Friday, December 3, 2010

teaching a genius

Last week I inherited a 1 on 1 class with a grade 4 girl (I don't feel it's appropriate to publish students names, even their English ones, so forgive the omission) who is, without exaggeration, a genius. I don't mean that she is very smart, or has a gift for languages, she is one of those 200 IQ points, the kid in Shine type geniuses. First off she is fluent in English and Japanese as well as her native Korean. Her writing has a few problems, but it's as good as my grade 9 and 10 students. However, by her own admission she is lazy (and she is :P). She tells me that she plays 3-4 hours of computer games a day, hates homework and school and doesn't want to study but does a bit because her parents make her. She tells me she can read books in Japanese except for the hanja (the Chinese characters that have been adopted as one of Japan's three alphabets and was the old alphabet in Korea before Hangeul) because hanja has too many characters and they sound stupid (as apparently does spoken Chinese in her opinion :). She is also doing middle school math and social studies. Now teaching a kid like this is not especially easy, as none of our textbooks are really appropriate (she's done the first 3rd of a 6 month course in about 3 weeks). Also, usual topics for writing and discussing are either below her level or get in to topics that she has no interest in doing. This is because, while her level is that of a High School or even College student, she is still a 10 year old girl. I've managed to improv with articles about things like Japanese animation, KPop and travel articles all from English language websites (where she read it and then answers 10-15 questions) and so far it's been okay. I also give her lots of time just to chat and, unlike so many Koreans who are very reserved and seem unwilling to express opinions on anything, she is very willing to discuss and give opinions ranging from why Jeju-do is a great place to visit but a terrible place to live (she lived there for a year) to why Japanese animation is better than American animation to why spoken Chinese sounds terrible and their writing system is inefficient to why her being blind in one eye is actually a good thing because it makes her different and gives her a free trip to Seoul every year to go to the clinic there. Overall, teaching her poses a few challenges, but it's becoming one of my favourite classes and I hope to be teaching her for a long time to come.

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