Second Day of Training - Getting Down to Business

Today we spent most of the day in training. We all woke up early, and even though Christine and I left alone to catch the subway, we all ended up crossing paths down in the tunnels and arriving mostly at the same time as everyone else in the hotel.

Our hotel is located round the corner from Gangnam Station, which lies under and around the underground shopping mall and walkway we found the other day. We have to catch three different trains to get to the stop, since it's on an awkward around-the-corner-type location from our subway route near the hotel. This means it was fairly simple to get confused as to which line to change to, going which direction, at each of the subway stops.

We all worked it out eventually, and we got to training in time to be hammered with all sorts of details in small groups.

Now, let me be fair. There are any number of people who tell you Chungdahm teacher training week is grueling and hard. If you compare it to the amount of work the kids do each and every day, it's almost next to nothing. It runs from 9:30am to 3:00pm, and then you have hours of homework, but those hours of homework are just what you'll have to do as a teacher anyway. It's practice in the preparation of classes. Each day you'll mock that part of the course as though you were teaching it to the kids, and so when you finally do get into a real classroom, you've already done it, seen it, experienced it, and received feedback you can immediately implement. Not to mention, all the work you're doing for training week is in fact with the first lesson you'll teach, so it doubles as prep for that first week of teaching.

I've been assigned to IRP and ILP, which are Integrative Reading Par and Integrative Listening Par. These are intermediate levels, where kids already know English and you're teaching critical thinking and analyzing skills for reading and listening and writing. These are, for those of you who don't know, things like: main idea and where to find it, supporting details, the patterns of organization of readings, pulling details from texts by using transition words as verbal cues, etc. It's basic grammar, and something anyone who has been through English-Speaking school systems has ingrained in them from day one. In effect, I'm not teaching kids English at this point. I'm trying to teach them to think in English, using the thought processes of English Speakers.

I'm actually really excited for this, because I've always been interested in cross-cultural consultation (advising people on the way other cultures think) so this is right up my alley in terms of what I enjoy doing. I am a bit nervous about doing this with kids outside a controlled setting, but by the end of the week I think I'll have practiced enough with my instructor and teams to pull it off. My group includes Rebekah and Amy, who are both going to Bucheon branch with me, so we're all on the same page as to how to do it. The people training us are actual teachers who go back into those classroom settings after our training day to teach the kids. This means that they've got tips and skills and styles all their own, and you're learning it from someone who is doing well and doing it now. This is also very helpful.

Tonight we're meeting to practice our mocks for both reading and listening courses and get the prep work done for tomorrow. I don't expect it to take too long (some of the more extreme people are panicking and expecting to be working for seven hours, but I think if it takes you seven hours to break down English reading and writing skills into a lesson then you're probably in the wrong profession here), and I'm trying to convince the guys to go out to eat again afterward for some more delicious Korean food. I've now been assured that the street vendors are perfectly safe to eat from (I was a bit hesitant at first), and I have also been told it's cheaper to eat out in Korea than eat in because fruit and vegetables are really expensive. Buying things off the street is really cheap (it's about $2-3 dollars) whereas buying things in shops to cook yourself is far more costly. Even the restaurants are cheaper, so its always the best bet to go out.

Amy told me a story of one girl who came out here and taught in Seoul who spent about $5 on gas bills for heating for her apartment because she just spent all her time eating out and meeting with people, so it might be the way to go once I've got an apartment. Either way, I know I'll at least know Rebekah and Amy at the Bucheon branch, and we've already got a list of places to visit as tourists within Seoul itself. This is made more simple by the fact that we've all got T-Money cards for the subway, and Bucheon is only a line away from the Gangnam line - the busiest line in Seoul.

With all that said, I'm off to group prep and mock with the team. If we go out I'll take pictures and do a double post for the day, since I've got a request to take more pictures of food. ;)