It's been an interesting adjustment for me as a teacher the second time around in Korea. First, I had my job at my institute, or hagwon, where I primarily taught elementary aged students advanced English speaking and grammar. With smaller class sizes, it was easy to control the students, and with a small classroom, easy to get away with sitting down for the whole time, and teaching from a chair. Teaching middle school however, is a much different ball-game.
If you've ever read stories about other middle school teachers, they'll tell you all about the students, and how, like typical middle school students, they have constant mood-changes, and while one week can be your easiest student, can also be your most difficult student the next. In Korea, they're somewhat the same, except much more respectful. Sure, students try to get away with a lot more when I am walking by, but I've heard much worse then what they say when I was teaching high school back in Chicago. The bigger difference comes in the way of respect.
Each student generally pays the teacher they're walking past the usual respects; if they are your student, they will politely bow, very simple, but respectful nonetheless. When you start your class, the students also bow while sitting down, and they also bow when you finish class (In my class, they do the whole process in English, which makes the class leader usually flustered to be speaking English). The students are also responsible for the cleaning of the whole school; from wiping down the bathroom at the end of the day, to scraping gum off the floor outside of their classrooms, its all done by the students. It should be noted that while they don't break their backs over the labour, they do a pretty decent job. Watching over the whole cleaning is the teachers, who do their best job to point out all of the places where the students could clean a little harder, to which they grumblingly clean and answer to. Its quite a big change from how a typical middle school is run anywhere in North America.
All in all, my school's been incredibly helpful to me. Aside from getting me a new television today when the cable company couldn't connect my cable because my television was broken, they've done everything in their power to make me feel welcome. They even bought me a family sized rice cooker when they saw how much food I was eating at lunch, and after they found out that I was asking questions about which model to buy; they just ordered it for me, and told me it was a gift. I'm wondering why I never tried teaching in a public school before.....
God bless,
me