Friday, November 13, 2009

Seedbed

The youngest students who are least familiar with English at my hagwon are in the "Seedbed" level. When I walked into school 5 weeks ago and was told I would be teaching a Seedbed class beginning that day, I started to cringe. Not that I don't love little kids, but the idea of starting phonetics with 5 and 6-year-olds after I have been teaching kids who read, comprehend, think objectively and have conversations with me, well, this was going to be a challenge.

I received four new students. Julia, Tad, Ted and Zion. So, not only could they barely read/speak English, but they didn't understand the rules (No Korean!, No Food!, No Hitting!, etc) and I couldn't very well explain them. Julia, Ted and Zion had at least some basic understanding of the ABC's and even knew some of the sounds those letters made. Tad was another story. Couldn't understand a thing.

To paint a bit of a picture of how my Tuesdays and Thursdays look with this motley crew: Zion has these outrageously stinky farts (he bombs the class no fewer than 3 times a day), Julia whines, eats the whole time and acts bored, Ted has a lisp and cries/curses me every time he gets a bad grade and is usually hitting someone, and Tad (who's name we recently changed to "T-Rex"), well he is the reason for this post.

Last week we were working on the sounds the letter "c" makes: soft "s" (as in "city") or hard "k" (as in "cat"). I gave them a list of words and had them separate them based on what sound they made: "Cycle, cease, cell, circle go in column A. Camel, cry, camp, call go in column B." But when it came to the word "cent" T-Rex unknowingly thought it was a hard "c" and shouted "CUNT!" I couldn't help cracking up for the rest of the class. How can you stay mad at that?

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