The following piece was written for an essay contest held by EPIK, my employer here in Korea. I decided to write about classroom management, the hardest part for me of teaching in a high school.
The new English teacher in Korea faces all kinds of issues
in the classroom, from indifferent and tired students to indifferent and tired
co-teachers. As someone who had never taught before, my first year was spent just
learning how to plan effective lessons and find that elusive balance between
education and entertainment. Hey, I like to have fun as much as my students.
But one element had continued to elude me: classroom management. But, thanks to
two new policies, I have been able to more fully manage my classes and teach
more effectively.
I teach middle and high school boys in rural
Gyeongsangbuk-do. My school is academically focused and for the most part I
don't have many problems with the students. They are a lot more driven to
succeed than I ever was at their age and they consistently impress me with their
dedication and discipline—in other people's classes, at least. In many of my
classes they were undisciplined and wild, seeing it as a time to cut loose, to
let off some steam in the middle of a pressure cooker day that starts early in
the morning and ends after midnight.
I sympathize with them, I really do. I could not imagine
having to keep up the kind of academic pace they do. But I also did not fly
half way around the world to be their punching bag. Don't get me wrong. I'm not
the kind of teacher that requires absolute silence. I like a little chaos in
the classroom; it keeps things interesting. But there's a level of respect that
I expect and for the most part, it wasn't being met.
I should stress that this was only an issue in high school.
My middle school classes are largely free of these kinds of issues, for a
number of reasons. Co-teacher involvement plays a large part, I believe, and my
middle school co-teacher is pretty strict. But it's also the students
themselves. I work with these kids in after-school classes and they're
respectful and pay attention, for the most part. But they're also not under the
same kind of intense pressure that the high school students are, so there's
less of a need to go wild.
After a few particularly bad high school classes, in which
students were actually standing up and hitting each other while I was
lecturing, I decided that I needed to make some changes. I first identified what
I thought the problems were so that I could find solutions. The common factors
among the problem classes were uninvolved co-teachers and a large number of
class clowns. It was a bad ratio. Other classes might have a lot of clowns but an
involved co-teacher was there to temper their behavior. In another class, the
co-teacher might be out to lunch but the class was generally low maintenance.
Another problem, I have to admit, was myself. I had been waiting for the
co-teacher to discipline the students, or the students to work it out
themselves, but this Zen approach only enabled their behavior. I at last came
to the realization that there must always be a boss in the classroom. If it's
not the teacher, it will be the students.
My first solution to becoming the boss was to implement a three
strikes policy. Any time the class is goofing off and not listening to me, if
students are standing or walking around, if students forget that this is indeed
class time, I write an X on the board. I don't yell, I don't make a big fuss about
it, I just write it. They know what it means and will do my policing for me:
they will tell whoever is talking to be quiet. Should the class end up with
three X's on the board, the entire class is punished. So far I've only had to
punish one class and that involved everyone doing push-ups in the hall. Part of
the punishment is that it's in a public space. They are embarrassed, and
students in other classes know I'm serious about discipline.
The three strikes rule addresses the symptom, that being
unfocused students, but not the sickness, as it were. Why are the students not
motivated to pay attention in my classes? Because there's no specific academic
reason to do so. They're not tested on the material I teach and it only
marginally relates to their eventual college entrance exams. One reason the
middle school classes pay attention is because I teach from the textbook, and
the material covered is on their tests. But for high school I create my own
lessons unrelated to the material in the textbooks. Unless they have an
interest in English there's no reason for them to participate or even pay
attention.
The obvious solution would be to make my class count
academically, and this is just what I did. I approached my co-teachers and
explained the situation as I saw it, and asked if they would mind if I
contributed questions to the midterm and final exams. I had actually assumed
that they would not be interested, that they would have asked me to do it
already if they were. But to my surprise they loved the idea and even praised
me for taking the initiative.
The change in my classrooms is like night and day. Between
the three strikes rule and the test questions, the students are much more
behaved. They're focused and contribute more to the class, even the class
clowns. There's also a new and palpable level of respect towards me. I have
become a real teacher in their eyes, not just the foreigner with the fun-time
class. I feel more like a real teacher now as well, as what I say really counts
in their lives. My teaching has become more academically oriented and I find
myself explaining grammatical concepts more.
Of course, they're still teenage boys and are prone to
getting out of control. After a few weeks of paying attention, they forget. But
the occasional X on the board serves to remind them that my policy is still in
place, and that I'm serious.
As my students have responded to my needs, so must I respond
to theirs. I contributed questions to the recent midterm and they were
universally regarded as "too difficult." Even the top students had
trouble with them (and were none too pleased with me for causing their scores
to be lower than usual). This is a learning experience for me as much as for
them. I have told them that because we don't use a book in my class, they must
take notes, and study them. But I have also made a concession to them: I will
devote the last class before the test to review so they have an idea of what to
study.
Also, my head co-teacher has informed me than my questions
need to be in a format that is more like the other questions on the test, which
are reading-based. I had a hard time agreeing to this. Why should form dictate
content on a test? I don't teach a reading class so why should my questions be
reading based? But we have come to an agreement. I will create dialogues for
the test based on the lessons. The questions will be long and thus conform to
what the principal expects. I still think it's silly but I am willing to
conform to what my school requires.
