One Month In

Now that we're into the second week of April, I can say something about the first month in my new job.

As I mentioned in my last post (a whole month ago--where has all the time gone?), I changed departments at my university. I had been part of the General English Program (GEP); a department that had 30 foreign professors (teachers/lecturers, since only one of the 30 has a doctorate, and all are on year-to-year non-tenure track contracts). The GEP was a tight-knit mix of people who had been working there from one to ten years. They had a great network and a great administrative staff who was always there to help. The department taught almost every student in the university in their freshmen year in the English language requirement courses. They also offered a few other elective courses. The students are competitive and for the most part are pretty eager to learn English. Some majors are more eager and enthusiastic than others, of course. In the English Language and Literature department, there are three strands: literature, translation studies, and English education (plus a new one that started this semester: TESL). I think the professors are a little cliquish, but really I wouldn't know. I never see any of them.  Their offices are spread out all over campus, so there is not much of a community regarding work space. I'm also the only one in the department who doesn't have a doctorate (though that will change once I finish my studies). I'm also the only foreign instructor. Though, they are actively seeking another foreign instructor to be a part of the new TESL strand, one who has a doctorate degree in TESOL. The administrative assistants are students (graduate students) who change every year. There is not a single full-time employee who stays more than a year, and they all change at the same time. As you can imagine, just when they are getting efficient, they leave. I cannot help but to compare them to the GEP assistants, who are great. They have a full time staff member and two students. The students work for one year as a work study program (they pay no tuition for the year) and have their tenure staggered so there isn't a 100% turnover. Even if the English office did that with its staff, it would be better. It would also keep them working hard all year instead of the first ten months (I noticed in February that the previous group were pretty much useless--at least for me. I was something new that they didn't know what to do with, so they did nothing--didn't order books at the bookstore, didn't get my office situated until the day before classes started, and had a general 'I don't want to acknowledge your existence' attitude whenever I walked into the office.)

I moved from the GEP to the English Language and Literature department. There are some obvious differences. First, I'll start with the job itself. I was hired to create two new required courses for English majors. The students now have to take two semesters with me: Integrated English and Intensive English--one semester each. I wrote about the integrated English course here.  I teach the same number of hours, but have considerably more students. The GEP had their classes capped at 16, I was supposed to have 100 total students split into 5 classes, which means 20 in each class. However, that didn't quite work out. The university implemented a different intranet system that was filled with bugs and glitches. The cap at 22 was not  imposed, and I ended up with students registering for whatever sections that fit their own schedules, leading to some sections having five students registered and other sections having 50. The system also didn't limit the registration to English majors, so there were a wide variety of students who had signed up for the course that didn't belong there. Non-freshmen and non-English majors alike, many of whom were former students of mine. The class-size problem was remedied a few days before classes started by automatically dropping students, which led to massive re-shuffling (and even a last-minute schedule change on my part).  Classes were finally capped at 26 to allow for students schedule conflicts. What was not calculated was the number of exchange students. The exchange students are handled by another division in the university, and the English department actually had no idea that there were several exchange students admitted who were English majors. That pushed my numbers up by about 10 total. For the first time in many years, I've actually got guys in some of my classes. (Being a male exchange student in a women's university is quite a feat, if only I'd thought of that when I was a student!) The whole class-size thing should be worked out by next semester, and they should be stabilized and capped at 22 or 23. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Long story short, I've got about 110 students total. One class has 32 students, which is twice as big as my GEP courses were. I've got one class of 17 or 18, and the rest are 20-something. The students really are different though. I am able to push them harder than I could the students in the general English classes. This is a required major class for them. The overall atmosphere is different. I cannot say that they are all there because they want to study English because they are not. For some, they chose that major because it is the major they were accepted into, not their first choice. However, they seem to have accepted the fact that this is their major, and in a year, they can join another department for a second major. In the GEP, there was never much of a problem of students doing their homework. They may not always understand what they were doing, but 90% of the students would do their work to the best of their ability. That number is pretty much the same now. However, what they turn in is just so much more, more... well, it is just more. I ask for a paragraph, and a third of them write a perfectly-formed five paragraph essay, a third write a two-paragraph short composition, and a third write a paragraph. Instead of a quarter of the students writing in Korean and then translating into English, I've got two students who are stuck doing this (both of whom surprised me with this, as they are both students who seem to have fairly high speaking abilities. It's made me think a lot about 'ear learners' versus 'eye learners.' If you want to know what that means, ask me, I'll blog about it.)

The relationship between me and the students is a little different as well. It is hard to explain, more of a feeling I have. I have more students emailing me and calling me with questions than I've ever had before. I don't know if this is because they have a slightly higher level of English, tend to be slightly more outgoing, or if it is because this is a major course and therefore more important to them. Regardless of the reasons, things are different. Also, since this course is being offered in addition to the GEP course, and was designed to parallel the GEP course in its content and build upon what they are doing in that other course, they seem to be progressing so much faster than I predicted. Essentially, they have doubled the number of hours in a skills-building course to now have six hours a week.

There will be more to come about the course I'm teaching. I had started out intending to write about the department in general, but have decided against it.