Yesterday, the owner of the school observed all of the foreign teachers in one of their classes.

Theresa came to my “March” class (who are really a nice bunch of kids – and are all pretty smart too). The kids in “March” are 6-year-olds according to the way Koreans determine age (I’m still not 100% sure how they do this) but if the kids were in the US, they’d be roughly 5.

So I go to class and the bell rings. Theresa walks in. I start the class by saying “Hello March Class!” and every single one of the kids says “Hello Kathryn Teacher!” in one loud chorus. Not one of my classes has ever greeted me in unison. They knew they were being evaluated too.

I say “Let’s sing the ‘Hello Song’!” and they all start singing. Even the one little boy who usually sits there and looks at me with a puzzled look on his face sang.

So we’re supposed to do a song or a poem with the kids everyday. One of the songs for this month is “Little Rabbit Foo Foo“. And we’ve been singing it all week. So I start the song and every single one of the kids does the best they can with it. They all know the hand movements and most know at least the first part of the words “Little Rabbit Foo Foo; Hoppin’ through the forest; Scoopin’ up the field mice; and boppin’ ‘em on the head”.

Then we go through the script the kids need to know for the day when the parents come to see the renovations that were done on the school. They did a really good job with that too. But I wasn’t worried about it. I’ve known all week that they’ve pretty much have it down cold.

After that, Theresa stopped me and thanked me. She told me I was an excellent teacher and left. Bah! She didn’t even get to see me teach. And I had such a great lesson for the day. “March” has been studying positional words (on, under, between, etc.). I brought a basket full of stuff for them to show me what a sentence means. So if I say, “The balloon is in under the paper.” they’d have to pick up the balloon and the paper and put the balloon under the paper. It’s the best way I’ve found to teach prepositions of location.

So all in all, the kids in “March” made me look really good. I’m glad the whole thing is over though. I hated being observed in my last job (and the academic director observed us teaching each and every one of our classes).