Craftsmanship and painstaking

Once a week I get to teach a whole 45 minutes of 'my' lessons - in the schedule these are shown as 'supplementary' classes, and for quite a while I taught these in the following way:

Each grade at this present school is split into two groups, so we have 1-1 and 1-2, etc.

Only the first and third grade get supplementary classes, and the whole third grade and the whole first grade have to be accommodated in the space of one period.

So I would spend 22 minutes with group 1, then dash to the classroom of group 2 and spend 22 minutes there. The two Korean co-teachers would each be with a group, and use the time to drill the grammar.

Lately, we have changed this - one week I see group 1 for 45 minutes, then next week I see group 2. This has allowed me to prepare more kineasthetic classes for them. However, the latest such class, where I asked the students to use ribbon, paper, crayons, stickers and glue to create a birthday invitation (the curriculum is focusing on the 'will you come...? I will...' grammar construction, so this was a nice way of getting them to write it out as well as reinforcing the use of 'at' and 'on' - at my house, on the 14th etc. It also gives me a chance to spend time talking to them about what they are doing while they are nice and relaxed.

I observed the following phenomenon - those who are good students are also those who took the most pains to make interesting and carefully crafted invitations. Those who are poor students generally just did a scribble or made a mess in terms of glue all over, jagged cuts, bad writing etc.

The idea of the craftsman who patiently and painstakingly makes something out of nothing, even something of the mind, is alien to the poor student. The idea of instant is in their minds, and if a thing cannot be attained in an instant, they give up on it.