My Thoughts

Some difficulties I encountered included my own fears of teaching, and my age. I had a certain thought process which made me think that, because I am not fluent in Korean, or because I have never taught before, I would not be able to communicate to the students as well as I'd like. Teaching English, for me, was a bit difficult. It is nothing like teaching dance, you actually have to teach someone how to speak, and you have to explain to them why certain things are said the way they are said.

An example of this is when one of my students asked me what YOLO means. Though it is slang, I still felt the need to explain it. In Korea, as I heard, there is no such expression in slang. It is just used as a phrase when you talk about deep things such as "It has always been my dream to be a dancer, well I may as well try. You only live once." It is not used as an acronym in every day life. Another example was when a student asked me what "Lates" means. {Lates as in "see you later," or "later" in the "goodbye" or "see you soon" sense.} One of his other teachers dismissed the class and said "lates" to indicate that they would see each other soon. It was not as difficult to explain as YOLO, because YOLO was both an acronym and used for simple things. "Lates" was just a shortened version of "see you later/later."

My age was also of worry to me because most of my students were older than me by a few years. I had a few students which were my age and maybe one or two that were younger. I feared my age because I knew that in Korea even a year can make a difference within a relationship. So I kept quiet about my age. My students behaved in a respectable manner as expected in a proper student/teacher relationship, until a student came across my passport. Word circulated between classes and the students behaved a bit differently. They acted cutesy and childlike. They did not in anyway misbehave nor did they talk in a rude sense they just acted almost childlike. But it made things a little simpler and I grew closer to them quicker. So I am actually more thankful that this happened.