School Budgets

About two weeks ago, I went to the annual SMOE NSET workshop, which I barely mentioned here because there was not much to mention. However, during the sharing session, a couple of people (these are all high school teachers) talked about their candy budget.

I had two responses to that: a) that much candy you need a budget? Seriously? For high school students? Whatever; and b) you have a budget?

So, this got me wondering, Do I have a classroom budget? Before I go on, let me clarify it's not that the school I am at is niggardly (with apologies to David Howard), as whenever I've asked for teaching materials they've always been very accommodating--but that's not the same as having a budget!

In any case, I pretty much have what I need: enough desks and chairs; heater and air conditioner; loads of lockable storage cabinets; a modern computer and sound system; and even a large touch-screen display. In fact, it's a rather nice room. Still, I buy things for my classes occasionally, like those witches' hats for the Harry Potter pictures. I generally just out-of-pocket the expense, and don't worry about it--what's a few thousand won here or there, right? (I know, I know, I'll never be a millionaire thinking that way ...)

But I also generally save the receipts.

I've wanted a presentation pointer for a while (the kind of thing that lets you advance Powerpoint slides and so on from anywhere in the room), but Miss Lee had told me that Korean teachers should buy that for themselves. At 75 to 100 KW (kilowon), I didn't want one that much. Well, I did finally break down and buy one just recently for use in my public speaking class.

Anyway, I asked around about my classroom budget, and got an answer today: 500,000 W. About USD 450. This does not include paper and printing costs. So, I go to my room and tally up the receipts I've collected since March 2: 88,420 W.

Yikes. Coming out of my pocket, that sounds like a lot, but coming out of a 500,000 won budget, it's not much. Therefore, I went to the nearby Daiso during my free period and bought twenty bucks worth of marker pens and plastic tubs to put them in, so there are enough for each of my student tables to have their own. (For a first grade lesson I'll blog around the end of the week.) 111,420 W. 388,580 W to go.

Serendipitously (with apologies to Arthur C. Clarke), when I looked through the papers this evening, what did I see but a story carried in both the Korea Herald and the JoongAng Daily about next year's budget from SMOE (my employer). Sez KH:

The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education will almost quadruple the free education budget next year, officials said Monday.
The office unveiled its final budget plan for next year, which amounts to 6.6 trillion won, a 4.7 percent increase from this year.
A total of 249 billion won is to be allocated to free education, a 376.7 percent rise from this year’s 52.2 billion won, according to the budget plan.
Of that amount, 116.2 billion won is to be used for free meals in elementary schools,

The article continues:

The education support fund for low-income family preschool children has been raised by 51.4 percent from 29.5 billion won to 75 billion won, officials said.

Hmmm. Actually, 151.4% of 29.5 billion comes to about 45 billion. This would presumably be a typo by the Herald, as the JAD account gives the current budget number as 49.5 billion.

So, where is all that money coming from, if the net effect of these increases only raised the budget by 4.7%? Cutting back on native teachers, perhaps?

Maybe, but there's no mention of it. No, the big loser appears to be school facilities improvement, which KH calls "repairing and exchanging deteriorated buildings and facilities": down 27.1 percent.

The upshot is, then, that it is my school's plan to build an elevated gymnasium, rather than me and my measly 500 dollar budget, that will suffer from the cuts: click here and scroll to #4.

Purpose of This Blog

In this weblog, I will focus on sharing my more successful ESL lessons with students in a Seoul high school (a boy's school, though I think that only matters sometimes). I teach "English Conversation". My classes generally have 36 to 40 stdents, and a Korean co-teacher. Classes last 50 minutes, and meet once a week.

I have been teaching in Seoul, at my school, since September 2008.  My school was chosen as 2010's "Seoul City Demonstration High School for English Education" which might sound more impressive than it is. Three or four teacher groups (including one group from Australia and New Zealand, and one group from Singapore) have traipsed down my "English Only Zone" hallway for a Q & A session, and that's about the extent of it, in my life, anyway.

This blog will also summarize and discuss news media reports (and whatever other sources I can find) of education news and policy, particularly in Korea but also in the US and elsewhere, especially in the area of ESL.  And especially if I can be witty, ascerbic, and/or devastatingly insightful on the topic.

