Reflection #5

Rachel Jonker
August 5-6 & 9, 2010
August 12, 2010
Journal #5
10.5 hours teaching, 15 hours preparing
Yum Kwang Church

Part 1: Summary of your recent time in the classroom (one-two paragraphs)

As we near the end of the YumKwang English Camp, my classes have begun to wrap things up. Thursday, August 5 was the final day for a Fruit of the Spirit verse. After that, I decided to use six of Jesus’ “I am” statements for the final daily Bible verses. These have provided the basis for each day’s Bible lesson in an engaging way as we have discussed what it means for Jesus to say that he is “bread” and “light.”

With the Brown Camels (my upper elementary school class) we have been working toward the students writing their own book report about a children’s book which I gave them to read outside of class. Every day I incorporate an activity which prepares them to complete another section of the report, such as character and setting description. The closest equivalent to this in my Blue Elephants class is the TeenInk essays which the students selected (on their own) and wrote two questions about and then summarized and exchanged with another student so they could read the essay that that person had selected and answer the questions. In the mother’s class which I co-teach with Molly and Rose during the kindergarten class, we have mainly focused on reading and discussing the Bible story which the kindergarteners learn each day so as to equip the mothers to be able to discuss the story with their children.

Part 2: Reflection on TESOL Themes
1. Discuss one approach you used or observed which you felt worked well and received positive response from both students and teacher. Support your observations with references from your TESOL texts.

On Monday, August 9 the daily verse was John 8:12 “When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” In order to create a memorable experience which would help both of my classes think about what this statement means, I decided to talk about light and darkness.

In my Brown Camels class I used scarves to blindfold each of the students at the beginning of class, while in my Blue Elephants class I simply turned off the classroom lights. Then, when the students were in the dark, I asked them to explain what it was like. After they had done so, I asked the key question: Which is stronger, light or darkness? At first there were diverse opinions, but after I asked them to consider which one overpowers the other when both are in the same room, they all understood that light will always beat darkness.

I also distributed several Bible verses about light and darkness. The Brown Camels each had one verse to explain while the Blue Elephants were given a complete sheet with all of the verses, but we only looked at a few of them. I asked the students when most robberies take place, and why this is the case. From this point we talked about how since Jesus is the light of the world he will still be able to see anything which is done in the darkness and a little about what it means to be children of light.

I think that this approach was effective because it gave the students a tangible experience which helped them understand an important concept. In terms of language learning, this gave them clarity which made the discussion more profitable. The students enjoyed the activity because it was unusual—the say the least— to have the teacher blindfold them and turn off all the lights. Harmer comments on this very thing when he discusses the importance of variety in classroom activities and topics. He notes that even the best activity “will be less motivating the sixth time we ask the students to take part in it than it was when they first came across it. Much of the value of an activity, in other words, resides in its freshness” (29). I think that I was especially attune to this because I have adopted a fairly consistent class structure which needed to be “broken-up.”

2. Discuss one approach you used or observed which you felt did not work well and received negative response from either students or teacher. Support your observations with references from your TESOL texts.

I am very intentional about treating my middle/high school students according to the maturity which I expect them to display in the classroom. I do this in the hope that if I treat them as responsible, capable students, they will perform accordingly. While this generally works, recently I have begun to question its effectiveness. I have struggled throughout my time teaching here to get my students to complete their blog homework. While I am still not completely sure why it has been so difficult to get them to do it, I suspect that it may be because the students are not accustomed to accessing the internet every day, are occupied with other homework, academies and activities and the blog homework was often not incorporated into the classroom time, so thus they were not reminded of it.

However, during these few days I discovered that the single biggest factor may simply be a lack of consequences. After discussing it with my fellow Taylor students, I decided that it was not too late to change my standards by requiring the students to write sentences every time that they did not complete their blog homework. I used this approach in my Brown Camels class: on Thursday, August 5 the three students who had not completed their blog homework had to write “I will do my blog homework before I come to class” five times and hand it in to me before they left class. On Friday the sentences increased to ten and on Monday there were 15. The combination of public humiliation and inconvenience that this created for the students proved to be more effective than I anticipated: since Monday, all of the students have been completing their blog homework. The whole experience makes me wonder why I didn’t think of this sooner!
Since I haven’t instituted the sentence punishment in my Blue Elephants class, student completion of blog homework has—understandably—stayed about the same. I chose not to make the students write sentences because it felt too “elementary” and because I had not instituted it from the beginning of class. I wanted them to feel that they were respected in the hope that they would return that respect. I have also recognized that this decision was motivated by my first language learning experience, in which the teacher used no consequences or tests at all, but rather simply presented us with “Desafios” for each subject area which we completed when we felt ready and through which we would earn the “honor” of having our names written on a posterboard.

