What is an adverb?

(Liji) After teaching English for a month, I feel that I am getting the hang of things. I definitely am learning more about English. When I had to learn Spanish, I re-learned what verbs, nouns, adjectives etc. are, but now that I am trying to teach English, I am finding that it doesn’t matter much if I know what something is if the kids don’t know what it means.
One of my classes consist of 4th-6th graders, they are put in classes according to their ability. (Which is something else that I could talk about, but I don’t have time, maybe later I will talk about students being put in too high or too low of classes.) In this class, we call it Vin’s class, I am supposed to teach English grammar.
When I first saw what I was supposed to teach. I thought, “No problem, these kids are learning English, they shouldn’t have any problems understanding some simple English grammar.” When we arrived here, we just picked up where the previous teachers had left off, well in Vin’s class the previous teacher left right before teaching about comparatives. Comparatives were fairly easy to teach, vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate, you just compare two or more nouns.
After comparatives, I was supposed to teach comparatives with adjectives, then superlatives, then superlatives with adjectives, then superlatives with ordinals, then adverbs of manner, then comparatives with adverbs. So after comparatives just by themselves I discovered that is extremely difficult to explain English grammar to 11 year olds who have about a 500 word vocabulary that doesn’t include such important words as: superlative, adverb, adjective, comparative, and so forth.
No problem, I thought, I’ll just look up the Korean word for these grammatical terms. So I looked up adverb and wrote it on the board, in Korean! I thought, “These kids are going to be impressed that I can write in Korean.” They weren’t, and it turns out that though they “recognized” the word, (in the pure sense that they recognized that it was a Korean word as opposed to an English word) they didn’t “know” what it meant.
So has anyone ever tried to explain what an adverb is, (The part of speech that modifies a verb, adjective, or other adverb) how about trying to explain what an adverb is to someone who doesn’t speak English, or how about trying to explain what an adverb is in English, to someone who barely speaks English? For that matter, how many of you even know what an adverb is? Yeah that class was lots of fun, what I really mean is that was the most frustrating 30 minutes I have ever wasted in my short teaching career.
After that experience, Christina and I talked about the practicality of trying to teach kids grammar, when in all likelihood, they wouldn’t understand us if we were speaking Korean! We decided the best thing to do was to demonstrate how to correctly use the part of speech that we were talking about, then to quickly move on. By quickly I mean give a few sample sentences, make sure the kids pronounce them correctly and then on to the next grammatical term that we have no prayer of ever explaining. So, in my last time in the classroom with Vin’s class, we covered six pages of material, as opposed to the normal 2 pages a day in other classes.
I still can’t decide how I feel about not really teaching something that I am supposed to be teaching. Is it honest? I don’t think so, but as far as I can tell the alternative is insanity for me and extreme boredom for the kids. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Another frustrating part of our teaching duties has been our “Library Class.” When Jennifer, our principal, explained to us our first week what she wanted us to have the kids do, it sounded to me like it was supposed to be a time that the kids honed their reading and comprehension skills. Not too easy, not too hard, and Jennifer told us that we could have them “write about the books they read.” I thought she meant have the kids write summaries of the books. I found out yesterday that is not what she meant.
We did assign the kids to write a brief summary of one of the books they have read. When we gave the assignment, we carefully asked each kid if he/she understood what a summary was. To our surprise, every single one of them said that they did indeed know what a summary was. So we were quite surprised when almost every summary we received was copied word for word out of the book they had just read! Of course we explained to them that “copying” is not writing a summary, and had them do it over again. Nearly every kid complained to Jennifer that the assignment was too hard, and Jennifer told us that we can no longer assign the kids summaries. That does not hurt my feelings at all, less grading for us.
Yesterday after the Library Class, Jennifer called me into her office to tell me that the books we were “assigning” were too hard. That caught me by surprise because I always let the kids choose their own book. Unless they choose a kids book that has 20 words in it, then I make them choose a book that is closer to their level. Anyways to make a long story short, from now on in the Library Class, we have to let the kids choose any book they want (unless they choose a book that is too hard for them, then we have to tell them to get an easier book, more about that later) and generally make sure that the kids are “having fun.”
This will make our Library day much easier and shorter. When we first arrived, Jennifer told us that we should hold the class from 3-7pm. The kids don’t all come in at the same time, they first ones show up at 3pm, and the last ones show up around 5:30pm. To keep the kids reading for one and half to two hours, we had to have them read two books, and they couldn’t be easy kids books, or everyone would have finished in 20 minutes, and we would have been sitting on our hands for quite a while waiting for 7pm to roll around. After my discussion with Jennifer yesterday, I think I understand what we are supposed to do, but I am sure that there will be more problems after next week. If we let the kids read whatever they want, they will be done very quickly, and we will be done by 6pm at the latest.
Yesterday one of the students selected a “Bernstein Bears” book about playing Tic-Tac-Toe, when she got the book, I tried to tell her that it might be hard for her to understand because even though it was fairly short and didn’t have a lot of words (which is why she chose it) the words were hard to understand. After she failed the test for the second time, I spent 20 minutes trying to explain to her the phrase “Heads, I win, tails, you lose.” Let me add that I was unsuccessful in explaining the trick on words to her, even after I procured a Korean coin and showed her that if I say that, I will win every time. In the book, one of the characters always wins when playing Tic-Tac-Toe, because he flips a coin to see who goes first, of course he always wins the coin toss and goes first.
Please don’t misunderstand this post, we love our job, it is so fun and rewarding. We love being in South Korea, they people are great. It is difficult because of the communication barrier, but we are working on our Korean, and hopefully we will overcome that. I would not change places with anyone, I am having fun, and learning skills that I could never acquire in any other situation.