The kindergarten“hagwon” (private school) that I work at has a thorough curriculum. We teach language arts, phonics, creative arts, arts and crafts, theme, science, math, gym, cooking, and computer class among others. There are monthly targets for the material that needs to be covered for each class. For many of the subjects, my students (Saturn Class) have workbooks that the principal charged their parents an arm and a leg for.
When I first arrived here with zero teaching experience, having a structured curriculum was invaluable. I had to do little planning of my own. We had the books and I knew the pages that needed to be covered each class. As beneficial as this was in the beginning, the rigidity became increasingly frustrating as I became more familiar with my students and their skill level.
There have been many concepts in phonics class particularly that my students have had trouble with. For some foolish reason, I believed it was beneficial to spend additional time on these difficult topics so that my students had a chance to grasp them, even if it meant that we didn’t meet the page target for that class
Sometime in December, the (Korean) head teacher at our school approached me and said,
“Can you finish all of the books by the end of February?”
“That’s going to be very difficult,” I replied. “There is a lot of material to cover and some of the concepts are quite challenging.”
“I know, but it looks very bad if the books go home unfinished. The parents will be unsatisfied. Do you think that you could go faster?”
“I… guess so.”
After discovering how many pages still needed to be completed, the principal decided that it would be best if my kindergarten class had no more unnecessary (re: fun) classes. Arts and crafts, and cooking classes were removed from my schedule and the number of music, gym, and computer classes were significantly reduced. Needless to say, my students were not happy when they learned about the changes, especially when they discovered that their favorite classes would be replaced by phonics and language arts.
For the next two months, my students worked hard to complete their workbooks, but in February (the last month of the school year) I could tell that we still wouldn’t be able to finish them at our current pace. As ridiculous as the idea seemed to me, we needed to go faster.
On Monday morning I stood in front of my class and said,
“You guys, we have a lot of work to do in our books. We have to finish mannny pages. If we work verrry hard for the next two weeks, then I promise our last week will be verrry fun! O.K.?”
“O.K. teacher.”
I wasn’t sure if they knew what they had agreed to.
For the next two weeks we proceeded to fly through pages and pages of the workbooks. I was frustrated because I knew that my students were only retaining a tiny fraction of what we covered. They were frustrated because I was making them complete several pages of each book throughout the entire day. It wasn’t fun, but when it looked like they were ready to quit I would remind them of the promise I had made.
“You guys are excellent students. You are working sooo hard. Remember, if we get through these books, then our last week will be full of fun classes.”
During the next two weeks I failed at teaching, but we succeeded in getting through all the workbooks. The answers to each drill, problem, and question were written down with my corrections and signature on every page.
On the weekend I did a lot of brainstorming and research about exciting activities that we could do. Below is footage of the last week with my kindergarten class. They’ve worked so hard and I hope that I could make our last days together fun. I love these kids so much.
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
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