Wasted time.

So, when you arrive to teach middle school you take a look at the text books and you make certain assumptions beased onwhat you see that the other teachers are teaching. But you're wrong. Why?

The kids can't read.

They seriously can't read at all. And they're "reading" from a text book. Reading with much more complicated words than I tried to teach last semester. Words that had led me to believe that they would understand most of what I threw at them.

I was wrong.

I've been doing phonics for the last few weeks. This is something that Jessie had started doing at her school, and I decided sounded like a good idea. Of course, remembering what I had seen in the text book, I assumed that we would fly right through. I mean, kids who are holding dialogues on different professions will certainly know what sound a 'P' makes, right?
Wrong. Doing phonics finally revealed it to me. The problem is that the kids are basically trained to wait for the hagwon kids to answer a question, and then to repeat whatever they say. Another trick they use is word recognition. Jessie noticed this, and pointed it out to me. Basically, the kids see the first letter, or a shape of a word, and say a word that "looks" the same. So came gets called cat, because they both start with c, and most M words now get called "Matthew". So, if you are constantly hearing repeated correct answers and near misses, you kind of assume that they know what they are doing.
But then you do phonics, assuming that it will take two weeks to review all the rules, and then you can move on to "teaching conversation". Well, I'm going on to week four of phonics now, and all I have covered is long and short vowel sounds, which they still cannot distinguish.
Today I was trying to teach the "vowel consonant e pattern makes a long vowel sound" rule, and it did not go well. "Mat" got called "bat' (word recognition), and so on. It became obvious very very qucikly that they did not understand anything that they were reading.

It was funny, because this happened the day after I had a conversation with James Park about the fact that I was teaching phonics, and no-one had told me to. He said that that was what the teachers should be teaching, because the kids can't even read the textbook.

Man, no wonder my "Talking about the movies" lessons bombed last semester. Hahahaha. Oh well, I can't be too hard on myself though, I only see them once a week, I had to base my lessons on the text level...

And that's what I'll keep telling myself.