Soongsil first semester

My first semester at Soongsil University has just ended. Here are a few pictures of me and my students. The smaller, older group are graduate students preparing to become ESL teachers too. We had a little celebration in class. I taught them English conversation, which was a breeze, except that they had very different levels of English fluency, which tends to slow things down a bit. And one of the students (the taller of the two men) is a Christian pastor. In itself, that's neither here nor there but he tended to act as if he were in the pulpit during class time (not by preaching, but by dominating the conversation, which was unfortunate as he wasn't as good an English speaker as he thought).

The younger group, of course, are undergraduates. They took my practical writing course and we went out to eat and drink after their final exam. The writing course was more challenging than the conversation one because it was too big--one class had 34 students, the other was over 40. I felt kind of bad that I couldn't give more individualized attention or tailor lessons to all of the levels (there was a huge disparity in English fluency among the students, as some had lived in English-speaking countries for years and others had trouble formulating a correct sentence). This was my first time teaching classes this size (in the US as well as Korea) and I've resolved to make it easier on myself next semester by assigning less homework and writing shorter exams! Even so, I enjoyed working with young people; they have a lot of energy and enthusiasm (except for those sleeping in the back of the room, one of whom expressed surprise when I gave him a low grade. What's up with that?)