Today was the big conference for all the private schools in the same franchise as mine. I didn't realize how big this would be and how small my school is. We were just a party of three since others couldn't make it. So we had the director, a Korean teacher, and me. In comparison other schools had about 50 people attending, and I'm told this time was the fewest number of attendees from my school.
There were five workshops to attend based on what your role is, and which classes you are involved with.
My first workshop of the day was all focused around asking the right questions. After taking in information you need to check to make sure your students understand it. The questions start simple, with limited answers, then build up to comparing and contrasting, explaining why, applying it to real life, and the most complex questions come last with the biggest range of answers. For a story you could ask the students to, say, make up an alternative ending. That can be a pretty steep order depending on your student's abilities. I found this to be on of the most useful of the workshops.
Then there was a massive all you can eat lunch. The director was pushing me to break the record of a teacher from the last conference who ate 6 plates of food. Naturally, I would be all over that, but I was actually trying to pace myself a little so I didn't just fall asleep in the next workshop.
The next workshop was all about getting the kindergarten kids to really remember words. It turns out that action things I've been doing is called a Total Physical Response (TPR) and it an amazing way to remember words.
After that I had a very good workshop on classroom management for kindergarten students. This covered how to keep order without resorting to bribery or punishments. There's a couple good tips I will take from this. One such tip was about how to handle students who finish their work early. The put their hands together straight up above their head and they are now a banana. When the teacher sees a banana, the banana must be peeled. Apparently the peeling was supposed to be the end, but the children convinced this teacher that you must eat the banana -which is essentially fake eating and tickling. Other students might see this and finish their work quicker since they want that attention. i know that my class would love this and they will all want to be bananas.
Next was an actual grammar and pronunciation workshop. This felt a lot like everything I have covered in my TEFL course, but maybe a bit more specific to Korea.
Lastly, I had a workshop on how to teach Social Studies. I thought for sure they would address the whole super American textbook thing. In fact I overheard the people sitting behind me talking about it before the presentation began. The facilitator gave a pretty half-ass-ed response claiming it was fine because they are learning North American English. When I did turn around to discuss strategies with the people behind me, as per the workshop, we got on this subject. It turns out they were Canadian too, and couldn't properly answer their students questions about the Pledge of Allegiance. I told them about googling the liberty bell, and how the students had struggled with many of the concepts.
The way I make sense of the American textbook problem is reflecting on my own learning. In Mr. Dooley's grade 6 and 7 classes we learned about Peru and Japan. It didn't go as politically deep as this book, but nonetheless gave us a brief chance to think about the world outside of Canada. These kids haven't been as worn out by Americanization as their adult counterparts, so it is still just learning about a new place for them. Then by the time they're 12 or 15, they can be sick of it like the rest of us.
The whole thing was supposed to wrap up with a group photo, and maybe it did, I don't know. I escaped out the back door with the Korean teacher and we hopped in the directors car to beat the traffic home.
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