We did something...different!! today

This week starts the second half of the first term. At this point they change teachers around, so we have two new teachers. But that's not what's different. These new teachers follow the same script as the old ones, so they know exactly what we've studied, and they use the same procedure to go through each lesson. Oh, there are differences - one teacher always starts with the first student on the right when we take turns around the room; another teacher starts in the middle. One teacher has us read long passages out loud and spends a short time explaining the passages while another teacher has us read short passages out loud and spends a longer time explaining the passages. But basically, the teacher could be a robot.

No - here's what was different. In the fourth period of class today, the teacher put us in 3 groups and sent two of the groups to different classrooms. Meanwhile 2 groups of students from different classes came into our room - thus mixing up the students from 3 classes. Then we paired up with a new student we didn't know from a different class, were given some conversation questions to use as starters, and were instructed to have a conversation with our partner.

Wow! We actually got to practice talking with a partner. No particular questions we had to ask. Nothing we had to report to the whole class afterwards.. No - we just got a chance to practice - stress-free - for about 30 minutes. The teacher was there to help us with whatever we wanted to ask. It was wonderful! How lively everyone became.

Was this in the script? I don't know, but I suspect so. I suspect it's Yonsei's attempt to be a little more modern. I think every Level 1 student did this today. Ah, lucky us. To just be able to practice, and to use our new skills to get acquainted with someone new, to actually communicate, without the pressure of having to perform in front of the class - I must remember how good this felt.

Itaewon, Insadong, and Ehwa Womans University

I don't have pictures, but here are 3 more meaningful places I have visited:

Itaewon

This is an area not far from where Charles Montgomery lives, and I spent an evening with him and Yvonne here. There are lots of foreigners in this area. The famed "What the Book" English-language bookstore is here. The American Army base is next to here. There are restaurants from all over the world here. Really great for a little diversity! We browsed the book store, wandered the streets and went to a delightful rooftop cafe for drinks and food. I'll be returning to this area!

Insadong

Clara Song was here in Seoul last month, and one evening she invited me to join her and a friend to visit this special "cultural" area. Lots of artisans have shops here, there are old-style homes here, tea houses, narrow cobbled streets, galleries and so on. The friend was Mi Kyong, the one I later went to Seoul Forest with. We walked around, visited various shops, and ended up at this small specialty restaurant Mi Kyong knew about. Amazingly, we walked in, and there at the next table was a famous Korean actress Clara and Mi Kyong recognized - in her 70s now, but apparently well-know in her youth. (Her name for any Korean readers: Eom Aeng Ran or 암앵란). There was a fair bit of conversation between our two tables and I was even introduced and greeted. So what a great evening - Insadong, great dinner, meeting an actress, being with Clara, and making a new Korean friend.

Ewha Womans University

Yes - it's spelled without the apostrophe. This university is very near Yonsei, and one evening Clara Song (yes, Clara, once again, who has introduced me to so many people!) invited me to this area for dinner with another friend of hers, Myeong-hee, who teaches health education at the university. At dinner we got acquainted, and since then I have met with Myeong-hee several times and gotten to know Ewha a bit. Myeong-hee even invited me to go an excursion with her and a colleague to the DMZ, and I really wanted to go with them - but alas, they were going on the day of the midterm!! Amazingly, 4 of her students have volunteered to meet with me once a week to practice speaking Korean. Wow! I have already met with one student a couple of times, and will meet another one tomorrow.

So - my days have been full. It's a good thing I'm not teaching!!

Excursions

I realize that the last time I wrote about any excursions was a month ago. I have actually had some kind of outing every weekend since then. Rather than have people think all I do is study for midterms, here is the run-down:

Oct 10: Evening at Namsan and N'Seoul Tower followed by rainbow lightshow on the Han River. Namsan is a small "mountain" in the middle of Seoul with a tower built on top. I took this excursion with a classmate and Yvonne Dominguez, Charles Montgomery's fiancee. We rode a cable car up to the top of the mountain - where there is a teddy bear museum! At the top of the tower - I look wistfully across Seoul - to home.

