Amanda Takes Off...

My sixth grade students have no idea what to make of me.

I am always supposed to have a coteacher in the room, but the sixth grade coteacher is on a business trip. Fine with me. In two days worth of classes, I've started to make them understand what I want. And since my teaching was sort of wacky by American standards, you know it's wacky by Korean standards.

(I see third and fourth graders once a week, fifth and sixth graders twice a week. I have four classes each of 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade and five classes of 6th graders. I have approximately 35 people per class and I don't know any of their names. Neither do my coteachers. I didn't meet the 3rd graders this week because of court.)

The students, much like my American students, think I'm crazy.

I make them stand up not to answer questions (which they already do) but to pit the standing half of the class against the sitting half of the class in talking activities.

When they look bored, instead of screaming at them, I make them stand up and get moving.

Today I made the kids who arrived late stand in the front of the room and start talking first.

I wore Spiderman socks just for the confused sixth grader.

During our chanting exercise today, I was dancing around the room, bobbing my head, and making them move their heads in time, too. Four girls in the last class couldn't stop giggling at me. But they were singing the song.

In each class I had a contest about the chanting between the boys and the girls. The boys won 4 classes out of 5 and got to leave the classroom first.

I take away their Rubik's cubes (exceedingly popular right now) and then play with them while teaching. "How much is this?" "A million dollars." "It's too expensive!"

I tell them to keep their books closed when they've been trained to open them immediately (they get too distracted with them open!).

I make the whole class hold their arms above their heads so that they don't start writing while I'm talking.

I walked with one kid back to his main teacher and asked her in Korean if he talks so much in her class. He said, "Oh! Amanda! You speak Korean!" I said in Korean, "No, I don't speak Korean."

I make them say at least one sentence before leaving the room (today it was "tell me what you're doing this weekend" or look at these two dice and tell me if you'd buy the item for that price or if it's "too expensive!"). One group of boys was slick and after one said, "I'm playing soccer" the other 16 yelled out at once "I'm playing soccer!" I let them go with that and a yell down the hallways, "Good one, boys!"

I make them use cute voices when repeating the DVD. Deep voices for the men, high voices for the women, voices with some sort of beat for the musical parts.

I answer their messages on my Cyworld page.

To me the, though, the oddest thing is that when I dip down to touch them like I did my American students—to shoulder hug them or to touch their backs instead of saying "I see what you're doing and you need to stop" or to whisper in their ear—or when I hold my hand up for a high five, they flinch.

Some of my students in America flinched, but every last one of them flinches here.

Hitting students in the classroom is allowed here. I refuse to do it, but yesterday when one kid was choking another to the point that he looked like he was going to faint, I wasn't afraid to put some muscle into breaking them up.

I have to say, it is much easier to control a class of 35 kids for one 40 minute period than a class of 22 kids all day like I had to in my American classes. It's easier to keep the enthusiasm level up, too, with each new batch of kids, which is good since I'm teaching only five different lessons a week during the regular day. (In other words, today I taught the same lesson five times in a row.)

And dang, I am digging these sixth graders.