I'm in the One Week Program. We also have Day and Month programs, as well as Special Programs for families and the military and other organisations. The One Week Programmers work weekends as well when they cover Special Programs. There's also a group of Edutainers (Haha! see what they did there? Took "Entertainers" and "Education" and put... um... yeah... we don't think it's that funny either...) They put on shows and musicals and talent competitions for people who visit during the day as paying customers.
This is a picture of the Village looking uphill from City Hall, which is where the day-to-day admin is done for us teachers. On the left are our bank (real) and some roleplay venues, like a travel agency. Above the venues are teachers' flats. On the right are more flats. I live further away from the actual village than these flats, which are right on the main street; this is pretty busy with children and One Day Programmers during the weekends in particular.In the One Week Program we teach children who come from schools in the surrounding province, which includes Seoul. They're often from poor families, and the government pays for them to come to EV as an English immersion program before their exams. Most of the children are 15 and at middle school (13 - 14 in Western age). The idea is not so much to teach English, but rather to let the children meet foreigners, experience an English environment, and become more comfortable using and listening to the language. We don't teach grammar classes particularly, but teach grammar through classes like Cooking, Music, Drama, Robotics, Science, Broadcasting and Movie-making.
Our week in English Village starts with a morning meeting where we collect our schedules for the week and pick up our class details and their passports. Then it's off to Immigration where our students have been delivered by their school teachers. It's a bit of a mad trip - there's generally around 500 kids milling around, not entirely sure what they should be doing, and often unable to read the signs we're holding up - or else they've forgotten what class they were assigned to. Once you manage to round up your 15 kids (and it's taken me 20 minutes before) you can lead them off to their hotels, and the week begins.
This is Caitlin waiting for her class of boys to get in line.
There are lots of different classes we run for the students during their week at EV. I'm in CSI, which means I do Maths, Science and Invention. We have one lesson for each subject which is in Powerpoint - I'm already wordperfect at Invention, which I've been teaching right from the start, and as lessons only change every few months, I can see I'm going to be pretty sick of teaching the lessons very soon! :) They are fun though, and when the kids get started on the activity it's usually lots of fun watching them fumble their way through. In science, they make either a boat or a catapult, and then (hopefully, depending on time) race the boats or fire the catapults. The girls below made one of the best boats I've seen so far:
There's actually about 4 girls around, but they scattered when I pulled out the camera - Korean girls are incredibly shy in a very girly way, and most pictures have them with their hands in front of their faces or in hysterics! The boys on the left are about to race their boats on the greenhouse pond. Normally they race on the big pond in front of City Hall where there's no greenery, but it was mysteriously emptied that day...So far, I've also had a homeroom every week. This is one of my homeroom classes:
That's my coteacher Michelle helping out a couple of the girls with the exercise I've set them. Normally, you teach a combined class of 15 girls and 15 boys for homeroom, but this week I was in a small classroom so I just had one class. In a combined class, you will have at least 2 teachers. There's lots of us at the moment, so there's enough for 2 teachers even in a single class. In homeroom we teach things like survival English, a bit of grammar, games and administration tasks. It's their first and last class of the formal day and their last class before they go home, so you tend to be their most important teacher. It can be pretty tough if you mess up with them! One nice thing is that the scheduler tries to place together a Korean and a non-Korean teacher in a class, so that although Korean teachers speak only English, they discourage the kids from swearing in Korean, as well as being able to deal with true traumas quicker than you can in English.Right now I work from 9am to 5pm. I have homeroom in the first period, then I take 3 classes within my content area - and will teach any one of the 30 or so classes, not just my own. Then homeroom again at the end of the day, and then it's finished :)
Next month, I will probably be on the 1pm - 9pm shift and won't have homeroom. Instead, I'll take them for the evening classes, which aren't really classes - they play games (baseball, soccer, or board games, etc) and then have an evening activity, which includes movies, quizzes, disco dances and things like that.
Every week ends on Friday at 1pm for the kids when they attend a closing ceremony and then go home. We carry on for the afternoon with a packed schedule of meetings and workshops. I really like this as it's a very visible form of support from our head teachers and the admin of EV, and a chance to talk to each other about events during the week and classroom problems, and learn a bit about teaching from each other. Of course, it also involves Content Area meetings, which for me often means scrubbing down the labs and washing out test-tubes in preparation for the next week.
And believe me, the next week comes soon enough - with so much routine and ritual, the time flies by, the weekend disappears in a blinding flash of light, and suddenly it's time for the next batch of darlings, trouble-makers, geniuses, shy wallflowers and all the rest of those characters from my own teenage years.
It's a lot of fun, and a lot of hard work.
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