Conversation Class

I have come to dread Thursdays recently. On Tuesdays and Thursdays Albert comes to our school and teaches grammar during several of the classes that would otherwise be taught by Han, Boram or myself. Many of these classes end up being an hour long with one teacher (as opposed to two half-hour segments with two teachers). In the past I had lucked out and had been the odd teacher out and enjoyed a couple of hour-long breaks scattered through out the day.


Then Albert changed things and now I have to teach. I didn’t sign up for this! Oh, wait, guess I did. I do not mind the new class that I have, I really don’t. The way it was handed to me is what I wasn’t too happy with but it seems to be a typical Korean situation.

I was sitting at my computer at 7pm doing what I always do: nothing (read: Facebook, comics, blogs, news, etc.), when Boram came in and told me that soon I would begin teaching a conversation class. I said okay and asked when we would be starting it.

“On Monday?”

“Actually,” said Boram, “it will start right now.” She then handed me a book and ushered me into a class full of some of our older middle school students.

Truth be told, even if I had some warning of just an hour or two things in that class probably wouldn’t have turned out much differently. I have never taught more than 4 kids at once and never anybody out of elementary school. While these kids were better behaved they seemed to be judging me as I walked into class with a book that I had never taught before.

I took a few minutes to glance over the book as 9 kids stared at me and said things in Korean that probably had something to do with the idiot teacher who was turning red and realizing that the book had nothing to do with conversational English whatsoever and was in fact a different edition of the beginners vocab book we use with the younger elementary students!

There was a moment of panic but then recovery. These kids weren’t going to know what the hell I was saying anyway. I opened the book to the first page and read some sentences that were completely useless unless given a freakishly specific context and involved such important vocabulary words as ice cream, ball, and pencil sharpener.

I ran out of coherent sentences in all of 5 minutes and decided that it was too much of a bother to try and walk around and show each kid the book as none of them had the stupid thing. What Albert was hoping for these kids to get out of that pathetic monstrosity of a class I don’t know. What they ended up getting out of it was a 25 minute long game of hangman.