But such is not adequate for these students. I also struggled against a lack of consequences to motivate the Blue Elephants to complete their “My Motivation” essays and select, ask and answer questions about, and summarize an essay from the TeenInk website. Harmer addresses my dilemma directly in his “What if students don’t do homework?” section of the “What If?” chapter (179-180). While none of his suggestions provide insight into how to create the intrinsic motivation which I would love to see my students develop so that homework completion was not an issue to begin with, they may have been helpful given the lack of such. I can see how a homework diary, variety, greater teacher involvement in reminders, reciprocation, and post-homework activities may have been helpful in motivating my students to complete their homework without belittling them. I can only lament that I did not institute such strategies earlier in the class.

3. Discuss a cultural dynamic that you saw playing out in the classroom. How did you respond to this dynamic? What resources could you consult to gain deeper insight into this?

On Monday, August 9 I decided to use a unit from Small Group Discussion Topics for Korean Students, a book which the YumKwang Church owns, for discussion in my Blue Elephants class. This book by Jack Martire presents a political, economic, environmental, or social issue facing Korea in the early 21st century in a three part essay complete with explanations of unfamiliar phrases and 8-10 discussion questions. The first topic that I chose was “Suicides.” Looking back on it I wonder whether it was appropriate for a middle school summer camp, but at the time I thought that the topic was sufficiently relevant and would be engaging to the students.

Our discussion was profitable; the essay gave the students a reason to communicate their opinions. However, the questions were not all relevant. This became humorously apparent when we came to the third: “What is your reaction to the suicide rate, as explained in Reading 3—a clash between traditional Confucist thinking and modern Korean society?” After a spell of awkward silence, it came out that the students did not know who Confucius was. I directed one of them to look up his Korean name in his dictionary, in hopes that this would “turn on the light bulb” which would enable them to answer the question. But even after they knew who he was, they were unable to answer the question. The students told me that while they had heard of him, they didn’t know anything about what he taught. Thus, I adapted the question and we went on to talk about how Korean media has changed. From that point on I realized that it worked better when I fed directly off of our discussion to create new questions rather than systematically addressing each written question in turn.

This situation shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did. Throughout the course I have come to realize that much of what is marketed as “traditional culture” is not known as such by my Korean students themselves. Most of this is due to modernization and the students Christian backgrounds; much of what once defined a typical Korean experience is no longer present in their lives.

However, the fact that the students did not know anything about what Confucius taught does not mean that his teachings have ceased to have an effect on Korean culture. For example, it is still customary to bow to others—particularly elders—when greeting them. In addition, Korean society still awards a relatively high respect to the elderly. I have never before been in an environment in which the eldest is consistently served food first, and in which people routinely give up their subway seats for the elderly. However, I think that I am sensitive to this issue for that very reason: I have never before lived in this environment. For my students, in contrast, this is the only culture which they have known. As such, they are less likely to recognize such as overt evidence of Confucist influence. What I recognize as a cultural phenomenon appears to be simply normal to them. This phenomenon of which aspects of culture one can self-identify as such is fascinating to me. I would like to research it further via similar discussions with my students, the Korean language assistants, others who have lived in Korea as well as another culture, and via published material about evolution in traditional Korean culture.

Reflection #4

Rachel Jonker

July 29-30, August 2-4, 2010

August 6, 2010

Journal #4

8 hours teaching, 12 hours preparing

10 hours and 40 minutes teaching, 18 hours preparing

Yum Kwang Church

Part 1: Summary of your recent time in the classroom (one-two paragraphs)

On July 29 and 30 YumKwang Church’s middle schoolers attended their summer camp at the church’s retreat center, so we did not have class. That gave me more time to focus on my younger class, the Brown Camels. I incorporated a few themes—such as cultural festivals, the Bible story from each day, and the Fruit of the Spirit verse into other classroom activities so as to create a continuity which I hoped would help the students understand the flow of the class while motivating them to engage more with these stories. This tactic worked best when I introduced the topic and then gave the students an activity in which they could respond to what I had taught them with their own creative thinking.

