Substitute teaching is going pretty well. Half of the game is signing up for gigs at schools that are run well or, of course, avoiding the bad ones. It gets easier over time, and I've dipped my toes into things like P.E. and Special Education and enjoyed them greatly.
This last week before Christmas break a young elementary student threatened to kill me though. Per training, I called the Behavior department four times and they didn't even answer.
Again, avoiding the poorly run schools is part of the game.
I've been teaching for nearly 20 years now, albeit in some unconventional places and spaces, primarily 12 years teaching ESL in South Korea. These days I'm a substitute teacher at all grade levels and many subjects (including P.E.!). Anyhow, the debate over phonics or not-to-phonics kind of escaped me while I was living in South Korea, and this article (while seeming a bit biased) was fascinating to me:
"In first grade, these 'independent reading' hours were torture for my kids, who, I would eventually learn, were among the roughly half of all children who, research shows, will likely never read well without explicit instruction in sounding out words. My kids’ reactions to being expected to sit quietly each day pretending to read ran along stereotypical gender lines. My daughter silently berated herself for not being able to read; my son acted out, once attempting to push over a bookshelf."
The whole thing is downright amazing. All I have to add is that graduate school education programs struggle to justify their own existence every ten years or so by developing entirely new paradigms and approaches, even when existing ones seem to work pretty well. That's true for other departments as well, but only Ed Schools use children as guinea pigs.
Anyhow, I teach a fair amount of reading intervention classes and phonics and blending are definitely back. I guess I didn't realize they'd ever gone away.
One thing I really like about substitute teaching so far is how it gets me travelling all around the county. This week I'm off to some pretty remote places, as the majority of my teaching has been close to or inside Frederick city proper. (I live on the west side of town.)
Substitute teaching is going really well, much better than I expected. Basically, you're teaching but not having to prep or assess, i.e., grade, which are the two biggest time-sucks in education.
Am I a great big target for student harassment? Yes! But as long as the teacher has left behind a reasonably coherent lesson plan I feel confident and have thick enough skin to make it through.
I've worked with a severely autistic kid for entire days. One day I was basically a glorified study hall monitor. At the end of last week I taught biology. In one week I got two different offers to go "long term" with the schools -- this would mean a slight pay-bump, and honestly I think it's a trap. If you really like the position, that's great. But that's not nearly enough pay to get back into lesson planning and grading.
The variety is great. Not forming relationships with students is a downside but honestly not something I'm too worried about. Right now, it's a paycheck among other things and not a bad one. I finish the day somewhere between two and four p.m. and take nothing home.
This Wednesday I've got orientation for being a substitute teacher for the county. Honestly, I was trying to get away from teaching but job-wise it pays well, it opens paths towards full-time teaching, and I applied for every damn job I was qualified for since my Dad died last November. As mentioned, I was tutoring for a really terrible company for a while but it did pay a few bills.
There is a really wide range of schools around here. I've heard actual subs tell me everything from you're basically a warden to much more positive experiences actually teaching and building relationships with students.
We'll see! But it's nice to finally have something full-time lined up.
I've lined up full time employment for the first time since my Dad passed away last November. Good for me! It was tougher than I thought it would be, but Frederick, Maryland is a very competitive place in no small part because there aren't many big employers here beyond the county and city itself. (My understanding is that the largest employer in Frederick County is -- wait for it -- Frederick County.)
At one point I took a part time tutor job with Varsity Tutors. It was decent, but also very scammy. I remember asking if I should contact the parents of one student who wasn't showing up for Zoom sessions and was basically laughed at.
Long story short, I applied for a position which required a Sexual Abuse background check for any jobs in my past ten years involving minors. A good policy and not a problem!
Well, Varsity simply refused to sign off on this form. I understand that I was a contractor, but they still wouldn't lift a finger to help me out. Not to mention, if you have a situation like this there is no HR department. They will simply give you a dummy email address, and they won't respond to your issue(s) unless you are very, very lucky and/or raise enough of a stink.
I understand people want to boost their kids' chances, but you're better off finding a local company that will provide you with at the very least a phone number and email to talk to a real person.
