Safe in Seoul!

Greetings blog and netizens of the world! I’ve returned safely back to my home in Seoul with my beautiful wife! It was an awesome trip being back in my home country, but alas, time for vacation to end and time for cash flow to recommence. I haven’t been quite as diligent as I intended to be with the two classes I’m currently taking, mostly because of serious jet lag and lack of WiFi on the trip from Boston to Tokyo. Aside from that, it was an uneventful trip back, and Hyemi and I are planning to return to Japan sometime in the near future to see some sights and discover new things together. We’re thinking of going to either Fukoka, a southern coastal city, or up north and go to some bathhouses and stay at some Ryokan (traditional Japanese inn).

The last couple of days were fairly uneventful. I took an accidental 7 hour nap yesterday afternoon (thanks jet lag!) and today volunteered teaching English to underprivileged kids. I totally forgot that kids like to do things quickly, so even in my time confused brain, I shifted my strategy from the “in-depth” approach of looking at vocab / structure from many different angles, to doing a “fast fast!” approach of getting the student I was tutoring to respond to and do tasks as fast as possible. This change in style engaged the student and got him into gear! Hopefully I’ll be able to volunteer once or twice a month on Saturdays from now on.

I wasn’t really able to do any programming, but I did pick up a really interesting book called “But how do it know?”, a book explaining how computers work. So far I’ve only gotten to writing gates, where two trues equal a false, and all other combinations make a true. I’ll write about it when I finish it, but right now I think I need a nap! Cheers internet!

Second TESOL Course Complete!

Today I finished my second TESOL course offered by Arizona State University through Coursera. These classes are light, fun, and generally not all that challenging. In this module, we learned about how teaching methods have changes from the early 1920’s to present day. It was interesting, and I highlighted activities or methods I could apply to my classes while taking notes in google drive.

Let me take a moment to say how awesome google drive is. When my wife got me my new PC in Seoul, I was really stoked. It’s custom and the guys built it to my specs, 16 gigs of ram, around 4 TB of hard disk space, and a really swanky 4 gig nvidia graphics card. Also, miraculously it has an English version of Windows 7. However, joining a university, I figured I was going to have to shell out a few hundred bucks for word processing software. I did some research, and not feeling like spending more money came across a recommendation from the University of the People to try google drive. Now, instead of having to send my files around when I want to look at them, they’re all right there in the cloud, essentially having the same functionality as MS Word, but for free! Anyway, if you haven’t tried google docs in google drive, save yourself some serious headache and money and give it a go.

Getting back to teaching, so there were some really cool techniques in this course that I liked. Some of them I used in my classes already, like substitution drills and chain drills. Substitution drills are easy and super scalable. You take any sentence, remove a word or phrase from it, and have the students fill in the rest. Let’s say something like “Jimmy goes to the store to buy an apple.” You can write on the board, “__________ goes to the store to buy a/an ____________.” This is good for practice and getting kids to use the form, but sometimes you have to watch out as kids will naturally pick on other kids (in like, 75% of the cases I found). So, this could turn mean with kids saying things like “Benedict goes to the store to buy a brain.” Chain drills are fun and simple too. You do them by saying something like, “I like bananas.” the next student says “He likes bananas, and I like apples.” This can go on for a while and is a good way of figuring out who needs to work on their attention / memory skills.

Techniques I haven’t tried that I’d like to are the multiple concert approach, Total Physical Response, and script writing/acting approach. The multiple concert approach is when you read the same text, but in different ways. The first time, you read it to the beat with music in the background. The second time you read it normally twice. All the while, you have students taking notes on the dialogue or reading passage, and on the third time you have them recite the reading from their notes. This gets the students engaged and hyped up by sing-reading, and then focused by having them take notes. The Total Physical Response method is neat, and aimed at pure beginners. In it, you speak English while making gestures. For example you could say, “Hello Mom!” while waving at your imaginary parent. Then say “I jump to my home!” and jump to a picture of a house on the whiteboard. This could be fun, and I think I’ll try it next time I teach a really young group of kids, but this I can see as being really physically demanding (given you’re doing this and at the same time controlling a class of children). So we’ll see how that goes. The last one is really up my alley for more intermediate / advanced students. I can give them a situation like sending a piece of mail at the postoffice, watch a short relevant clip, and then have them write a script and preform it. This could be a great group activity.