Oct. 17: A lovely day spent at the Korean Traditional Village in Suwon, about 40 miles south of Seoul, with a classmate. Gorgeous fall weather, wonderful day spent wandering around this multi-acre recreated traditional village - many many houses and shops and paths and shows and interactive activities and people in native dress pretending to go about business the old way - no crowds - really a nice day.

Oct. 23: A visit to "Seoul Forest" with a Korean friend, Mi Kyong, whom I met through Clara Song. On that day I disappointedly forgot my camera again (picture is from the internet) - not that I wanted to capture Seoul Forest, but I wanted to capture my friend. Oh well - next time. Seoul Forest is not quite a forest - trees have been planted to try to make a park out of this old race track area, and as you can see the trees haven't grown too much yet. But we had a great time walking around. Mi Kyong speaks a little English but mostly we talked Korean for about 3 hours! Most of our talk went like this:

Me: What is that?

Mi Kyong: That's a tree.

Me: A tree. And what is that?

Mi Kyong: That's a bird.

Me: A bird. Oh, and what's that?.....

And so on. I don't know how Mi Kyong held up for 3 hours but it was great practice for me.

Oct 31: Another excursion with classmates. In the town of Icheon, about 40 miles south of Seoul, is a hot springs spa attached to that big hotel - you can see a water slide jutting out. We spent a couple hours in the coed sauna section, and then a couple hours in the women's only hot springs pool room. You walk around and go in all the pools ... naked! Those are a couple of my classmates in the picture. Hazy gray skies.

Believe it or not, we spoke mostly Korean the whole day on this trip. There were 3 Japanese women, 2 of whom speak little English, and 3 English speakers (one from Hong Kong, one from Singapore, and me) who speak no Japanese, so Korean was our language. Very elementary conversation, but fun and useful to practice with each other.

Actually, I've been having a very good time.

Celebration Time!

I passed the midterm!

And I forgot to bring my camera to the celebration party at a local restaurant Friday night.

So this picture is from the internet - but our food and drink looked pretty much like this. There were 11 of us students from the class and 2 instructors.

Here's what you do at this kind of gathering: you grill the meat at the table and attempt to pick it up with chopsticks (more on that in another post!) and put it in a lettuce leaf and pick up more stuff that's all over the table (kim chi and all kinds of sauces and side dishes) and put bits of things on the meat and roll it up and eat. Then you pick up more stuff from the table with chopsticks and pop it directly in your mouth - there's no individual plate at your place. Then you pour beer and soju (the ubiquitous Korean cheap alcoholic drink) rounds continuously and talk and laugh really loudly and just have a good time.

And you try to do it all in Korean.

Ah, the midterm is over. Don't have to start studying for the final exam for 3 more weeks!

The MIDTERM

Wow - the first half of the first 10-week term is almost over already. We had 2 tests today (speaking and reading comprehension), will have 2 more tomorrow (listening and reading comprehension), and 1 more on Friday (reading aloud).

And I am not pleased.

No. If I had reservations about high-stakes tests before, I have them even more now. How nerve-wracking. How undignified. Previously friendly teachers suddenly have this monstrous power. They know. We don't. They're out to get us, to find our weak spots, now to judge us rather than teach us -even though they already know all that because they are with us for 20 hours every week.

I'm pondering ways for a more humane kind of evaluation, where students have more say, more chances...

Of course, if I pass, I'll feel better. Tomorrow is my worst one - listening!!

KOTESOL

KOTESOL - Korea Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages - is having its annual conference in Seoul this weekend (Oct 24-25), so I went to check it out.

In scope and size it is similar to a CATESOL conference. I was surprised to see that ALL the featured speakers - all 13 of them - were white - not a Korean among them. Some of the names were vaguely familiar to me (David Nunan, Scott Thornbury, maybe some others) - the one I noted particularly was John Fanselow, so I went to his presentation, entitled, interestingly enough for a student at Yonsei:

"Huh? Oh. Aha! - Difference between Learning Language through Rote Memorization and Predicting"

Well. Here's a teacher the exact opposite of teachers at Yonsei. His message is something like this (his words copied from a website):

I have rededicated myself to supporting change; breaking rules; having contrasting conversations, and trying the opposite. Supporting change and supporting different perspectives is the only way to move forward.

