Comments | samedi: Sanggang and Solar Terms in Korea

samedi

Sanggang and Solar Terms in Korea

Nov 19, 2009 14:00

Once students reach a high enough level at our academy we have them start keeping an English journal/diary. Students are allowed to write about any topic they want. Some focus on what they did over the weekend while others pick a random subject to discuss in their notebook. I have twins in one of my classes - a brother and sister - who are ( Read more... )

traditional events (명절)

Comments 10

storysinger81 November 19 2009, 09:58:53 UTC

my favorite part of teaching is learning from my students. :-)

samedi November 19 2009, 19:36:11 UTC

The same for me. Seeing my younger students use sarcasm and make jokes in English is also quite nice! =)

Amanda here... anonymous November 19 2009, 12:30:49 UTC

I sort of wish my high school and college Spanish teachers had made us keep journals. You can really see growth and progress in a language if you keep them long enough.

Having said that, I've read more than once that students don't learn much from corrections on their own writing. Apparently it's another case where the more a student reads, the better they write.

Which makes me wish my Spanish teacher had made us read things other than the damn textbook!

Anyhow--thanks for the info.

Re: Amanda here... samedi November 19 2009, 19:47:23 UTC

What level did you reach in Spanish? While studying French in high school we used a textbook for the first two years, but since the third-year class was only four students we studied on our own using the textbook for half the classes and outside reading material for the other half. (I can recall going over the first chapter of Camus' "The Stranger", some of "Waiting for Godot", a story about a thief in Marseille ( ... )

Re: Amanda here... anonymous November 20 2009, 01:39:54 UTC

I took one year of Spanish my sophomore year of high school. My junior and senior years I went to college full time and took two years there. "They" (the mythical "they" say one year college is worth two of high school, which means by your school's standards we should've been reading real text ( ... )

Re: Amanda here... samedi November 20 2009, 20:50:45 UTC

The French program at my high school only had a single class for the first two levels and there was no French III course during my freshman and sophomore years. I do wonder if the decision to read outside literature came from our teacher trying to create a syllabus for a 'new' class of just four students. Since we studied on our own without the teacher I guess it makes sense to stress reading and writing to make up for the lack of speaking practice. For what it's worth, our teacher was not a native speaker, but she had spent several years living in Paris ( ... )

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samedi November 19 2009, 21:01:53 UTC

From what I can gather each seasonal division is 15 days long and is comprised of three 5-6 day segments. I think it's set up so that the sun's longitude changes by one degree each 'day' within the division. 360' in the sky and 365 days in the year mean that there are five extra days that get put in there somewhere, though I don't know how those are calculated. The autumnal and vernal equinoxes are recognized, as are the winter and summer solstices, so I imagine the originators had a similar conception of four seasonal groups to the one we have in the west.

If I remember correctly, this girl couldn't get a job after finishing university back home so applied for a job in Korea. Seems she likes it enough (being a lazy 'princess') to have stayed for several years. She was dead last on our list of possible hires ...

anonymous November 19 2009, 18:09:38 UTC

It's very likely that some students hate writing the journals as much as your co-worker hates reading them.
In my college Japanese class we had to write a journal. Instead of writing something interesting like learning about seasonal divisions, I wrote things I was confident I could write correctly. My teacher must have thought I was the biggest movie buff to ever live. Nice post. Per usual.

samedi November 19 2009, 21:21:28 UTC

Many students probably do dislike writing journals, and it's not something that goes over well when I first announce it in my classes. I'm generally happy with any effort a student makes, so for struggling students a short entry of two or three sentences is enough. That might even be better, as it lets them concentrate on one important idea and gives me the chance to focus on one area to highlight in my corrections -- be it proper use of conjunctions, past tense, or pronouns.

I do know that at least one of my co-teachers takes journal writing more seriously but, between blogging and having tried to keep a daily Korean journal, I can understand that there are some days when it seems like there's just nothing to write about.

Thanks for the comment, and for reminding me of what goes into keeping a journal in another language!

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samedi November 20 2009, 20:20:20 UTC

That is one thing that makes me thankful. At least it's not a guy with all the same behavior plus being sexist and/or constantly hitting on our coworkers.

Korea is seeing enough people come for jobs that they might be in a position to strengthen application requirements -- which I can't say that I'd be against. (Edited: Within reason, of course.)