But it's over, and soon enough I'll update you folks on my new job.
I'm applying for some part time jobs. I haven't updated (haven't had to update) my resume and materials for over a decade, so I give myself a little credit for taking some serious time to work on these things over the past few weeks.
In lieu of a longer post on how tough it is to find a job after coming back from South Korea, something that so many people droned on about when I lived in Daegu, I just have to say that, well, you get back what you put in. For starters, yes, not having a network sucks but then again, I'm living in a place where I literally know nobody except my Dad and his immediate neighbors. A good network probably wouldn't be that much help to me right now due to simple geography. Next, and this was my feeling back in Korea, you're going to develop as much or as little as a professional as you want to no matter where you live. Believe me, I'm not a diligent self-starter by any means, but during my 12 years abroad I managed to learn some of the language, co-publish a scholarly article, edited an ESL text by a professor at my college, and let my boss know that I'd be happy to help him edit (or write) things for the school as needed. I also developed, or created from nothing, a decent set of teaching materials that I might end up using again.
The point being, I'm not sure why teaching English abroad is seen as a professional black hole by so many folks. It certainly doesn't qualify me for doing brain surgery, but over the years I feel like I did a reasonable job at self-improvement and, more bluntly, getting worthwhile stuff onto my resume. And it seems like my secondary cultural experiences don't hurt -- if anything, maybe I stand out a bit.
It's a process of course, and we'll see how it goes. I've applied for both classroom teaching jobs and more education-adjacent positions. Putting my cover letter together I never felt weakened or at a loss for explaining why a decade in Korea makes me a stronger candidate than I was before I left.
I should have worked harder on my Korean, definitely. But it was nice to hear from some of my former bosses that they'd be more than happy to give me positive recommendations. My resume has a larger "narrative" that I can handle teaching ESL or English composition, and that I had a fairly productive last decade. I'm not sure what more ESL folks are expecting from work history, either in Korea or in some mythical "perfect" job back here in America.
"A Green Beret trained in Modern Standard Arabic and deployed to Iraq isn’t going to have many fluent conversations with his counterparts who speak an Iraqi dialect. But he can exchange simple pleasantries, ask about his counterpart’s family, and understand basic military terminology — all while getting a laugh out his new Iraqi friends who might describe his school-taught Modern Standard dialect as 'fancy Arabic.'
Once it’s accepted that in most cases the purpose of language training isn’t to achieve fluency, it allows standards to be set that are more realistic for the missions expected from today’s Green Berets. The Interagency Language Roundtable scoring scale notes that at a 1+ rating, speakers '[c]an initiate and maintain predictable face-to-face conversations and satisfy limited social demands.' Meanwhile, listeners demonstrate '[s]ufficient comprehension to understand short conversations about all survival needs and limited social demands.' This level of speaking and listening is more than enough for Green Berets to converse with a partner force that speaks the same language, get across basic ideas, and potentially work around a situation where an interpreter or English-speaking member of the partner force isn’t available."
There's a lot more going on in the article that's worth looking at.
I also appreciate an educational model where perfection isn't the goal, but basic communication is. Maybe it's the military's version of "ELF," or "English as Lingua Franca."
I never did take to K-pop. Korean hip-hop, however, is the balls. The good stuff, at least.
I'm in my office at lovely Daegu Health College for the last time today, taking care of some stuff. It's actually freezing outside, but it's supposed to warm up a bit this weekend. I'm going home to do some more cleaning and packing (haven't started the latter, to be honest), and tomorrow morning I'll get a COVID test (i.e., the "brain Q-tip"). I'll head up to Incheon Airport on Monday.
This is easily the best job I've ever had, and I realize I was very lucky in finding a boss in Korea who was for the most part both supportive and flexible, and willing to let me do my thing as long as the students (both college and adult) were happy. For the most part, they were.