To illustrate, here's from another website:

The ways he suggested we break rules were simple:

􏰀 If you normally ask students to underline words they don’t know, reverse the procedure and ask

them to blank out such words and ignore them. Notice your normal practice and do the opposite.

􏰀 Notice the difference between the way people do an activity in a classroom and outside in

ordinary life. In classrooms people sit at desks to read – there is silence. At home people

sometimes lounge on cushions and listen to music while reading. Have reading happen this way

in class.

􏰀 Take a traditional practice like reading aloud in class and change some detail about the way it is

done. Ask the student to read silently, to look up from the page and then to say what she has read

to somebody in the room. The change in detail radically changes the whole.

Fanselow’s message in that lecture was “For goodness sake do something different next Monday

morning”.

In the session, he gave us a lot more of these "change the way we do things" examples - all of which were basically puzzles (ie students presented with incomplete or incorrect information and asked to figure out or predict the complete message). As a teacher, these things make (made?) great sense to me. I too would have thought such ideas, such efforts to "shake up" the learning process and engage the mind more actively, would be productive. They would have excited me.

But as a student - I just felt irritated. Why do I have to waste time figuring out puzzles in a language class? Why do I have to indulge this teacher in his idiosyncratic approach to teaching - an approach that I know will not be repeated in the next class? Will I really learn more than by just plugging away at the words and structures I need to know (ie repeat, memorize, practice etc.)? How can the teacher convince me, the student, that this puzzle-solving effort will pay off? If the teacher doesn't do that, then motivation, trust, confidence etc - all those really important things - are lost.

The best part - I met a Korean English teacher at the bus stop; we rode the bus to the conference together, talked a while, exchanged contact info, etc. Once that was done I felt my day was made. I met a Korean. He offered to help me with my Korean. Wow.

I don't think I'll go to the conference tomorrow. I think I'll stay home and keep "memorizing" what I need to know for the midterm next week.

More on classes at Yonsei - the bad!

So what's negative?

• The classes are stressful!! I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. There is no relaxing. The teachers speak very fast and the brain spends 4 hours desperately trying to understand everything and keep up. Am I learning more than if they slowed down a bit and made it easier? Does the tension get in the way of learning or stimulate it?

• The high-stakes exams! The teachers are with us 4 hours a day 5 days a week and know our level very well- but they are not allowed to evaluate us. No. The TEST will decide that. Next week we have our midterm - 2 days of separate tests for listening, speaking, reading comprehension, reading aloud, and writing. At the end of the course we go through the same thing with the finals. Those scores determine 80% of our grade and whether or not we pass. What if I get a mental block from nervousness, or there's some freaky vocabulary that makes me misunderstand a whole reading or listening passage, or ... I feel the same way our writing students at SJCC feel when facing board-graded exams - IT'S NOT FAIR!

• For a teacher, this has got to be deadly boring. (On the other hand, teachers are relieved of the stress of having to grade the students, and they have almost no preparation to do other than correct the daily homework.)

Of course, there are other little negatives. We had to memorize long lists of Korean food dishes - more than we really needed to learn how to order food in a restaurant. We never have group work or much chance to practice together in class (though we do try to practice when we're together after class). But these things are minor. The material seems to be well-sequenced, and there's no doubt we are learning a lot. Actually, all the negatives have a plus side. The relentlessness of the class sessions and the midterm exams make us study even more. We are forced to do the work of learning. Our brains feel like they will explode. At the end of every class is the same refrain - my head hurts! Yesterday one student asked: "Can we review this material next week?" The teacher just said, "Sorry, no time!" The schedule is set; we have to finish a chapter a day. We even have a new lesson to learn the day before the midterms start.

But - I guess this is how they get students ready for Korean university in a year and a half - for those students who can survive!

I do wonder - as I wondered and hoped when I started this - if there isn't a less painful way to acquire a second language at an older age. Is all this needed to force the older brain to accept new sounds and structures and learn new words?

It does help tremendously that I am in Korea and can practice on real people! More on that later.

Thank goodness I didn't stay in Level 2.