Future Projects

Posted by Andrew | Filed under Living in Korea

As the time approaches, yet again, to transition between one work location and another, and I am caught temporarily in the limbo in between, my thoughts return to how my spare time should be occupied, given that in the "new" old location there are few amenities and not often anyone to talk with . . . a person with an active mind and spare time needs to be occupied with more than one project to fill the solitary winter nights, and there is a particular possibility which needs some thought.

One thing really needs to be said at the outset: When I first arrived here in July 2003, my mind was completely empty, I mean I had absolutely no real idea what to expect here apart from what I had read in a couple of books (1) about Korean culture. And as I discovered later, reading around the subject and mainly online, this is by no means untypical of foreigners who land upon these shores – even those who do so either partly or entirely by design. The important point, perhaps, is how one can maintain the kind of openness of mind down through the years which one experiences upon arrival? In an occupation like foreign language teaching, one needs constantly to be open to new ideas.

Korea actually presented itself to me as very fresh, particularly the noises which one would hear, which were usually electronic, such as voice announcements and accompanying effects on the public transport; the weather was hot, but not as hot as it had been in northern Taiwan previously (where the daytime temperature, the day I flew out, was forty-two degrees Celsius in the shade). And I had the temporary benefit of not having brought a huge amount of luggage with me, having sequentially sent boxes of books and other materials to myself at the new address in Changwon by surface mail, and which arrived in dribs and drabs over the course of the following three months or so. It was thus that I slowly populated my original small and sparsely-equipped apartment, surrounding the little bathroom in an L-shape, with the sundry literary treasures of teaching, languages and cultures. Little did I realise at the time that I was to inhabit that meagre space for almost five years!

At that point, the possibility of really being much more than a temporary fixture myself was not apparent. It was only when my boss of the time, Mr. Lee, asked me whether I would like to stay on for a second year that the idea of being able to get back online, and that the process of "tooling up" for more than being just some kind of average or even mediocre migratory worker finally began to bear fruit. And make no mistake: my previous experience of writing a book (2) (and several articles (3)) in the UK would have been impossible without computers. Since that moment, therefore, I have always been online and always maintained my systems. They are my indispensable and irreplaceable tools.

All of these thoughts, and many of the memories which attend them, return to me now as I ponder the new contract. Having worked in Yangsan before, both the situation and the geography are already intimately familiar; there should be absolutely no problems there, except . . . occupying oneself during non-working hours. And this is a big deal, because one thing you do not want to have is a lack of inspiration. Ideas and methods which you stumble onto by accident can later morph into lesson plans and materials which may have great repetitive potential, which is to say, ideas which you can re-use many times – and these are great time-savers. Mundane things like routine and mind-numbing Korean TV shows, or a podcast you heard the other day, or whatever, may suddenly cause a new idea to spring into existence before your very eyes. Usually, when starting a new job, the reward of the initial effort is that further down the line, repetition of that effort is prevented because the essentials were in place long before. There is an important lesson in this!

In essence, one should use even spare time productively (but not with the intention of inducing unnecessary stress within oneself) by setting up a number of tasks or projects, the completion of which renders a constant positive feeling of progress and satisfaction therefrom. This is especially true in a location in which non-domestic entertainments are lacking, as is often the case in the boonies anywhere you go, and believe me, I've been in a few . . . On a daily basis, this would be minor work taken home due to lack of other time or resources at the workplace (for example, simple flashcards, presentation files or lesson plans) which would not occupy more than one or two hours of otherwise spare time. But one important point here is that as much work should be completed before leaving the actual "workplace" as possible – and the aim of most work-related tasks undertaken at home should be to set up work for completion when back in the office. One might even suggest that the completion of these "little tasks" puts the capper on the whole day and increases relaxation psychologically, as well as providing oneself with beneficial feedback.

In the medium- to long-term outlook, more serious projects might be devoting time to a blog (like this one!) or even writing books. Equipment maintenance, for the more able, is quite important (I maintain – at the moment – two Mageia Linux boxen, one sharing its main drive with XP) and you have to make time for reading or other input of information – ideas are important in teaching. There's little point in accumulating a small library of books, from several countries, unless you intend to make use of them. It also means that recording your ideas in some form, for future reference, is also important.