That was really what I took away from this course, and while I learned some cool techniques, I found it somewhat less interesting to other courses I was taking. I enjoy learning about teaching and how to become a better teacher, but there was some serious competition for my longterm memory slots with the other things I do online such as CodeAcademy, checkio.org.

Planning for Teaching and Learning: Some Thoughts

Tomorrow I will have finished my second MOOC about teaching from Coursera. It was not an easy class, there was a great deal of information in a short period of time and I wish it was a half a year class, not 6 weeks. That being said, I learned a sizable amount, and thought I might elaborate here for future reflection and thought. Here’s what I learned.

One of the key concepts I learned about is that students success isn’t correlated with socio-economic standing (directly related at least). Student success comes by way of trust and understanding that teachers believe that they will be a success in life.

The “Spiral of Inquiry” is an ongoing process of looking at your assumptions about your class as to what could be improved, trying to improve it, and then coming back full circle and seeing if what you’re doing is having an impact. It almost reminds me of the joke about the programmer who after looking at the directions for washing their hair never exits the shower (wash, rinse, repeat is an infinite loop).

There are two types of mindsets that people can have, a “fixed mindset” and a “growth mindset”. A growth mindset suggests that you can improve at anything so long as you practice. A fixed mindset is the belief that everyone has an innate static intelligence level and this is reflected in academics. Basically a growth mindset looks to challenge students to achieve more whereas a fixed mindset is an excuse for not taking risks in learning so as to not get one’s ego bruised.

Students find things engaging that relate to them. Culture and habit are big influencers on how much students will be engaged in class. This actually had some relevance on my teaching strategies. Instead of just thinking about the materials in my textbooks, I’d think about their application to Korean culture. If a chapter was about making cookies, I’d also look up instructions on how to make Kimchi Jjigae.

I took this courses out of order. It’s the fifth course in Coursera’s “Foundations of Teaching for Learning” specialization. I haven’t taken any of the other courses for this track, and if they were offered in another year I’d probably pick them up. Currently I have to study for the TOPIK and between that, work, and Rice University’s “Interactive Programming in Python” course, I’m a busy guy.

Now, while this course was interesting, there are some problems I have with it. Mostly, this course made me realize how isolated I feel in my current teaching place. A core theme of this course was about working together with other teachers to better tailor the learning for the students. I am unable to do this, teachers are busy trying to maintain relationships with parents, grade an ever consuming wave of quizzes, worksheets and papers, that they have no time to meet with me. Even if they did, the language barrier and rigid structure of the academy (both curriculum and hierarchy) isn’t terribly conducive to experimenting with the spiral of inquiry method.

Even though this class made me feel a little disheartened about my current workplace, I was glad to have taken it. This is the second class I’ve completed in the MOOC world and I hope to complete many more.

Day 38 (How to Use Dragons to Control a Class)

Hello blog! It’s late, and as I have mandatory work tomorrow morning (hooray?) I decided to catch some additional zzz’s while I still could. That being said, some non-programming news and ideas. First, as you may or may not know, I teach English to elementary school kids in South Korea. It’s a fun and generally rewarding job as the kids slowly march off to proficiency in my native tongue. While generally fun, some younger kids can get out of control, which makes classes much less fun (for them and me) so I came up with a simple and somewhat thorough solution.

I split each class into two teams. One side is the “monster” team and the other side is the “hero” team. I then drew a stick figure with a sword and a monster (dragon, golem, giant smiley face). I gave the team who is traditionally noisier more HP (maybe 30 hp) and the hero significantly less HP (15 – 20 hp). The hero gets a sword though, so he can do more damage (probable enough premise for the students not to complain. After all, how could a tiny human have the same vitality as a huge dragon?)

Next I explained the premise to the students. What does the hero want to do? Defeat (slay, kill) the monster to get its treasure. What does the monster want to do? Eat the hero. If the kids are bad, don’t pay attention, speak in another language outside of English, archers pepper their character with arrows. This gets them quiet and self policing real quick. I continued with my lesson, having the kids read and answer questions. If they answered really well or better than the other team they can have their avatar do an action (“I breathe fire on the hero!”).

Yesterday, when the dragon team breathed fire on the hero, the hero team asked to cast a water shield. I obliged, but then pointed out that humans can’t breathe underwater and made them take 10 points of damage. It was a fun day and the students were speaking English, or trying their best to, which is really why I’m here.

Anyway, time to get going to work!