Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Sam's Classes

I suppose Alison will post a similar blog in the next few days about her classes.  I am not familiar with her schedule, so I will let her fill you in.

Our new semester started yesterday. The semesters are approximately three months long. Here is how it works.  There are three ability levels, R, E, and W.  R being the lowest, and W being the highest.  In each of these three levels they are split up three times again,(B, for beginner, I, for intermediate, and A, for advanced) so all in all there are 9 levels of students, they dont really go by age, the students take assessment tests, and the grades on those tests determine what level they are.  So, the nine levels, starting with the lowest: RB, RI, RA, EB, EI, EA, WB, WE, WA.

I am teaching 2 RB classes, 2 RI classes, and 3 RA classes.

The students schedule works one of three ways, they either come Mon, Wed, Fri,  or Tues and Thurs, or they come Mon-Fri.

Classes are 75 minutes long and run from 4:10pm - 9:25 pm, with 5 minute breaks in between each of the four periods.

The students who are MWF and TR come for 155 minutes on their respective days.  This is split between a foreign teacher(thats us) and a Korean teacher.  So 75 minutes with each of us with a 5 minute break in between.

The students who come Mon-Fri are only there for 75 minutes each day.  I only have one of those classes, so I will see these students for 75 minutes on Tuesday and Thursday, and they will see their Korean teacher for 75 minutes on MWF.

We report to work at 2:45 and work on lesson prep, which usually doesn't take too long, unless we have essays or book reports to grade.  And then we can leave at 9:45, we usually take the remaining time from when the last class ends to enter grades into the online grade book.

So my schedule goes something like this, I have three classes(out of four) on MWF, and four classes on TR.

The R levels kids that I teach have decent skills, they can understand, speak and write simple sentences with mostly simple vocabulary.  Vocabulary is the funniest thing, especially in their writing, they use a translation dictionary to find mostly adjectives for their book reports or essays, some just don't translate well.  I will start posting funny phrases in later blogs.

I suppose that is enough for now, I am sure its a lot to digest and probably a little confusing for all the readers.

P.S.  It's snowing, and it's my birthday.....technically, after the time changes its not really my birthday for another couple hours, and the funniest thing is that when it is 10:47 am on March 4th in the Central Time Zone(where I was born), it will already be March 5th here.  Not planning on celebrating too much, rumor has it that work gets everybody a cake on their birthday though.  So yall can just go out and celebrate for me.  


7 comments:

the other mom said...

Happy, Happy, Happy Birthday lil' Sammer!

Love your blogs, love your photos, Love it all! Keep it coming!

Anonymous said...

Happy Birthday, Sam! The class schedule sounds intense.

Andrew Stanton said...

Happy Birthday man! So how many hours, technically, does that add up to? Sorry I got a little lost or I would just add it up myself.

--Drew

Unknown said...

I'm confused.

Anonymous said...

Basically I am at work 35 hours week. About 26 are spent in the classroom.

Sarah Fox said...

Happy late birthday!!!

Andrew Stanton said...

ok 35 hours/week is not bad.