Since the middle school retreat, the middle school student who had been giving me trouble has not returned to class. While I am disappointed to see him go rather than working through the challenge of teaching him effectively, I would be lying if I did not admit that this has significantly improved my perspective on the success of this class. It is so much more pleasant to work with students who are willing to follow directions and participate in class. With two-four students attending each day, the class has evolved into a more discussion oriented structure which gives me more time to interact with each student individually. I find this to be the most rewarding aspect of teaching here.

Part 2: Reflection on TESOL Themes

1. Discuss one approach you used or observed which you felt worked well and received positive response from both students and teacher. Support your observations with references from your TESOL texts.

My favorite activity which I did during these classes was a discussion of Korean Rites of Passage which I had with my middle schoolers on Tuesday, August 3. I located descriptions of traditional Korean coming-of-age ceremonies (gwanhonsangje), weddings, funerals, and ancestor veneration in a guide to Korean culture which I downloaded from the internet before I came to Korea. I proofread these descriptions, making note of words which I assumed would be new to my students and locating their definitions so that I could explain them to the students in class. I then gave each student a copy of a description of one of these traditions along with several questions which I wrote to prompt a discussion:

1) Were you familiar with the traditional way that these rites of passage were celebrated? If so where did you hear about them?

2) Do you know of anyone who still celebrates this way? What do these traditions have in common with the way that your family celebrates these rites of passage? How are they different?

3) What are the advantages of discontinuing celebrating these rites of passage in the traditional way? What are the disadvantages?

After each student had read his or her paragraph, I asked him or her to summarize its contents for the rest of the class and we then worked loosely through the discussion questions. I directed these questions to other students when it felt appropriate, making the judgment call based on their knowledge of and interest in the topic. This activity worked very well because it gave the students a real reason to communicate to me about something with which they were more familiar than I was. It was also helpful to provide them with the descriptions, because the students do not practice most of the traditional customs and thus are not very familiar with them. Most of their knowledge came from books, relatives, or grandparents.

I think a significant part of why I feel that this activity went well is that it was genuinely interesting to me to hear the students explain why they think it is perfectly acceptable to leave behind old cultural traditions and move onto more “westernized” celebrations. Since I am fascinated by this aspect of cultural evolution, I was genuinely interested in hearing the students’ perspectives and reasons. This made me prod them on with further questions, which gave them the opportunity to develop more thorough reasons for their opinions. I have determined that I enjoyed this activity because it gave the students more agency than I typically incorporate into my lesson plans and put me in the role of prompter and resource provider for language information (Harmer, 25). I enjoyed learning alongside my students.

2. Discuss one approach you used or observed which you felt did not work well and received negative response from either students or teacher. Support your observations with references from your TESOL texts.

I am generally satisfied with my students’ participation in classroom activities, although I still struggle to get some of them to complete their homework. I experienced this acutely with the book reports that I am trying to get my elementary school students to write. I gave them each a children’s book on Monday, July 26 and instructed them to read it on their own before class that Friday. On Friday I gave them a character summary sheet to fill out which walked them through several steps to describe one of the characters of their book. When they brought the descriptions back on Monday, I was very disappointed with the poor quality of their work. Their descriptions of the characters’ physical appearance were very limited, and the extent of their character’s personality description was that everyone said that his or her character was “kind.”

But then I realized that the students had completed the assignments in this way because I had not given them adequate preparatory support. I merely gave them the sheet, expecting them to figure out on their own how to accurately describe the character. At the time this seemed best to me because I wanted the students to take more ownership of the assignment, rather than merely regurgitating adjectives with which I provided them. However, in this instance it was unrealistic of me to expect the students to have skills which I did not teach them. At times I think that I forget that they are not able to be as independent as I am expected to be in my college courses. Upon reflection, it seems that I imposed learner autonomy rather than providing the support by which my students could gradually extend their involvement and responsibility in their learning (Harmer, 21). For this reason, I revisited character description in class on Wednesday, August 4 with a worksheet which detailed various ways to describe people and gave the students a few opportunities to practice doing so in class before I asked them to rewrite their descriptions.

3. Discuss a cultural dynamic that you saw playing out in the classroom. How did you respond to this dynamic? What resources could you consult to gain deeper insight into this?

