Winter Intensives

January has been a busy month for me at work!  The students had the whole month of January off for their winter break/holiday season, so that meant that I had to pick up an extra class.  

I'm not sure how things work at other "hagwons," or English academies, but Chungdahm offers extra classes called "Winter Intensives" during the breaks that students have from regular school.  So, I believe this means that the classes are offered during winter break and summer break.  What this means for teachers like me is that we are required to teach an extra lesson 2-3 days a week, on top of the other 2 lessons that we would normally have.

Another thing to keep in mind about the intensive classes is that they are different from the regular classes that are usually offered by Chungdahm.  For example, there are debate classes, newspaper classes, literature classes, or classes in which the students read chapter books or novels like Because of Winn Dixie.  I think the purpose of these classes is to give the students more "fun" ways to learn English, as opposed to the monotonous vocabulary tests they take week in and week out.  Also, it's a great way for our franchise owner, Mr. Gil, to pad his wallet with more money!  And I'll have to admit.... I don't blame the man at all!

Anyways, the class that I was privileged enough to teach was titled "Speaking Workshop 1."  When I first heard about the class, I thought that we were going to be focusing on the fundamentals of speaking such as pronunciation, sound recognition and that sort of thing.  However, the actual class is for students in the lower level classes of Chungdahm to work on writing and giving speeches!  We did focus on pronunciation, voice, tone, facial expression and elocution, but how all of those things pertained to giving a proper speech!

Initially, I was a bit mortified to be teaching this class, because public speaking isn't necessarily one of my strongest assets.  However, I found the course a lot of fun, and the students were pretty amazing!  There were only four students in the class, so stretching out the material for 3 hours, two days a week was a little bit of a struggle considering the majority of the class was supposed to be spent with the students actually giving their speeches.  However, the five of us powered through the coursework and the down time and had an amazing time doing it!

Here is a video that was created of my students' final speeches.  The topic is "Building Your Own Robot"! This video will be shown on a giant flat screen TV in the lobby of our school, so that when new prospective students and their parents visit they can see the kind of work our students produce!  I hope you enjoy the speeches!  I'm very proud of my students!!