Advanced Student Class

Yesterday I suggested that perhaps in one of my 3 additional teaching hours I could teach an "advanced English" course for students who wanted a harder English curriculum.  My school and surrounding Yeongtong area is pretty well-off and many of the students have traveled abroad, lived abroad, and/or regularly attend English academy or private English lessons.  Although this is certainly NOT the case for all students, many of my kids are constantly bored in class because the content is too easy.  I have been itching for ways to help those kids since I got here.  

One of the things it says in my contract is that if there are more than 30-something kids in the class, the class can be split into two groups.  (Actually, I have not referenced this point in quite some time now, but I swear I read this once.)  When I asked about doing this my co-teacher laughed and basically said "yeah right!" 

This school year there are two very amazing things: 

1.  Instead of the 38-40 kids per class that I had I now only have 32-36 kids per class.  Now, I know that it doesn't seem like a big difference, and really it's not, but when the class is as large as it is, every additional kid seems to make an impact.  Now, instead of using 7 tables, I only have to use 6.  That alone is huge.  

2.  I get to teach the advanced class!  And because I am the first one ever to teach such a thing, I am designing the curriculum.  My evaluations from Winter Camp came back and although some kids expressed some grief to me during the class, they basically all rated the experience as very positive.  They really liked doing the theme and doing all the projects.  

So now I'm designing a project-based learning method for these advanced learners.  We are going to have one month on each topic.  I can't remember them all right now, but there is an entire month dedicated to the environment and natural disasters, one month on journalism where we will do a role play TV news broadcast, one month for architecture (and eco-building because I gotta bring in my propaganda experience in somehow), and the month of march will be sports/olympics.  

I'll keep you all updated as it goes along, and if you have any wonderful project-based ESL ideas and theories for me,  please do send them along.  

PS: Yes, I will do a travel update; it's just harder to do that than sitting here and type type typing.