It's not all fun and games

A couple of you have asked, via e-mail, about my job. I decided to respond with a blog post since there might be others of you out there who haven't asked but are interested - and also because I'm afraid I might otherwise be creating the impression that I spend all my time in Korea rating coffee shops and relaxing at the bathhouse.

I love my job. It's loads of work, especially since this is my first semester; next fall it will be nice to revise lesson plans, assignments, rubrics, quizzes, and exams rather than creating them from scratch as I'm doing now. But my students are great, and the work is rewarding and (with the possible exception of grading/commenting on written work) really enjoyable.

The College English Program that I teach in is sort of an extension of the English Department. The latter offers courses mainly for English majors - literature mostly, plus some advanced grammar and linguistics courses. In the CEP we teach more practical - for lack of a better word - language courses. All students at SNU have to take at least one course in our program; based on their standardized test scores, they take a low-level English foundations course, an intermediate reading/writing/speaking/listening course, or an advanced course - their choice from themes such as current issues, English-speaking cultures, or drama.

I teach three sections of the intermediate class, which is the category that most students here fall into, and also two sections of advanced English reading. For the first few weeks of the reading course, students read and discussed news articles about trends in higher education in the States such as service learning and taking courses online. Right now they're reading editorials on some of the same topics and analyzing and evaluating the arguments made in them. Midterms are next week, and after that we'll change gears and start reading short stories by American authors like Hemingway and Kate Chopin. The reading course has been fun for me because I got to design it myself (there's a bit more structure in place for the intermediate courses), and also because both sections are fantastic groups of students. My intermediate students are good too, but the advanced ones are especially active in class discussions and thoughtful in their responses - and since their English level is pretty high, we can dig into more complex issues.

So, for the record, I do spend the bulk of my time here in the classroom and the office. I suppose my free-time activities probably make for more interesting blog posts, though, so I'll get back to them next time!