The Bible character for Monday, August 2 was Mary Jesus’ mother, so I decided to tell the story of Jesus’ birth via the Brick Testament, a resource which I found online which illustrates Bible stories with Legos. I like this because each page displays a verse and clearly depicts it with the Lego people. The disadvantage of this illustration and simplified version of the story is that it makes some aspects of the story clearer than is typically done for children’s Bible stories. For this reason the creator marks each story for its nudity, violence, and sexual content. (The Bible isn’t exactly G-rated.) I decided to use an abridged version of the story for my elementary school students so as to avoid having to explain “circumcision” and show them images of the baby boys of Bethlehem being slaughtered.

I didn’t avoid Luke 1:34, however, which the author rendered “Mary said to the angel, ‘How can this happen if I had not had sex with a man?’” My fellow teachers cautioned me against using the text in class, advising me to soften the language. I considered it, but chose not to because I have a heightened sensitivity to unnecessary censorship and simplification of the Bible. I am convinced that this is done too effectively in most Sunday School classes, such that after children grow up they only associate the stories with kindergarten felt boards and primary school puppet shows rather than recognizing the characters as real people who lived lives very much like ours and those of the people by whom we are surrounded. Besides being a misrepresentation of the truth, this leads to the impression that the Bible is childish and irrelevant, a false stereotype which I will not condone.

So I copied these verses for my students, and directed them to read them in turn as I advanced the images so that they could follow along. I watched them carefully as I handed out the papers, waiting to see how they would react. One of them spotted the “s-word” almost immediately and giggled behind his hand as he pointed it out to his friend. I remained silent and waited to see how they would react when it came time to read it. As luck would have it, the verse fell to the quietest boy in class. I felt a twinge of pity for him, but only because of how his friends might tease him afterwards. But when it was time to read the verse, he skipped right over it and read the verse immediately after it. I caught my correction half-way up my throat and swallowed it again before it escaped my mouth. I knew exactly why he had done so, and decided to let it go.

It was definitely the wisest way to react to the situation, but the way that it turned out made me doubt my decision to include the “uncensored” version for these sixth graders. In retrospect, I realize that it might have been wiser of me to consult one of the Korean assistants to ask his or her opinion about what would be considered appropriate for students of this age. Perhaps that would have helped me make a more informed decision.

Reflection #3

Rachel Jonker
July 26-28, 2010
August 1, 2010
Journal #3
8 hours teaching, 12 hours preparing
Yum Kwang Church

Part 1: Summary of your recent time in the classroom (one-two paragraphs)

I have settled into the rhythm of things in my classes. I combined activities from my expanding repertoire with some new ideas. While I am glad that my younger class has become quite comfortable together, this made them more difficult to control and less responsive to my reminders that “This is English, not Korean, class” and attempts to get them to work quickly through in class activities. The atmosphere in my older class is generally very pleasant, but can be quite difficult when one student refuses to cooperate. I can tell that this directly influences my ease in the leadership role, making it more difficult for me to feel confident in my teaching abilities.

Sometimes I forget that since the students are more skilled in reading and writing than they are in listening and speaking, the fact that they easily perform a reading or writing activity does not mean that they have attained fluency in the oral and aural use of that skill. I need to guard against reducing the number of speaking activities that I use in class simply because they are more difficult for the students to perform. Although it is important to organize the class in a way which gives the students an opportunity to succeed, that does not mean that I should exclusively teach that which students are already good at. The purpose of these classes is to increase spoken fluency. Thus, even though it is more difficult to give the students significant individual “air time” in a way which keeps the rest of the class’s attention, I need to be more intentional about incorporating speaking practice.

Part 2: Reflection on TESOL Themes
1. Discuss one approach you used or observed which you felt worked well and received positive response from both students and teacher. Support your observations with references from your TESOL texts.

This week I used an authentic information gap activity to tell the story of Elijah. I printed the story of his confrontation with the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel (from 1 Kings 18:18-40) in Korean and divided the story into as many parts as there were students in the class (seven for the younger and four for the older). I distributed these in class and instructed the students to read their verses and prepare to tell me the story in English. After a few minutes I solicited the story from each of them in turn as we watched an illustrated PowerPoint version of it which I found online. This helped to remind the students of parts of it which they may have forgotten and effectively maintained other students’ interest. The activity was successful because it created a genuine information gap which motivated students to communicate while at the same time giving them the material to communicate. This was more effective than other information gap activities which I have used because it eliminated the additional step of requiring students to produce information to communicate by forming an opinion or answering a question. I think this is because it provided the additional support needed to get less vocal students to talk, as Harmer talks about in How to Teach English. He advocates getting students “to speak in a more controlled way at first” as a means of building their psychological confidence so as to answer follow-up questions, etc.

