Homeroom teacher

This is a common homeroom teacher's daily life in middle(junior high) school in Korea.

morning
8.25.
arrive at school.

8.30.
go to the homeroom class and have students in homeroom class do self-study for a while.
before 8.50. give Ss announcements from school and check the role. If there is any absent, call the parents.

9.00.
start the work as a subject teacher. As a subject teacher, you usually have five or six classes to teach. In other words, you should take care of Ss' score about 140~200 students in a year besides your homeroom class Ss.
Between classes, you can have students who need your help in your homeroom class. Ss can come to you for any reason. Someone wants to go home early for being sick, someone fights, someone loses their belongings, etc.

Lunch time.
If you are lucky, you can have lunch with other teachers. However, when something bad thing happens to your homeroom Ss, you should go to the Ss right after you hear the news.
If  you are not lucky; your school doesn't have a cafeteria for Ss, that means you should watch every student get their meal on the plate in the homeroom class. If you don't, someone must not get their meal.

afternoon.
work as a subject teacher and a homeroom teacher too. very similar as you do in the morning.

after finishing all period
you should go to your homeroom class and watch students clean the classroom and other places distributed to your class. If not, some weak Ss will do all work.

Finally,
you check students attendance for the last time and give some direction if you need. and let them go.
From this, your counseling with Ss starts or you should do your paper work which you couldn't finish.
These would take your time so much so that you could leave after 5 or 6 at most.
You can prepare your class usually between classes or after all paper work.
If there is serious fight/arguments or bullying among Ss, you may get calls from angry parents even after 9 or 10 p.m.

when you don't have class
you should handle your paper work. Usually it is much more important than your class. If you didn't finish in time, you can bother other teachers for your incompetence. You may get scolded by your head teachers.


The concept of homeroom teacher may not be easy for foreign teachers to understand. Even though I explain some, it seems that most of them still look confused.