all the fun I can out of this.

(Disclaimer, when you watch the Creationists in question: My students were – after laughing – a bit disturbed when I told them just how many people there are in my country that take this sort of thing seriously.)

Re-entry into the blogsphere …

Now it might seem a bit presumptuous to have the first post on this particular blog be along the lines of “BAAAAACK!” But this is mainly for the benefit of family and friends (only regular readers of earlier stuff elsewhere) who kept asking why I hadn’t been writing lately.

Well, the short answer is that there wasn’t much to write about. This whole travelling, expatting, living-in-Korea-and-other-butt-ends-of-nowhereing, globo-hobo bit has long since got out of hand. And lost its luster.

But every winding-down is the predecessor to a re-start … or, in my case, a re-boot.

As I write, I’m on the downhill run of my residence in Ulsan, South Korea. (Which is, unquestionably, one of the most boringly unattractive cities of its size in this land.) I’m just into month nine of this year’s haggwon contract, and the end of it can’t come too fast. I’m mentally preparing myself to move back to my own country (the USA) and reaquaint myself with home after a long spell away. All of this conspires to make a man less than well-interested in his surroundings, and uninclined to find any real stories to write about.

Luckily, between elections, economic upheavals, and wondering what the hell I’m going to do with myself when I DO get back home … there’s plenty of fun to contemplate.

So welcome aboard, friends and neighbors. Consider this a phone call from the airport while awaiting a connecting flight.