Teaching!

As promised from the last post....
We've had two days of teaching so far and we love it! The kids are so motivated and attentive even though the material is really dry and boring. What a contrast to supply teaching back in Canada! The students all calls us 'teacher' and are super behaved in class. I guess they know that they'll get it back home if there are any problems. When the parents are paying for school then they become extremely interested in how well their child is doing. If there are any problems with any of the students, we simply write a little report on the computer and then a Korean staff member will promptly get on the phone and call the parent and report what we have said. We are never expected to deal with parents. Our kids write 3 tests in the course of 3 hours and the marks must be posted on the internet before midnight. Apparently some of the parents sit at home refreshing the computer screen waiting for the marks. We also have to do attendance on the internet within the first 1/2 hour of class because if a child is not in class then the mother will get a text message on her phone reporting that the child is not there. Crazy!
The videocameras in our rooms are watched and our head instructors do come and talk to us about our teaching. I feel so weird about it! The feedback has all been positive and they are simply trying to help us teach better, but it's still weird. We teach kids from ages 8-14 and work from 4-10pm. The material that we teach is intense and Blake and I have had to brush up on our skills in order to teach it.
As we have had a glimpse of the school experience of our students, we feel that our childhood was lazy! We feel bad for the amount of homework the kids have and how competetive the environment is. It must be so stressful!