One might add to this the commitment to self-improvement by undertaking extra courses. I completed two minor TEFL certificates before leaving Blighty, but my third one (which is serious because it leads to actual "official" certification as a teacher) is stalled and needs to be revived and completed as soon as . . . all of these things in addition to your natural requirements to get out and shop and meet people, and see new places. Not to mention (in this case) improving your spoken Korean!

Over and above all of the other considerations, however, rears the spectre of an unknown future, and the provision(s) which need to be made for it. Now, for a long time, the idea has been with me that the conventional "career path" of slaving away for about forty-five years and then having nothing at the end (in the sense not of finances, but rather an occupation with which to engage one's time) is patently ridiculous. Plenty of people make money in this life without actually having a "day job" at all, but this is something which is rarely discussed, to such an extreme extent that whenever such an idea is broached, it is simply laughed out of the conversation, an idea which others are somehow magically able to do, but not people such as Oneself. I intend to change this, step by step.

As far as projects go, the idea has occurred to me that I could sit down with all of my information and equipment and put all of my experience and opinions about being a foreign English teacher here together in a single volume. Recently I came across references to the use of Cuisenaire Rods – originally invented by a Belgian mathematics teacher, and later co-opted into English teaching – which should be a good thing, play-wise . . . if I can persuade the school to pay for them – assuming they don't have them already . . . but one common problem is that schools tend to have lots of materials which are not used, or not combined in useful ways, or just simply ignored and left to gather dust.

I'll never forget the Percharter American School in I-Lan, Taiwan . . . my first teaching job . . . from which (what a surprise!) I was fired after less than a week . . . the teacher's office was stuffed all around with framed pictures and other materials, so there was almost no room for maneouvring (like, say, sitting down . . .). Schools are often willing to spend a lot of money on items of dubious utility, and for which the teachers then seem unable to find uses. Better, surely, to have less and use it more?

The same seems to apply to all those books you buy . . . which seem like such a good idea when you first see them in the bookshop. One of these (actually a quite well-known EFL book) was written by a guy who spent years teaching English in Japan, and in fact has a whole section at the end containing a hundred games he says I could play in my lessons. But I have always looked at them somewhat askance because – in a classroom unattended by a Korean teacher – explaining how to play the game can literally lose you the whole lesson. By the time the kids understand, the lesson is over, and yes, this really has happened in the past.

Another drawback of many textbooks seems to be that they are geared to specific teaching environments, due to the experience (or the limitations thereof) of the writers. So while a book written by (for example) a UK primary school teacher probably has a lot of useful advice and ideas, in the Korean hagwon context, those ideas have limited usefulness due primarily to different materials and methods. Also, many assumptions are really based in the culture of a different country (the country of the author), and may simply either not apply or not even form part of the psychological or educational landscape here. So there is a duty placed upon oneself to regard these writings as only opinions and suggestions from people whose experiences and values, at best, interdigitate only marginally with your own. Accept, modify and adapt only those ideas which fit into your own situation.

The fact of the matter is that despite a "playing field" which should be relatively uniform between institutions (elementary schools, in this case), any two given schools usually turn out to be as different as chalk and cheese, because they are essentially an agglomeration of the ingrained attitudes and practices of the participants, as well as a more "localised" culture unique to that one place. As a result of this, I have often wondered whether, instead of trying to provide the illusion of inventiveness and "newness" all the time, teachers should focus more on a simpler "core" of activities. There has always seemed to me to be a fetish for "games" as a means to reduce the affective filters of the students, to such an extent that the lesson may be all about "games" rather than "learning". This is a pernicious trend. It weakens the discipline of the classroom by conditioning the students' minds to expect rewards which may not be deserved, as games in the classroom are usually perceived as a "reward".