I'll get to Bellingham Monday and enter a new world of caring full-time for my dad. I wouldn't say I'm either optimistic or pessimistic about it -- just ready to make sure his needs (at almost 92) are being met. He's stubborn and fiercely independent though, so what will be tough is walking the line between taking care of him as needed, but not babying him or taking away his sense of power or volition. His house, his rules, as they say.
I'm looking forward to the mild weather, the beautiful mountain and forest views, and air that is as fresh as fresh gets. As I close out my to-do list here, I've got a new one for Bellingham as well, but it's not nearly as extensive. The goal is to adjust and continue from there. I'll be taking a long walk every morning after coffee with my dad, and probably one in the afternoon as well when he takes a nap.
My dad is scheduled for a vaccine, but not until late March (this is where I mention he's a die-hard Trump supporter). I'm guessing at best I'll get mine in summer at earliest. Hell, that could be optimistic.
And from there? Nobody knows what happens next, other than I'll be living in a nice house in the quietest of neighborhoods five minutes from the border of Canada.
I'm pretty sure I'll read a lot of books.
As for Daegu, I hope this wretched virus gets handled as soon as it's possible. I want people wandering around eating and drinking and laughing downtown again. I want the undergraduates back, in person of course, studying hard and goofing off all at the same time. I want my local movie theater to stay in business if it can. I want the local restaurants and coffee shops of Chilgok / Northern Daegu to make as much money as possible. I want to see Samsung Lions Park filled with people cheering and drinking beer and eating fried chicken at yet another spring or summer ballgame.
Samsung usually loses. I don't care. True fans know winning is only ever a part of it all.
At the end of every semester our students do mandatory teacher performance surveys.
My boss came in today before our weekly lunch and asked me, how is it possible that my scores were so high? (In absolute terms, and definitely in comparison to his scores and my foreigner co-worker's.)
What I actually said -- "I put a lot of effort into our first semester of online teaching."
What I wanted to say -- "Unlike you and foreigner co, I didn't half-ass this stuff. I supplemented videos with plenty of study materials, including very detailed midterm and final guides. I encouraged students to call or e-mail if they had questions. I tried to make students feel as comfortable as possible in very strange and new circumstances."
I'm unexpectedly salty about all of this today. We're being told to re-record videos on exactly the same material. Even though I spent hours scripting and planning mine, unlike two other people I know.
No good deed goes unpunished I guess. As lazy as I can be sometimes, when I do commit to something I try to make sure I've got it right the first time.
This is Korea though, and the country would simply fall apart without mandatory levels of meaningless busy-work.
My adult classes just got pushed back two weeks into mid-September.
Daegu has been thankfully, relatively, quiet on the corona front. But Seoul is seeing a boost and we get the knock-on cautionary effect down here.
As a side note, I think what I'm craving more than anything these days in the face of open fascism in America, a pandemic, Bible-level hurricanes, and the continued destruction of black bodies by the police state, is just some damn normalcy. A day, just a single day where I wake up and go to bed with no unpleasant surprises, no violence or disruption unto anything or anybody.
So no surprise here -- English courses, being non-major selections, will be online again for this fall semester. Half of my school's major courses are planning on coming back for in-person teaching.
You may have heard of a "second wave" of coronavirus hitting Korea, but this has mostly been limited to the Seoul and greater Seoul area, so fingers crossed, maybe this is the semester where we start the slow trudge back to normality.
Then again, flu season is now only a few months away. (Nelson Muntz laugh.)
Next week I'll find out if I'll be teaching a second semester online, or if we'll go back to in-person classes. A week ago I'd have told you it's a 50-50 proposition. As of now, I'm almost certain we'll be doing distance learning again. To wit:
"Korea added 197 new cases of the coronavirus Sunday, down from 279 cases the day before, as a cluster at a politically controversial church in Seoul continues to grow — and spread across the nation.
The vast majority of the new infections were reported in Seoul, 89 cases, and Gyeonggi, 67 cases.
By Monday noon, the cluster from Sarang Jeil Church in Seongbuk District, central Seoul, a Presbyterian church with some 4,000 adherents, reached 319 related cases, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) announced.
That’s 70 additional cases from 24 hours earlier."
