BIG NEWS!
I GOT THE JOB!!!
Yes, after all that soul searching in my last post and the wanderlusting for a greater purpose to my life in Korea, my prayers were seemingly answered in the form of an offer of employment by Soongsil University in seoul, SK. http://eng.ssu.ac.kr/web/eng !!!!!!!!!! And when it comes down to it, no one was probably more suprised than I was.
I had pretty much prepared myself for defeat. I hadn't heard from anyschool and then in the last week on may, I heard from 1 school a bit south of Seoul. So off I went for my first real face to face job interview since I interviewed for the summer camp teaching position at the Westmount Visual Arts Center (great summer, awful job!). I was pretty nervous, but it was a great experience, and based on the pretty positive feedback I got from the program director, I thought I stood a pretty fair chance at getting the job. Ok, so I would be about an hour and a half south of the city, but hey, it was still a good job.
On that very day, I got my second interview at Soongsil University. This one came attached with the ever terrifying teaching demo for a panel of faculty and administrators, gulp!
'Please come prepared to teach a small 10-15 minute activity on the Present Perfect tense.' I thought sure, ok, no problem. But then I looked carefully at the present perfect tense and nearly shit my pants. WHAATTTT??? REALLY??? That one is sooooooooo hard for non native English speakers.
Therefore I pulled out my secret weapon; my mother. She has been working in English lit and ESL for 30 years and i put great stock into her advice on lesson planning activities. Their usually bang on. Experience can NOT be bought, (SCRATCH THAT; you can totally buy experience, duh, that's what a personal consultant is called)... but if you don't have the stomach or the budget for that, it can also be shared. Let it be a solid peace of advice for alllll those who aren't quite sure which direction to work towards to just ask someone who has a lot of experience in that field to nudge you in the right direction and BAM! you just might come up with something pretty amazing.
So, along with a proper nudge, I came up with something pretty amazing. Rather than just trying to teach the Present Perfect directly, I made an activity that would compare and contrast it with the tenses that people most often confuse it with; mainly the Present Simple and Simple Past. I had 3 sentences in each tense deconstructed into broken sentences. What I pointed out was that there were certain words that would distinguish one tense from the other and that by memorizing those words and using them as signal words you could more clearly distinguish between tenses and by putting all the sentences back together again, it would really challenge students not only to work in groups but also to create sentence structures in different tenses. WOOT! It was hard and time consuming to come up with this kind of activity instead of just delivering the material directly, but it was definitely more student centered, and in the end, I guess that's what they really wanted.
15 minutes goes by realllllllllllllllllly quickly and I had no idea whether it had been successful or not. But I thought the interview part went very well, and I was right to think so, because less than 2 hours later, they called me and offered me the position!!!!!
It is so great to feel vindicated and that all of your hard work has paid off. I think that's one of the things that University best prepares you for. It teaches you that hard work and persistance usually DO wreap some pretty good rewards. I always feel most sattisfied and purely happy when I do something hard and get rewarded for my actions. I think my reactin to the news was the most telling sign that this was something that I really wanted. I was out for dinner with my friend and I basically had to leave the restaurant so I could go and run up and down the street screaming a couple times! lol!
Now that I have the job, there will certainly be some harder work days ahaead of me, not to mention the stress of getting a new visa, packing up and moving into a new appartment and neighbouhood and begining a completely new job. The intimidation factor is pretty high, but I have to believe that they would not have hired me if they didn't think I could do the job and that things will work themselves out for the best.
Over the next 2 months I will be winding things down and out at Garak Elementary school and moving forward to a new place (litterally) in my Korean adventure. Sometimes you hear a change is as good as a rest and I completely agree. My life here was beginning to stagnate and it was time for a change. It was time to start challenging myself a little bit more and pushing my career forward to a new level of demand and success. This is a good thing. Despite the fact that it will be ahrd work, I have found myself so much more excited and motivated about this new job than my curent one than I ever expected to be. I feel as though it has given me a new purpose and validation for being here. I just hope that I can live up to the expectations the university has of my teaching abilities. The good news is that i have my very own professional personal consltant a skype call away that I'm sure will be able to help and guide me through this precarious new ground. I also have two months to start studying.... better get on that!
It makes me think of a quote that this one English teacher uses in her posts on the resource site I often use for work:
"Hard work beats talent, when talent doesn't work hard."
But when talent decides to work hard, ...well I guess the rest is pretty self explanatory.
Sorry hard working guys, but I get to collect the $200 and pass GO on this one. ;)
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