At the same time, I have always had this notion of a "democratic classroom" at the back of my mind – one where the students' affective filters are kept low by a combination of familiarity and enjoyment – activities they like to repeat, with just enough variety to stave off boredom for the duration of the lesson. Again, such an idea shows the importance of recording the proceedings as they happen, as the failures can be more revealing than the successes.

If this project should actually take off, perhaps I would do well to remember my own thinking when I was writing my first book, Rapid Spot Tests for Metals, Alloys and Coatings. Way back in the year 2000, when my editor finally agreed that I could do a book rather than more articles (I had recently finished the two-parter about ion selective electrodes and was rather tired with that kind of thing), I resolved that the book ought to have extensive references, but should ideally be self-referential, i.e. that the reader could go to other books if necessary, but for purely practical reasons, all of the necessary information should be in the book so people could use it on the spot.

As part of their learning process with regard to the wider application of the tests given in the book, they would have to experiment and find some things out the hard way. After all, a good teacher should be someone who saves the student all the mistakes that they made when they themselves were younger – or so one would think. But the extension of the ideas therein relies upon many factors; in the same way that no two schools or classrooms are ever the same, similarly no two applications of things like chemical tests are one hundred per cent. similar. Without some thought as to how the simple analytical methods could be adapted to suit the reader's particular circumstances, their usefulness would be limited; the only trouble being that sometimes, finding the most suitable or useful adaptation is the major problem.

So this is the real caveat when approaching the idea of writing a text like this: the writer lives in a world of unique experiences, unique to them and not shared with their audience, members of whom might even disagree violently with suggestions and opinions which the writers themselves would consider routine, mundane or even trivial. Far better, perhaps, for the writer(s) to suggest something and then state why they thought it was useful, or maybe instances in which it might be more or less useful, and how it might be adapted. That aforementioned book had a hundred suggested games and activities, but a careful review of their (Japanese student-oriented) contents and methods convinced me that no more than six could possibly be used at any time in my own (Korean student-oriented) classrooms. It really can be that serious!

As a corollary, we might recall that very often, materials used in language classrooms are often actually mash-ups of useful sections of several different texts or other books, and for precisely the same reason: no author can seriously be expected to foresee all possible permutations of a particular language item's potential teaching applications, and the teacher at the other end often has no choice but to cut-and-paste to create something more immediately useful (or to put it more accurately, perhaps, less immediately useless), and at its core, I suppose my desire is to create something which can simply be picked up and run with into a lesson which then proves to be more of a success than a failure; it's a numbers game, really. But as long as you make a habit of taking sufficient notes at the time to function as a record of your successes as well as your failures, hopefully future results will be dominated by the former rather than the latter.

The lesson to take away from all of the foregoing, however, is simply this: Without a plan, you drift aimlessly. But this new job will be the eighth in Korea, for me, in ten years. I have the advantage of familiarity with the place I am going to because I have been there before, so the transition will be less stressful, and I am arriving there with some kind of a plan, not just for working hours but also for my free time. With projects already arranged, this time, there will be no excuse.

Andrew ^_^

References:

(1) a: Vegdahl Hur, Sonja and Vegdahl Hur, Ben: Culture Shock! Korea: A Guide to Customs and Etiquette. Kuperard, London (1993). ISBN 1-85733-041-2. b: Kohls, Robert L.: Learning to Think Korean: A Guide to Living and Working in Korea. Intercultural Press, Inc., Yarmouth, USA (2001).

(2) Holmes, Andrew: Rapid Spot Testing of Metals, Alloys and Coatings. Finishing Publications Ltd., Stevenage, England (2002). ISBN 0-904477-25-8.

(3)a: Holmes, Andrew (1999): More Spot Tests for the Metal Finisher. Metal Finishing (New York) 97:10, 10-15 (later translated and printed in Galvanotechnik in Germany). b: Holmes, Andrew (2000): A practical introduction to ion selective electrodes – part I: Theory. Metal Finishing (New York) 98:10, 18-23. c: Holmes, Andrew (2000): A practical introduction to ion selective electrodes – part I: Theory. Metal Finishing (New York) 98:11, 38-45.

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Permalink | September 14th, 2012

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