Hello faithful readers. The holiday season is upon us and I hope you're doing a better job than me at keeping warm. Turns out, I'm becoming far too accustomed to Korean weather and every little drop in temperature seems to force me to add new layers. The Michigander in me is quite ashamed.
Today I would like to take you into my school life a bit. Today is my school's final examination day (yes, it's December so you may think I mean midterms, but I don't). One of the wonderful perks of exam days is that I'm pretty much desk-warming the whole time so I get time to type this. Unfortunately, I have a new "no computer before noon" rule in my office in attempt to force me to study Korean. Therefore, this entry is costing me 5,000 won.
First, let me get the whole "why the 'final' exams are in December" issue. As you know, the school years in America, Canada, and I'm assuming many other western countries begin in the Fall and end in the Spring. Well, in Korea the school years start at the beginning of the year and end at the end (go figure). It's not quite exact... the official start of the year for elementary schools is at the beginning of March. Therefore, even though it's December 5th and we're already having exams, there are still a few weeks of classes before the winter break. The students will also come back to school in the beginning of February for a week or so... then the 6th graders will have their graduation. Then the whole school is on Spring break until the beginning of the new school year. I may have confused you somewhere in there... if so, grab a calendar.
Since I've been in Korea, my jobs on exam days have slowly grown. My first exams were a little awkward. Since I started teaching in early November, I had only been a teacher for about a month when my first exam day came about. So naturally, I had no idea what I was supposed to do. My co-T's at the time made it rather simple for me. Every English exam in our school has two parts: a listening section and a reading section. My Korean co-teachers are always in charge of writing the tests, while I'm responsible for helping record the dialog for the listening test. This was my sole task during my first exam period. About a week before exams, I went into our English room and recorded a pre-written dialog with each co-T for each grade level. Pretty simple except for the fact that our recording set-up was pretty basic and we had no editing program to speak of. Therefore, each recording had to be done in one shot and with no errors. If we ever made a mistake, we started from the beginning. Each test is usually no more than 5-10 minutes long, but it's much harder to read a flawless dialog with a Korean English teacher than you think. I'm not saying that their English is bad... I'm saying that it's a lot of pressure when they see you as an English "professional" and think you should be perfect on every try. So of course, I was the frustrating cause of multiple re-do's. Since then, I've become much more efficient with the whole process and rarely make any mistakes. Also, I have become friends with Ziggy, the native English teacher across the street, and she comes over to help record and uses her audio editing software to make our lives easier.
After I became more comfortable with my school life, my co-T's started giving me slightly bigger responsibilities such as proofreading the tests and providing input for test materials. I really started to feel like a real teacher once they started letting me correct the tests too! It doesn't seem like a big task, nor does it seem like a big deal since I AM considered a teacher here... but you'd be surprised by how few of my friends are allowed to or even asked to help correct tests. The whole thing kinda makes me feel privileged. However, I do feel a bit of pressure since I don't wanna be the guy who accidentally writes down the wrong score on some kid's paper. They take grades rather seriously here.
So what do I actually do when the kids are taking their exams all day? Well, pretty much nothing. Obviously... I'm sitting here and typing this now. We do have to be in our office when the students are taking the English exams in their classrooms, just in case there's a problem that needs our attention, but that rarely happens. Although, I do remember one time when Youjin forgot to send the audio file for the 6th grade midterms and I had to run through the school to find her. It all worked out fine, by the way. It's really weird for me when the 5th graders who share a hallway with my office are taking the listening section of our exam. There's nothing like hearing my voice echoing down the hallway at five different points of a dialog saying things like, "What a tall tower! How strong he is! Where is the bank? Go straight and turn left, it's on your right. Please do not run, it is dangerous." I've truly come to hate hearing my own voice.
Although exam days are really easy and quite relaxing for me, it's the days after finals that worry me. As I already mentioned, the students still have a few weeks before vacation starts and they really have no incentive to pay attention anymore... especially the 6th graders. Every good thing comes with a price I guess. But I'm pretty sure at this point, the teachers are more excited about the vaca countdown than the students are.
