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ngaijihang
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Name: Jihang
Birthday: 11/17/1984
Gender: Male
Expertise: Silence via nonsense; confessions.
Occupation: English Driller.
Industry: Education.
Message: message me
Member Since:
9/6/2006
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| Feeling the NudgeI seem to have out-maneuvered myself: Despite recently wanting to continue enjoying all the freedoms and opportunities I steadily have going on here in Taipei, my planning has finally caught up to me and is pressuring me towards Seoul. I have about two weeks to decide whether Seoul is a set deal, after which I will likely need to get ready for my next great big move.
I never did think that I moved a lot: where others often said that they feel like they lost themselves somewhere in each move, I've only now begun to feel that pain. Up until this point, my roots were fairly stable in a single nuclear unit. Now, though, I apparently qualify as a nomad. | | |
| July 31, 2007You want so bad [sic] to fit in regardless of where or with who [sic]. Life really doesn't work that way; the best thing to do is just focus on yourself and figure out what you want to do......career.....future.....etc. The whole relationship thing will fall into place when you least expect it. - Mother
I need this -- I really don't know what I miss right now.
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| FamilyDisorganized entry. Please disregard lack of transitions.
It continues to be a little hard for me to realize that I'm more "grown up" now. For one, I met up with a friend from elementary/middle/high school who was visiting the island from DC, and our conversation touched upon how people's ability to just chat really changes. (I had referenced a time when I had to have lunch with two college freshmen.) More importantly, though, I'm watching my family change. My sister is proudly interning at Dreamworks in the LA area, which is simply an amazing thing to gloat about. Sadly, though, my cousin continues to keep "I don't want to work" as his core mantra for finding a job. Yes, he's not doing all that well. Apparently he did a stint as a doorman at a hotel. After about two months, he wanted to get a gig with a higher pay, so requested the hiring company to place him somewhere else. Unfortunately, he ended up hating the second gig, and so decided to quit the whole thing. His latest idea? Get an Associate's to become a Radiography Technician. T___________T Talk about a lack of direction.
Otherwise, I've also come under a wave of guilt as I've slowly begun to realize how lonely my mom must feel. It's a big emotional process to have the chicks leave the nest, and I increasingly feel that I ought to call home more.
I dunno, just events in general. I wonder how odd it must have been for my mom to grow up and see her siblings have their own lives. I remember how she mentioned that she was never really close to one of my uncles until they had their separate lives, and it always struck me as incredibly odd. And yet, I think that's what's happening with my sister and me. I'm at more of a point where I feel much more obligated to her, as opposed to just assuming her presence in my life, especially as I've come to realize that, well, she isn't just a sister in her life. | | |
| Educating SecondBriefly.
Taught the all-girl class yesterday.
I was at the front of the room reviewing some grammar point.
At the corner of my eye I noticed something along the wall next to the whiteboard.
I turned to look and it was an F'ING ROACH!
Omg, I fucking hate these huge things, I literally FREAKED.
All the girls were a bit shocked by the roach, but more so at my horrified reaction.
I ran out of the room and got one of the office worker people to help me get rid of the roach.
(He just grabbed it with his bare hand and left.)
All my students started laughing at me, saying, "You're such a girl!!!!"
I immediately retorted: "Is it bad to be a girl?!?!!?"
They were slightly taken aback.
One girl tried to rationalize it: "But, you're a boy, and you're acting like a woman."
And back: "Are boys better than girls?!?!?!"
"No ...."
Point made. | | |
| Teaching and Other NewsBack in March I applied to work for the Princeton Review. My motive was mostly a financial decision: I wanted to make more money, I wanted to lower my commute expenses because I could just walk to their office, and I wanted to expand my job training in case I need to teach again in the future (given the grad school aspirations). Implicitly, I also wanted to make my life easier; I figured that teaching the SATs as I remembered them would just be teaching how to answer questions and how to read.
Dead wrong. I went into the interview and quickly learned that I would have to teach and grade essays like crazy. (I hadn't thought through how the SAT format has changed since I took it to require essay writing.) Furthermore, I would likely have to give up learning Chinese throughout my stay there because of the hours I would likely have to teach. In the middle of the interview I instantly gave up: it didn't match the lifestyle change I wanted for my last few months in Taipei.