Before coming to Korea in 2008, I labored for long years in the semi-rural environs of sub-suburban Atlanta as a science, math, computer, drama, debate, etc., teacher in a couple of small independent schools serving students from PreK through 12th grade.  I was also varsity and middle school soccer and sometime basketball coach, athletic director, State administrator for Soccer and Literary, summer camp director, webmaster, school photographer and probably other stuff I can't remember.

In Korea, I teach English Conversation. Period.

It is just as challenging as anything else I've done, but it is limited and defined: I do two or three lesson plans per week, with 20 or 21 classes, and I am finished by 4:30 every day.  YMMV, but I do not do grades or exams, I do not do speaking tests, and I do not go to faculty meetings--except the ones held in restaurants, where beer and soju accompany the food, rather than budget reports and curriculum notes.

I am fortunate to work with caring professional educators; my classroom has a large touch-screen display TV, a PA system with a mic, and a modern computer with Microsoft Office 2007.  Still, I think the best lessons I do can be taught in less technology-rich environments--indeed, some of my favorites involve only pencil and paper, or not even that!

Nonetheless, one cannot ignore that our students live in a hyperactive world of TV, computer games and full-color images.  The plain whiteboard and some markers is good for a change, but is no longer our meat-and-potatoes; I recall I went home covered in chalk dust each day for many years.  I'm still looking for better ways to reach my students.

I can't say I adopted the computer into my classroom from the start-up, but I was earlier than most at my school--I was quickly made webmaster.  The internet is a powerful tool for educators--it has its flaws and vulnerabilities, but you are using it right now!  These days my computer acumen is mostly known by the sweet, sweet Powepoints I produce (some co-teachers have mentioned they'd rather have me teach an extra class in making PPTs over one helping them with English!)  

My plan is to choose one or two of the six or eight lessons I do each month and provide a detailed breakdown, and all the materials (at least the digital ones) needed to make it happen in the classroom.  In the hope that someone out there can use them.  Or take some kernel of pedagogy from them, and apply it in their own ESL classroom.

If you do find something here useful, let me know by commenting with the form after each post--if you know a better way, or find a useful modification, please share it!

Size Matters

... at least when it comes to your score on the SAT essay section.  Didn't know the SAT has an essay section?  You're not alone--my informal survey on this question found one out of two people didn't know the SAT even has an essay section, which is 50% of the sample.  The other 50% couldn't remember what SAT stands for.  Mind you, this survey has a margin of error of + or - (whichever the case may be) 15,000 per cent.

My survey is slightly less scientific (but only slightly) than that performed by a New York high school student and reported by ABC News: Has Teen Unlocked the Secret to a Better SAT Score?  Nebbishy fourteen-year-old Milo Beckman has taken the SAT twice, and found that even though his second essay was factually inaccurate and generally inferior, it earned a higher score.

It was longer:

"My hypothesis is that longer essays on the SAT essay component score higher," he said.
So he asked his fellow students at New York City's Stuyvesant High School to count how many lines they had written on their essays and to provide their scores.
"I thought, 'This ought to be interesting.' I've always wondered about this, too," said David Sugarman, a classmate.
"This was something directly related to the SAT itself and the means by which, you know, we were being graded," another classmate, Yana Azova, said.
Milo says out of 115 samples, longer essays almost always garnered higher scores.
"The probability that such a strong correlation would happen by chance is 10 to the negative 18th. So 00000 …18 zeros and then (an) 18. Which is zero," he said.

Me?  I kinda wonder what are the chances that it's really an 18 after those 18 zeroes?

Another thing I wonder is, why has a 14-year-old already taken the SAT twice?  I only took it once, as a high school senior, and that was under duress.  Back then, the top score was something like 23.  Today, you can get 14 million on your SAT.  And you still might not get into Harverd. 

The ABC News story follows up Milo's research with some MIT professor's insane blathering about how to do well on this (largely imaginary, according to my research) essay section, including such advice as memorize some big words and sprinkle them randomly throughout your writing, and conclude your paper with a quote by a famous person, even if it is totally unrelated to your topic, and even if you don't really remember it well enough to get it right.  I hasten to add that I am NOT making this part up.  

Which explains why I didn't get into MIT.  As the poet Sherman Helmsley said, "I am the Captain of my Fate, I am the something something here in Seoul."

N.B.: My first post on this blog is a copy of a post on my other blog, The Seoul Patch. This will be the way of things for a while, to some extent, as I migrate my education/classroom/teaching stuff to this--more serious--blog address.