Another session over, only four more to go!

This Friday marks the end of the second session at our Hagwon. For those of you who haven't been keeping track of the days going by, we teach in sessions at our academy. Each session is eight or nine weeks long, or about two months. We have been officially teaching in Korea for four months. Woot woot! We're approximately 33% of the way finished and we're anxiously anticipating our week of summer vacation in the upcoming weeks.

At the end of each session, the kids are tested to check their English abilities. Most of the time, the kids pass (50% is passing). Sometimes, the kids are not working hard enough, or they are new, or they miss too many classes. Anyway, those kids fail and have to repeat the level. Even more rare are the kids that are so impressive that they skip levels. About 3 kids have done that so far.

This session was pretty much normal. A couple of kids we expected to fail failed. A couple of kids we expected to do well failed. One kid surprised everyone but me. She was the underdog and I was rooting for her. She seems to be exceptionally smart, but she doesn't interact well with the other kids. Her brother, who is also one of my students, is the same way. They both seem to understand what they read and can talk with me one-on-one, but put them in a classroom with a few kids and they are the trouble makers. The girl has crying fits and refuses to participate. The boy makes grunting noises and smears his spit on his face, papers and other classmates when he is allowed to get near them. They are problem children, but I think they sometimes get too much heat on them. I actually feel bad for them sometimes and other days I want to send them packing to another academy. But anyway, they both passed this session and I feel good about it because no one was rooting for their success but me.

One of my troublemakers in my advanced level 3 classes failed and it put a smile on my face. He's Michael's problem now, he he. Every session, we trade classes so I should be getting his monsters and he mine. It's kind of a fair trade off, except a lot of his trouble makers left school this session. That means that I will have one difficult class of four boys (ages 8-12), but he will have to deal with 3 troublemaking 6 year olds, a rambunctious class of misfits, and a couple of misbehaving middle school boys. Have fun, Michael.

I will keep you posted on our new schedules. They should be interesting. Hopefully we will not be scheduled for overtime and we will get a vacation!