This week, I am supposed to be conducting a one to two week English camp here in Northern South Korea. Part of an NETs contract here is to organize and run a winter and summer English camp. These events vary in importance, but from what I can gleen from my colleagues on the intrawebz; generally it’s a two week, 4 hours a day affair. Usually the NET runs the camp by themselves and is generally a low-key, fun-type of event. Lots of people seem to be doing cultural tourism.
A few weeks ago as I was getting ready to plan my camp, I was scouring the internet for something I could do. I mean, the only real knowledge I have is linguistics and even that is debatable. I’m not sure how the kids would react to learning about syntax trees and writing in IPA (regardless of how useful it would be). But I came across a beautiful video on TedEd. It was a short, 5 minute video on “The Hero’s Journey”. I remember hearing about this when I was in high school, but I’ll admit I didn’t pay attention very well. But it struck as ideally suited for the organization of an English Camp.
The Hero’s Journey, or the Monomyth, is the underlying framework that all “hero” stories follow and was put together by Joseph Campbell in, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”. Now, I will probably say some stuff here concerning Cambell’s monomyth that is laughable (I probably already have), lets just keep in mind that I’m approaching this from a Language Acquisition perspective.
What I intend to do here, is provide all the information, data, worksheets and lesson plans for performing this English camp. It’s going to be irrelevant to many people, but hopefully some fellow lonely travelers on the ESL educators trail can use it (at least in part, or to build off of). Sadly, I myself will not be able to do the one thing I wanted to most, at least as concerns this blog; I will not be able to give post-lesson critiques, as my winter camp has been commandeered by my superiors. I now have 1-2 hours, maybe, for four days. Enough to do something, but not nearly on the level of what I intended. I will finish all the materials in the hope that someday I can try it out.
Materials:
Day 1 Lesson Plan
The Hero’s Journey – Day 1 lesson plan
Day 1 worksheets
Hero’s Journey – departure airline ticket
Mark Rasmussen - MA TESOL 
We are going to have an FHE on this!
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