When Vacation Is Only A Dream: Winter Camp
I was caught remembering The Original Kings of Comedy speaking on Black people taking breaks at work: When we break, WE BREAK!
As pretty much everyone (who cares) knows, we have to teach what is called 'winter camp' during the time I normally consider winter vacation. Here's an update for Korean society that doesn't seem to understand the term vacation: when I go on vacation, I don't work. I don't even like to think about work. If I wanted to work, I wouldn't go on vacation. I understand, this is a different culture so I roll with it. However, really, this isn't vacation.
I take that back, because right now I'm on vacation. What I just finished doing, wasn't vacation. The students however, don't have such a luxury. Sometimes, I wonder where all the creativity goes to die here and other times it smacks me in the face. Oh that's how you kill dreams and aspirations, I'll go ahead and take note.
But I'm not really here to rag on Korea or their idea of vacation. The truth is, while a lot of teachers hate going in for winter camp, I quite enjoy it. I got up and while I didn't want to leave but once I was out I was happy to be there with my students.
The thing about winter camp is the kids 'volunteer' for it. That means, their parents tell them to get the fuck out of the house or they decide to take my class instead of taking another teacher's class. Rest assured, the majority of students HAVE to take classes during the winter vacation. They might skip them and their parents might not mind, but technically they need to be doing something. So my class instead of the Korean class? Isn't that obvious? I'm the closest thing to a vacation when it comes to class. They know I like games, movies, music and talking about crap instead of a boring drilling lesson where I yell at you half the class.
Did I surprise them with a hard-nosed winter camp? Heck no, I spent a lot of the classes in candid discussion. I don't mind being their friend but honestly, I see this time as vacation and I can't be bothered to push them to learn more English than they're going to work towards. Lucky for me, I had good students that wanted to learn. This led to watching a movie without subtitles and (painfully) working through the story with questions that challenged them to actually put ideas together. I like to think they enjoyed that. It also led to them actually understanding an entire song rather than knowing most of the words and being able to fill them in as they read them off the screen. I like to think despite my lack of a standard formal teaching plan, I succeeded in challenging them and they did learn something.
I say, I lacked a plan but I had one. Then I realized, after about three days in, that it wasn't going to work. The students were taking far more time that I estimated and they refused to do ANY homework I gave them. It's cool that we're on a nice level that they can tell me straight up why they're not doing homework. One classic response was: I was chatting until 3AM so I didn't do my homework. Truth: I don't care. They know as well as I do that what they get out of this winter camp is for them. There are no grades and no one looking over our shoulder (just on hidden cams probably). I wasn't about to stress myself.
So yeah, I enjoyed winter camp. I showed them how human teachers can be and I think they progressed a bit with their English. I gave them a lot of proper English samples to study and hopefully when we return for Winter Camp Round 2 - 'Spring Camp' we can do more fun things as we prepare for the upcoming school year.
Right now I'm dreading going back to that standard classroom where I have 2-3x as many students and barely any of them are nearly as motivated. With any luck, these kids will spread the word that I don't want any trouble and my classes won't suck if everyone cooperates. I'm not going to hold my breath though.