Teaching at Poly

All winter long, I still biked to work. My coworkers thought I was insane when I showed up at the office sporting beardcicles.

It was a long difficult day, but rewarding. I taught ten or eleven classes each day that each lasted forty minutes. That's ten hours of teaching time per day, with preparation and grading on top of it, which was... grueling. On the other hand, I was a proper teacher, unlike in most cram schools. The kids were brilliant and fun, the curriculum was impressively well thought out, and the results were fluent or near-fluent English speakers with far better grammar, reading comprehension, and vocabulary than average American students two grade levels higher than them. I really want education to be a hybrid of East Asian and American/European schools. I want the family involvement and encouragement, the demanding yet achievable expectations, and the extremely high value placed education of Korea and other countries in East Asia. On the other hand, I want the emphasis of comprehension over workbook completion, critical independent thinking skills, and encouragement of self-expression found in the best schools in America and Europe. I also would like Korean kids to have more free time, but I don't know if that's really compatible with the level of achievement they attain.

The kindergarten was great because the kids really were having fun, and it was their only scheduled commitment of the day instead of being one of three or more academic institutions attended daily. 

I do think that our kindergarten students will have a skewed idea of 'party' though, since Poly's monthly birthday 'parties' were more like recitals: they sat still and quietly as each class performed a song, after which they would get a little cake. Socializing and running around having fun was not on the agenda. 

I actually remembered to bring my camera and record the songs one month.

I had my class sing the Beatles' Hello Goodbye.

My co-teacher, Becky, was much better at getting our other class to do the choreography in unison while singing Apples and Bananas.