That glorious day has arrived--summer camp is finished!
It may sound like I hate doing camp, but that's not really what's going on; it's just an added responsibility which entails loads of planning and creating materials, all for fewer than forty kids--not to mention showing up in the hottest, most miserable time of year to teach them, usually solo. But at least the kids are almost always great: while I hear a lot of NETs complain that camp is glorified babysitting, I find the kids want to be here, and like it. And they learn, too! (Again, here's a link to the TeachKorea website where I've posted the materials:
https://www.teachkorea.kr/forums/topic/mr-bean-camp/. That's a lot of vocabulary!)
Anyway, here's a quick rundown and mainly pictures of our best craft activities for week two. On Monday, Mr Bean goes shopping, very heavy on vocab. Tuesday is the day they've been looking forward to since the first day of camp, when I showed them the paper models of iconic English things they might get to make (3rd graders did the phone box, mostly, and 4th made Tower Bridge):
One of my favorite camp activities is the "mosaic". Let the campers choose from a few different coloring pages but instead of coloring them, we make colored paper mosaics. Every school I've worked at has stacks and stacks of colored origami paper squares in the supply room. Tear or cut them into smaller pieces and glue stick them onto your coloring page. First is the example I made:
My original plan for the big finale day on Friday, Science Day, was to have pairs of campers prepare and present a simple science demonstration. I realized this was impossible for the third graders, and pretty untenable for fourth graders, even though their English capacity is much, much greater. And, it was just too much effort to chase down the materials. So, I focused instead on a couple of body parts activities, such as labeling, and making the paper cube we didn't have time to do back on Day Two:
After the last campers left for home, the vice principal came along to tell me how the students really enjoyed my camp and thought it was so interesting. This is not something I wanted or needed to hear from her. I have had uniformly positive and supportive relationships with the top administrators at all the schools I've been at in Korea, with two exceptions. And she is one of them. But I don't bad-mouth people on this blog, so I'll stop now. Suffice it to say that I'll be the loudest toaster at her farewell dinner the first week back as she moves on to a new school.
I've gotten out of the habit of writing about the minutiae of school, the politics, etc, and I see I haven't mentioned the episode revolving, or so I thought, around my contract renewal. The day SMOE released contract offers near the end of June, I was told that I would need to do an open class for people from the district office. While some people assured me it was random, I found out the VP (and principal) asked for it. In due course, a lady from a nearby school who introduced herself as a master teacher, along with the head of Gangseo District English Education (who never spoke a word of English in the entire meeting, except to ask me if I could speak Korean), observed a fourth grade lesson. (Those materials are here:
https://www.teachkorea.kr/forums/topic/2018-gr-4-ybm-kim-lesson-7-its-under-the-table/#post-2676 )
Afterwards, she listed about ten things I did in the class that were awesome, including things she'd never seen other NETs do--like call children by their names--and frankly wondered why they had been asked to do this observation, since I clearly had run a terrific lesson, and the main activity was "brilliant". The lesson was on prepositions of place, and I created a "brilliant" activity based on Pokémon--Ash and Pikachu will see a Pokémon in different scenarios (it appears for 5 seconds or so), then a box comes up with a sentence to copy into their notebooks. The preposition is a blank for them to fill in, like "It's
under the bench." Every other one says "It is …", so they can get muscle memory of It's=It is.
Her only real complaint was that there were "too many" activities. Well, she had to find something, since they came all this way. In fact, the lesson was very much a standard set up: review by singing our "In-On-Under" song, for maybe the third time, followed by a fun team-based warm-up: make a sentence from the picture before The Flash runs through and makes it disappear ("The guitar is in the box."--this also reinforces the grammar point of replacing a noun with a pronoun, as well as calling back previous vocab); then, the textbook material, about ten minutes, and finally Ash and Pikachu. Four. Four activities in a forty minute class. Doubtless, had there only been three, she would have said, "Not enough activities."--again, she had to say something. Meanwhile the Head of English Education for Gangseo District sat there twiddling his thumbs, clearly unable to comprehend spoken English.
I assume her report to the VP mentioned my "brilliant" activities and how grammar points are being reinforced without actually teaching grammar and how the students participated fully and how both my Co and I took care to help anyone who was struggling and the way our hand motions during the song are really TPR (or at least H(and)PR) and the regard we show to the students and etc.
I felt insulted and disrespected that, after more than a decade of exemplary teaching for SMOE, I was required to do a dog-and-pony-show for higher-ups to get my contract. While I still feel disrespected by the VP, it turns out that my contract offer had been sitting in my handler's inbox, but he felt in no big hurry to send it to me since it wasn't due for a couple of weeks. A few hours later, I had my contract ready to be signed. A few days later, he was no longer my "handler".
But even worse than besmirching my teaching, the VP tried to deny me six days (and 2 1/2 hours) of my vacation. I gently pointed out that one week of those days was my so-called "renewal bonus", which did not count against my standard vacation. She sent back that I had already used those days, last August. At this point, I am not happy, as you may NOT fuck with my vacation! Two more messages, a complete print-out of the reporting system, and she conceded I was correct. But what irked me about it was that we had discussed my doing an extra week of camp last summer (MovieMakers:
here) and moving my renewal vacation to January. We had discussed it face-to-face.
Then she tried to tell me I would have to use
this year's renewal vacation by this August 24, because she and the principal would be moving to new schools. Well, I was using up the last of my current regular vacation days on my trip to Cambodia (
those days expire as of August 24th), and couldn't use the renewal then--you're STILL asking me to lose a week of vacation time! With permission--always granted by every administration in my whole decade here--renewal vacation can be used until February 24th of the next year. But but … they are going to new schools, so …
Beyond absurd. I told her it's just a matter of leaving a note for the new admin team--I insisted we have the administrative assistant write down the schedule for winter camp and renewal vacation so there would be no question. Furthermore, there is an on-line reporting system called NEIS where all this information is recorded. I'm tired of her constant hassle and disrespect. But mainly, you may NOT fuck with my vacation!
In spite of these machinations, I have two days of desk-warming next week, then off to greener climes in Cambodia for 10 days hanging on Street 19/172, sipping rum mango smoothies on the beach, etc.
