General Career Reflection:( Not the required Methodology reflection on class)

I realize that the more I reflect on this blog, the easier time I’ll have at the end of the program when I have to do the final presentation and report back on the changes I have undergone through this learning process. The more reflecting I do, the more material I’ll have to draw on. I didn't reflect last week, so I’m going to dig deep this week. Ye stand forewarned.

Tom spoke of teachers in the classroom probably getting into a comfort zone within their careers, in which they believe themselves to be proficient teachers. I could easily count myself in this category, I find as the years go by, that teaching elementary level English does just keep getting easier on some levels. With every year that goes by, I gain more experience teaching different grades and adding material to digital library. If you asked me to drop a two week plan for an English winter camp on your desk nine years ago, I’d need a new change of shorts. Nowadays, I’d just email you the plan as well as  the content within 30 minutes.

However, that brings me to something else I read recently in the coursework. Am I a teacher with nine years teaching experience, or am I a teacher with one year experience who has been teaching the same thing for nine years? Tough questions if I’m going to be honest with myself. I probably only really started to take teaching seriously after I decided to marry and stay in Korea. I stopped going to work in cargo shorts and T-shirts and started wearing suits. Only four years ago did I start bringing a laptop to work, and start trying to build up a library of effective teaching material.

I have also put myself in certain situations that were not conducive to my growth as a teacher. I worked for three years at a private elementary school where we had to teach seventeen new lessons a week. That required seventeen lesson plans a week that had to be uploaded to the internet for the parents’ perusal. This workload combined with another afternoon job (30 classes a week) that ended at 8:30pm left little time for quality lesson planning (forty-seven classes a week total).

After developing heart arrhythmia last year, I now work at a public elementary school where I teach nineteen classes a week, but it’s the same two lessons for one week. This means I only have to plan two lessons a week for that morning job, as opposed to seventeen lessons like the previous job. I have found that this extra time has improved the quality of my teaching by order of magnitude.

I’ve decided to take this step further still and quit my two jobs starting next year. I will apply for a full time public school job and teach the regular twenty three classes a week instead of my current thirty-five. This will give me time to be a better teacher and also time to focus on doing an MA TESOL degree should I choose to go down that road.

With regards to classroom interactions I am going to try and move away from monologic IRF (Initiating-Response-Feedback) and go to a more teacher initiated diologic classroom discourse. This will be harder to do with my 3^rd graders as opposed to my 6^th graders, but I will continue to try and create more opportunities for student interaction.

Looking at my transcript of my uploaded video lesson I have also noticed that almost all of my F – stage (feedback) interaction with my students is evaluative. “Good job. Well done.” This cues that we are done now done talking about the subject and are moving on. I suspect I do this not only with my young learners, but my older 6^th graders as well. While I appreciate the necessity for positive reinforcement, I must try to give more communicative feedback and try to keep the students talking.

The SLA section of the STG course is challenging me by sharpening my teaching tools. I find myself having to look up lexical definitions I had forgotten or simply never knew. The video narrative, scripting and word analysis also feels like a new set of power tools for my teacher tool belt. I had used these techniques once before in Ilsan, when tutoring a university student for a foreign university interview. At the time I felt like a teacher ninja using “Audacity” to record my pupil’s voice on my laptop to produce a transcript. Now, looking back I think my approach was rather basic. By simply analyzing the student’s place and manner of articulation, I could have gone a lot deeper to help him.

We've only just started with the ICC coursework, but I suspect that too will be a positive influence on my future classroom interactions. Dr. Bennett’s Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) rings true with my experience both in Ireland and Korea. I remember moving from the stages of denial, defense and minimization. Particularly in Ireland, as I lived on an isolated farmhouse, and let my weight drop to 59kgs. I remember moving to Korea, and instead of restarting the model, just moving on to the ethnorelative stages of acceptance and adaptation. I’m not at the integration stage just yet, but I’ll probably get there. Steady as she goes…