For those playing the home game (hint: if you're reading this blog, you are!), a hagwon is a private, extracurricular school. There are about a bazillion of them in Daejeon alone, many (perhaps even most) for English. (Other hagwon types include math and science). To give you an idea of the hagwon density: my hagwon is in a building with two others run by the same company for different age groups, and four others run by different companies. This is all in one building. There are several more across the street. My hagwon is a franchise of Avalon English Language School. We have a regional headquarters (to which I got sent for training - a story for another time) and a corporate structure and all that good stuff.
My school employs both foreign and Korean teachers. All the foreign teachers are American except for one, G, who is Canadian. E and S are both from North Carolina, Q is from Los Angeles, and J is from Colorado, and actually teaches in Korean. They are all older than I am, having spent time doing other things, some of them in hagwons, before this job. They all live on the other side of the school from me, in an apartment complex with a lot of other foreigners, with whom they get together and do stuff. I imagine it is difficult to form very lasting relationships with people here unless they arrived with you, because either you or they are going to be leaving soon. (Perhaps that is just me justifying why we do not socialize much; after all, E and J arrived at the same time I did, and I see them no more frequently).
The Korean teachers are about twice as many as we are, which is good because they teach more than half of the classes. (Foreigners only teach speaking and writing classes. Grammar, reading and listening are all on the Koreans). We have a head teacher, HS, and a vice-director, IH. I don't know all the Korean teachers, but I do know K, M, and H by name. To a man, they are all very friendly, but communication is not a strong point of the environment. (The first day of the new semester, for example, nobody told me I was supposed to arrive at 1:30, not 3:00 in the afternoon. In fact, they did not even tell the TA who had picked me up that morning to take me to Immigration. Both of us were unpleasantly surprised when I received a text asking after my whereabouts).
Physically, the school occupies half of the sixth floor of a decent-sized 8-story building. We have something like 20 classrooms, most of them fairly small, and at least one that is big enough for forty or fifty kids (that many adults would really be pushing it, though). In addition, there's the nice entryway/waiting room, two teachers' offices, the guidance counselor's office, IH's office, the copy room and the break room. Everything is done in the Avalon colors: blue, white and gray.
Every day is broken up into two blocks: one starting at 5:30, the next at 8:15. Kids only come for one or the other. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, each block has two classes, each 80 minutes long. On Tuesday and Thursday, the classes are three to a block, and 45 minutes long, plus a homeroom to make up the difference. (Yeah, nobody here's really sure why, either). As someone who is teaching speaking to reticent teenagers, I must tell you it is far easier to take more time to do a unit in the book than it is to cram a lot into a small time. With a lot of time, you can afford to wait for the kid you have called on to finally answer you. With a short class, so much time is spent explaining and coaxing, it would be a miracle to have them speak and finish a lesson.
Which brings us to the actual students! They are between 13 and 17 (though I don't teach any 17-year-olds myself). Those on the low end and those on the high end of the ability spectrum are great; they participate and ask questions, some of them even poke fun at my illustrations (I had to teach a class what "to scale" means, because one of them felt my stickman was too big for the mountain I had him skiing down). The middle classes are somewhat less fun, as they seem conditioned by the Avalon bell tune (a seriously elaborate jingle including two arpeggios and a descending scale with a little do-ti-do cadence at the end) to fall into a coma. If they were simply shy of speaking, I'd have more sympathy, but they just sit there with their mouths slightly ajar, some of them asleep. I've tried to take speaking out of it as much as I can and still consider myself a teacher; I just ask them to raise their hands to vote, and still, nothing! Please give me suggestions! (Preferably class-structural/activity/academic-based, as I am not supposed to give them candy).
So that's where I work.
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