Daegu, South KoreaThis was a good idea but frustratingly they only told us this towards the end of december, after students had done their final exams and lost interest in doing anything with the end of term. School closes at the new year and classes do not begin again until march.
We have a one week winter camp in january for some students but lessons had already been planned, materials printed, and this project could not be incorporated this late barely two weeks before.
The rationale the board had was that because school would be closed for two months and foreign teachers only had ten days vacation during this time, we could work on the project the remaining time with students!!! Did they not realize that students are on vacation???
How is it fair for us to ask students to come in on their holiday to work on this project? If we had time we could work this into winter camp or afterschool classes but telling us at the end of December with a late January deadline was being very unrealistic.
Many foreign teachers said they just wont do it. Its too last minute and unfair to the students to ask them to work on this during their vacation. Plus students had already 'shut down' and were not interested in learning anything new.
I thought if we tried to do something in the last few days after christmas we might stand a better chance as most other teachers decided not to participate. Surprisingly we found a group of advanced first graders eager to do the project.
Most of them were not attending winter camp and we had scheduling problems in the little time that we had in december trying to get everyone together.
The contest was relatively simple. Find and correct english spelling in publications and websites. This is something the students would not be able to find as they do not read or surf on english websites, but I do researching weekend events, so was able to find many.
An easy warm up I gave them was a government website referring to Queen EliSabeth (spelt with an S). Also shocking was the Korean Air website that spells Toronto as - Tronto missing an 'O'. Its been like that since 2010 when you go into esupersaver special fares.
It was quite easy to find others. Often websites and publications are written in korean. Then they paste it into a translate software and repaste the output without having anyone proofread it. So there are many grammatical and structural errors that do not read correctly.
A glaring example is the Daegu Airport website which reads very poorly.
http://www.airport.co.kr/doc/daegu_eng/intro/RE05.jsp
After submitting the students were relentless asking me during graduation week in February when they came back what happened? I kept saying I dont know but they kept hammering me everyday wanting to know.
On thursday of graduation week we heard back that we were one of the winners. I'm not sure what position but when the student that kept asking read the korean description he was upset that it wasnt first place.
Often I doubt the Board looks at anything when I've had to submit lesson plans to them before so I was somewhat skeptical. A friend tested this by submitting lesson plans with sexual inuendo in every one (like 'getting it up', 'I like your melons', and 'can I play with your balls'). He has heard nothing back from the board!!
Also it makes me look good in my school that my team of students were recognized by the board. I'm happy for them that they were recognized
I still dont know what we won but there will be a presentation when the term starts again in March.
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2025-05-23