There are many great things about teaching for a public school in Korea but my favorite is probably the fact that I actually got training. Aside from the late night gab fests there was a weeks worth of seminars from dawn to dusk. One of the biggest things to consider was how our students interact with technology and how different their relationship with it is from us, even though we aren't really that much older (at least I'm not, some of the veteran teachers have a larger age gap of course). Today's students need a diverse multimedia approach to material to make it engaging. They can't go a day without cell phones, computers, television, and video games...instead of trying to change a wall teachers have to try to incorporate the technological changes into the classroom. For instance, almost none of my students own paper dictionaries but nearly every kid has a cell phone with a dictionary on it. With the strict warning that playing games = Miss Karpen gets a lovely new cell phone, my students can look up words in a way that they feel more comfortable with. Flash cards work all right for presenting new vocabulary but bright slides on a power point work even better. In many ways, I'm old fashioned--I live for that musty smell of books. Yet, in order to reach out to my students I find myself spending hours of my day on education blogs, investigating new ways to get kids motivated and interested. There was an interesting video posted on YouTube about getting kids to 'pay attention.'

Sometimes it's overwhelming to try to wade through all of the information out there, trying to cull out the few gems that will make your lesson a bit better. On a funnier note, I did find a great Mr. Bean clip to use in my restaurant mini unit. Of course this video I can't seem to make embed so here is the link.