Teaching and tired teachers

Rob's students' mid term exams finish tomorrow. My students have exams next Monday - Wednesday. I find out tomorrow about whether I have to be at school for the whole day or (fingers crossed) just half days. All of this week I've just been using self made crosswords to get the students to revise. My co-teachers have run what's in the exams by me to check for mistakes, so I know the content. From using the crosswords in class, I can see a small percentage of the girls should do very well in this almost solely multi choice exam, but most of them unfortunately won't. :( They just don't know the vocabulary required and a lot of them don't know effective study techniques, from what I've observed.

I don't know if I already mentioned it, but the oldest students have the most atrocious writing! It is true that Koreans do pretty well to learn the alphabet of a language as far from their own as possible AND be able to do as well as they do by the age of 10. But after 3 years of German at school or one semester of Maori at university, it was expected that I would be able to write 50 - 100 words in full sentences in those languages. I estimate that 60% of the girls at my school can't write 50 words in complete sentences. They have little idea about how to construct full sentences in English. Few students have a big enough active vocabulary. The curriculum here doesn't push writing. Hence when I gave the 3rd grade a homework writing assignment of 3 - 5 sentences about a Korean movie last month, almost half of the homework was plagiarised from the internet. And they didn't pick the most well-written movie reviews for copying!

It is stressful sometimes. Especially when I put in a lot of energy in the classroom and spend ages looking for the best games to use in class and then for whatever reason - it's after lunch and they're sleepy and can't concentrate for the 2 minutes of instructions required before they can begin their speaking activity, or they are just super chatty and 70 % of the class don't want to speak English during that lesson that day - it can be like pulling teeth and the awesome activities fall flat. Luckily for me, that doesn't happen too often, but it is disheartening when it happens. I'm getting better at motivating the students in a wider variety of ways.

With all of the changes that have happened since I started work almost 2 months ago, like Rob, I'm also thankful for a break from it all during this revision week (I have less to prepare) and next week during the exams. I want to feel fresh again and start getting ahead in preparations for the oncoming chapters of their text books. Especially when I'm so exhausted this week! Although to be honest, that's mostly because Rob and I have been going to bed much too late. We've been watching the American forensic detective (comic) drama "Bones". I'm sad to say, we are addicted to it, but it's soooooooooo good!