A Good Day

Okay, in each class I have anywhere from 30 - 35 students, all of who have very similar names with nametags printed only in Korean. As you can probably guess, this makes calling on them in class rather difficult since they're listening for me to call their name and I can't either pronounce or remember it.

One thing I've already done to make my job easier is to arrange the tables so that they're sitting in groups of 4. Instead of having 35 students to control. I only need to control 9 tables. The arrangement helps but there's still a lot of confusion when I'm trying to call on one particular student and the only thing I can do is point at him.

So this morning, while talking to Shannon, I came up with the brilliant idea to give each table the name of a particular English-speaking city. The names I chose were:

• New York City, USA
• San Fransisco, USA
• Toronto, Canada
• London, England
• Dublin, Ireland
• Edinburgh, Scotland
• Capetown, South Africa
• Sydney, Australia
• Wellington, NZ (I put this one on the table in the center of my classroom out of symbolism and sentimentality)

Now, instead of having to remember everyone's name right off the bat, I can call on their table by using the city name and the students can actually recognize that I'm speaking to them, or at least their group. I'm amazed at how well it has already worked! It immediately gave me more control over the classroom. So now I can say, "London, be quiet! I want to hear an answer from Wellington!" or "Sydney! Pay attention!"

Of course, I hope that eventually I can learn everyone's name but, for now, it's a great way to manage my classes.

I also had another great experience today. At the end of each day, the students spend their last hour cleaning the school from top to bottom. When they're finished with their particular job, they're allowed to roam around the school talking to the teachers or just playing while they wait for their friends to finish. Today, as usual, a group of students crowded around my desk because they were curious about me. They're always curious about me, asking me if I know Korean sports stars or videogames.

Anyway, today they were asking me about videogames so of course I turned it back on them. A few of them told me that liked an online roleplaying game called "Maple Story" so I went onto the internet and looked up the website as they watched over my shoulder.

As soon as the website came up, a ripple of excitement went through them and suddenly there were 20-30 students crowded around my desk, all of who were desperately trying to tell me about this "Maple Story" game... in English! It was so cool! They went from being bored and just hanging out to super-excited because their English teacher was looking at one of their favorite videogames. They all wanted to tell me what level their character was or how awesome of a player they were. The only thing I could do was just sit there and milk the conversations as long as I could until they had to go home.

I love it when my students get excited about English! Their reaction just reconfirms my view that students will want to talk English when it's exciting and personal. In the coming year, I hope that I can find other ways to get my students just as talkative.

So, I feel encouraged and I think that's a great way to end the day!