An involver made me a teacher

83rd WK T Cherry

While I was at SM University from March 2, 2008 to February 23, 2012, I took several classes related to my major, English Education. The reason I specialized in English Education was that I really wanted to learn English, to be an expert of English and then I had a plan to be a best English teacher. I respected all of my professors but two professors remained in my memory. They taught my favorite classes but surprisingly, their teaching style was very different.

Professor Eoh was like an explainer but professor Kim was like an involver. Professor Eoh taught syntax by explaining everything. There wasn’t any students’ presentation or discussions and even no activities. Rarely, she just gave us homework. If her class hour was 90 minutes, she spent all of the time explaining that she wanted to teach. Although her teacher type was not good, the reason I loved her class was that her knowledge was perfect and she EXLPAINED very well.

In comparison with her teacher type, professor Kim was like an involver. She taught English Literature and she asked us many things. Her students including myself should present every chapter properly. We made up some groups and each group gathered to study the chapter took on. Then, we had to study, discuss and prepare our presentation. It made us experts of managed chapter. In case of my group, we divided into the work between us. For example, I took on a role to make presentation slides, a man had a role to make a presentation and some women of my group collected data and organized the resources with a responsibility. Of course we analyzed the chapter enough before we assumed each role. After the presentation of my group, professor Kim and other students asked a lot of questions and gave feedback. All her students studied each chapter in that way and learned by reading the chapter before the class, listening to their classmates’ presentation, speaking to the question on the chapter and writing to give feedback. In the lecture room, before starting the day’s class and after the class, professor Kim always asked some questions like “have you ever uttered soliloquy?" or "what is an example of soliloquy in Hamlet?". Those kinds of questions had us think and made our knowledge of soliloquy accurate.

In addition, professor Kim considered adult learners characters. For example, adults are relevancy-oriented. In that regard, she always told us why we were studying English literature when we questioned the reason why we should learned English literature. That’s because we wanted to be an English teacher not a doctor of literature. She told that old English literature gave us that there were eternal things like love, friendship and morality. Also, she helped us to become fascinated with literary works by using immutable value, past and present. Another example is that adults have life experiences and knowledge and she knew it very well. After reading a literary work, we talked about it without formality. Her hidden agenda was that we adults have knowledge of life and we could exchange information about our experience.

Confucius said "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." Now I can understand what it means. From professor Kim, I always dreamed about being a teacher. Thanks to her, I am an English teacher now. I want to know what kind of teacher I am. How does my teaching style? An involver like professor Kim or an explainer like professor Eoh? My teaching style is like an explainer. I want to teach as providing a variety of activities but it is still strange to me. From August 17 2012, I started to teach English in elementary school. I have difficulty teaching English. For example, when I explained this sentence; “would you like some cake?”, I didn’t notice that some of my students could not know just a word, “would”, means. Now I know that I can use CCQ to elicit a meaning of a word from my students. Through TESOL class, I will turn into an involver.