Nonetheless, I learned several things from that interview: (1) how to give a poor teaching demo; and (2) the kinds of questions I would have to answer in a teaching interview. The first was immediately obvious to me, but the second one kept ringing in my head. They had asked me how I taught grammar, to which I had a vague answer but really couldn't think beyond drilling and giving multiple examples; they also asked me a question that stumped me: How do you teach essay writing?
Ever since I started teaching classes at my cram school that required essay writing, I always complained that I didn't know how to teach it. When I was trained, I was told to simply give a topic, maybe detail on the whiteboard what I expected or even write an off-hand example, and then wait to see the result which I would then edit. Of the teachers at my school, I think I was the only one that actually wrote back to my students: I asked them why they would mention something, I asked for more details, and I told them why I rearranged the order of their sentences or paragraphs. That was, however, when I actually liked my students and before I got thrown into several new classes where I just went to status quo: Give topic, wait, and edit grammar with the occasional line of question marks to indicate that I'm confused.
Honestly, for a while I absolutely abhorred having to be responsible for classes involving essays and so I outrightly told my boss that I never wanted to teach the upper-level classes ever again. Unfortunately, the load of upper-level classes fell onto the other foreign teachers' shoulders such that I was the only one who did not teach them AND I was the most senior foreign teacher; this was to the point where the most recent teacher had to begin his training with an upper-level class -- and as time has proven, he's also the least competent of the bunch of us (to put it nicely). Sooner or later, I expected, I would have to take an upper-level class again -- and the announcement came right around that awful Princeton Review interview.
I'd been expecting it because I was the only teacher to have Friday evenings free -- the time slot usually used for the upper-level classes. Once I got that time slot available, I instantly suspected that my boss was making room for me to take on an upper level class and so I openly questioned her. I recall that she denied it at first, but I think she either hinted that there was the possibility, or she gave me a very advanced warning later on. Either way, when she told me she wanted me to teach a new upper-level class, she specifically noted that the majority of the students would be those I had already taught before in the school's main program. The good thing for her was that the old classes in question were all classes that I genuinely liked and cared about. (She only later mentioned that students from another class I had previously taught might join, too -- a class that I had demanded to stop teaching because I absolutely dreaded them.)
Stuck between a newly discovered weakness should I want to continue teaching English elsewhere (i.e., how to describe how I teach essay writing), as well as a handful of students that I genuinely want to see succeed so far as they are under my responsibility, I'm now spending a lot of time and energy on slowly devising a track of how best to teach this universally difficult task. It has taken me a long time to develop my present writing skills, and now I have to break it all down and figure out how I got here and how to make it relevant to my students such that they remain engaged -- particularly when they range from 10 to 14 years old (I decided to focus on the 12- to 14-year-olds, and just hope the 10-year-olds will be able to squeak through).
Although I dread the prospect of having to edit seventeen "essays" (more like paragraphs) in a single batch over a week, I'm finally excited again at work: I have a new challenge that I can hopefully use to my benefit in the future. In some ways I consider myself lucky because I have an opportunity where I actually want to tackle this problem, particularly when the cram school's designed curriculum tilts far away from favoring genuinely teaching how to write. I literally get at most twenty minutes per week to "teach" essay writing, but in the process I'm at least learning how I would ideally teach this skill: what thresholds to set, what standards to use, and what aspects to emphasize. I really feel like I have a better understanding about the limits of what can and can't be taught, as well as what being a good teacher really means. Even though my future will not rest in teaching how to write essays at a cram school simply because I've already set my eyes elsewhere, I'm glad to say that I've found another thing worth spending my unpaid hours on.
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Grad School Prospects
(1) Yonsei University: Accepted. Sent me a second e-mail, but this time with the other accepted people (not sure how many of them) CCed. CCED!!!! I got really angry at how such an institution couldn't make use of the BCC function for this kind of e-mail. *sigh* Awaiting scholarship money, still. If I don't get full scholarship, I'm not going. Will hear back in mid-July. T_T
(2) Korea University: No word yet.
I'm increasingly favoring going to Seoul first to pick up Korean and just teach at some hagwon. A coworker just got back from a two day vacation there, and he kept telling me about how expensive it was. Although by NYC standards the prices seemed decent or maybe even a little cheap, they might actually be too much to handle for me should I go there as a student. Basically, then, I'm hoping that I don't get the money -- this year.
Started up the A/C last night. Trying to live by fan when I'm not sleeping. | | |
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