Nobody is perfect. I often try to find ways to improve myself and my teaching is one thing I am trying to improve. I take the profession seriously and in order to stay employed for the future professional career is necessary in an age when the Native Speaker teacher is no longer the only job requirement and is rapidly facing competition from very fluent non-native speakers.
Getting more serious about teaching and my lesson planning I ran into a problem. To develop a lesson and improve your teaching leaves less time for thinking of creative topics. I have a problem with my middle school classes that is not a unique situation in Korea. Many of them are not interested in interest. I say 50 percent do not care enough to participate. They can be a distraction to the other boys. The problem I think has to do with a lack of interesting topics and themes in the textbook. But to structure a lesson is a very serious job at times, and it an take up time necessary to create an exciting lesson to take time to link the lessons and teaching vocabulary.
My solution to this problem was to buy some good course book to use as a guideline when making lessons. Saturday I stopped at the YBM bookstore at Jonggak on the way to a date with my wife. Getting to the English section I was overwhelmed by the selections of books. There were too dense bookshelves. I had set aside 15 minutes to find a book, but I needed much more time. And I was hungry.This can be a problem when you are vegan and extra time is needed.
So I left to get something to eat and then met my wife in Hongdae. I had forgotten about getting a book after settling down to a meal and a few drinks. On the way home I remembered that I needed a book.
I hesitated to break a plan I made with my wife to spend part of the day in bed watching an English costume drama we really like. However, if didn't do it I knew I would feel bad about it. So I talked to my wife about how I didn't finish the task I went into Seoul for yesterday. How, when I went to look at textbooks I was completely overwhelmed with the selection and needed more time to sort through it all. She was cool about it. She's the best.
So I backtracked into Seoul. Before getting back on a metro I walked to Starbucks. I did this so I could get into a coffee shop and do some research on textbooks. This I did to narrow down my options so I could avoid the same overwhelmed feeling I had the day before. I narrowed down my selection and got some ideas of what was on offer.
Limiting my focus onto textbooks only would have sped up my time, but I decided I should also look for theory books as well. After spending some time sipping my Starbucks latte and searching I had a list of textbooks and activity books.
I got back to YBM to spend half an hour to look at books. The whole task took me an hour. The reason was that none of the textbooks satisfied me. They seemed to put too much weight on one methodology. Either it was skill based learning, or vocabulary, grammar, or conversation. Worst is that that there didn't seem to be a lot of speaking activities in these books. The textbooks that were mixed put them all together in a lesson so that it was stretched thin. Most were developed for adults and the language was too advanced. Why with all the money spent on education are there so few textbook resources for ESL teachers in Korea?
I did find 6 good books after a half an hour, that I really could all buys. So after some hard decisions, I picked two books randomly from my selection of six. I bought Breakthrough English and Let's Laugh Together. The first offered me some basic vocab based topics that will offer a framework that can be adapted to an exciting topic. The second book was a book of warm ups with a simple dialogue with a punchline. The book was made for adult and some topics be a little racy but most work well.
Overall, not a bad outing.
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