2. Discuss one approach you used or observed which you felt did not work well and received negative response from either students or teacher. Support your observations with references from your TESOL texts.

One of my bittersweet surprises this week was that my students knew more than I anticipated. Based on their classroom and written performance, I determined that it would be helpful to teach how to form a complete sentence, capitalization rules, the more technical rules of apostrophe use, and some idioms. However, based on their adeptness with the questions that I asked in class to test their ability with the material, I concluded that my students already knew everything that I had intended to teach them. Harmer notes that it “is the mark of a good teacher to know when and how to deal with unplanned events, and how to balance a proposal for action with appropriate flexibility” (157).Several times I was able to alter my lesson plan accordingly so as to make the lesson more challenging, but that was not always an option. That’s what made me feel like a poor teacher through this experience.
For example, in order to teach idioms I selected five short texts from an idiom textbook and asked students to each read and explain a paragraph. Even though they were able to correctly define almost all without any assistance, I continued with the activity because I did not have anything else to fill the class time. After we finished reading, I had the students each fill their own Bingo card with the idioms. I then called out the idioms by their definitions, which required the students to know what they meant before they could mark off the square. In the least, I hope that it was a beneficial review activity for them, rather than simply a means to fill class time.

3. Discuss a cultural dynamic that you saw playing out in the classroom. How did you respond to this dynamic? What resources could you consult to gain deeper insight into this?

My most exasperating experience this week happened on Tuesday in my older class when one of my students refused to participate in an activity. He has given me considerable problems in the past, from pretending to fall asleep in class to aggravating his fellow classmates to swearing under his breath and refusing to follow instructions. On this day I did not have a helper in class, which is generally fine with this level because the students are sufficiently advanced to be able to communicate everything to me. However, it turned into a problem when he got frustrated and started speaking angrily to me in Korean. I reprimanded him sternly, telling him that it was not acceptable and that he needed to speak in English. When he refused to do so, I took to asking my other students what he was saying. The first several times it was simply his frustration, so I chose to ignore it rather than give him more attention and fuel for his feeling of “superiority” by calling attention to the fact that he can speak a language which I do not understand.

Ignoring him did not diffuse the situation, however. The next time that I told him to participate, he erupted into a stream of Korean which another student told me afterward had been “very rude” and an “insult.” Thankfully the class ended shortly thereafter, but before it did I reprimanded him again and threatened to take further measures if his behavior did not improve. After class my teaching assistant (who had been there for his final eruption) explained that he had addressed me in the informal form rather than the formal one which was required for his elders. I was about to dismiss it since this was more palatable to me than the type of insult that I had been envisioning, but she told me that it was still significant and that she would have been very upset if he had addressed her in that way. So, we explained the situation to the English Camp’s coordinator and asked him what should be done. He offered to come to my class the following day to confront him, since he needed to tell him that he had still not paid for the class.

I was very nervous before the next day’s class, envisioning a somewhat horrific confrontation. At the same time, I rested in the thought that the coordinator would take care of it and looked forward to a much better classroom atmosphere. But nothing of the sort occurred. My student arrived to class 45 minutes late the following day. I chose to let him fall into place rather than make a big deal of it so that he would have further reason to erupt. When the coordinator came in a few minutes later to speak to him he merely told him that he needed to pay for the class and left. I was tempted to say something to him, but since the conversation took place in Korean and I was in the middle of teaching, I chose not to.

I was very disappointed that the coordinator had not followed through with his promise to confront the student. It made me wonder if it had been culturally appropriate to ask him to do so in the first place, since I understand that confrontation may be less acceptable in this culture. I wonder if he felt obligated to tell me that he was going to confront him. That may be the case, since earlier he began to translate a letter to this same student’s parents (which explained the difficulties that I have had with him in class) which he promised to deliver to my classroom the same day, but never did. When I asked him about it he told me that he decided that it would be better to call the parents. He later told me that he had done so, but said nothing about telling them about their son’s behavior issues in class. Since I also dislike confrontation, it is tempting for me to take his behavior as an indicator that I should leave the issue in his hands rather than attempt to make further headway. However, that is not a favorable option because it will be interpreted by my student as a lack of consequences, which simply gives him further leave to act out in class.