The United States does not have a monopoly on religious ignorance.
I just taught my last adult class of the semester and handed in my final (hardcopy) grades for my college classes.
I have no right to complain. I went from teaching five college classes to one, basically, via video recording. In my defense, I did have to learn two new programs from scratch (one for distance learning, one for distance evaluation) with little to no help from my boss. I think I also mentioned some drama over the "we won't have a grading curve this semester but then again we will" situation.
But it's over. And it's strange to think I'll be in Korea for a full August for the first time in over a decade.
I just got some new books though, so I guess vacation is off to a decent enough start.
I'm in my office for the next few days basically waiting for students to call me if they have a complaint about their final grade. (Those were entered into the school computer system last week.)
It's a strange custom, no doubt, and it doesn't help that with distance learning we basically went up to August with our semester schedule.
It's hot and humid, grossly so.
I'm reading articles about how America probably won't go "back to normal" until 2022 due to Cheeto Hitler's utter incompetence.
In a best-case scenario where Joe Biden wins with enough down-ticket momentum in the House and Senate to make it impossible for Trump to start a literal coup headed by Barr, he still inherits a pandemic and a historically shitty economy.
To recap, my five sections were done entirely online this past semester. And from the beginning my boss has stressed that our (online) quizzes, midterm, and final should be relatively easy. This is in no small part because across Korea, students and parents are complaining about paying full tuition for largely online courses.
So I came in to the office Thursday, only for my boss to complain that I was about to give too many As.
He's usually a good egg, but I'm spending a happy weekend not thinking about him at all.
As for next semester, it's 50-50 whether or not students return. I'm guessing we'll have some come back, but continue online for non-essential things like, oh I don't know, English. (There is no English major available at my school, and I'm fine with that.)
Suffice it to say, if Korea isn't going back to 100% this September there's no way the US or UK should. They will of course due to politics, and within a week major classroom outbreaks will ensue.
While my college classes have been put off for the entirely of the spring semester (first semester in South Korea) tonight I'm teaching a handful of adult students. I haven't done any in-classroom teaching since last January. Anyhow, we're doing coronavirus vocabulary. Fascinating! Here's my list:
Coronavirus Vocabulary
Virus
Coronavirus (crown virus)
Quarantine
Symptom (n)
Symptomatic / Asymptomatic (adj)
Lockdown
Social Distancing
Epidemic
"Flattening the curve"
Fever / Take temperature
Immunity / Herd Immunity
Patient Zero
"Work from Home"
Super-spreader
Other than "Eating whole pints of Ben and Jerry's in my boxer shorts at 3 a.m." what did I miss?
I am not an optimist by nature, but in a world clogged with so much shit and misery it seems to me that some things -- actually, many things -- are going to have to shift, transform, or simply disappear in global wake of Covid-19.
So here's your ray of sunshine for today -- California (and it's enormous public university system) is getting rid of the SAT (American college entrance exam).
"Critics of the standardized tests have long argued they disadvantage students of color and those from low-income families because test questions often contain inherent bias that more privileged children are better equipped to answer. Wealthier students are also more likely to have access to expensive prep courses that help boost their scores, which many students can’t afford.
The UC’s governing body, the Board of Regents, voted 23-0 Thursday to approve a proposal by the UC president, Janet Napolitano, that phases the tests out over five years, at which point the UC aims to have developed its own test.
The regents met in a teleconference that lasted several hours Thursday, with expert presentations and lengthy debates that echoed a national conversation about whether the tests discriminate against disadvantaged students or help admissions offices find the most qualified applicants.
'I think this is an incredible step in the right direction,' said the Regents chairman, John Perez."
Yes, the SAT is racist. Rich folks can send their kids to prep courses, and poor folks can't. And those courses are primarily how to game the test -- more specifically, when should you guess and when should you leave an answer blank? This alone can significantly increase your score, and it has nothing to do with an improved command of vocabulary or math.
Next, let's kill the GRE (graduate school entrance exam). It's absurd to think an MA or PhD program can't judge your potential based off of a 20 page writing sample and two letters from your college professors.
