Please feel welcome to stay as long as you like.
Here you can find an inventory of my teaching skillset, a more detailed version of my work history, my resume and CV, and much more. More in the CV section.
Revenue, expenses, profit, percent discounts, and growth over time, taught in four 40-minute lessons. Includes a playable lesson hub, lesson plans, and student advertisements with their own prices and discounts.
Four things guide how I run my classroom every day. Here is what each one looks like in practice.
Accomplishment feels good, and that feeling is what keeps someone learning long after the class ends. I make progress visible so students actually see it happen.
Example: Student work goes up along the back wall of my classroom, early drafts next to finished pieces. In one writing unit, students revised an essay through several drafts, and the strongest ones ran in the school newspaper.
A student who feels anxious, unsafe, or overlooked is not ready to learn. Feeling secure is the necessary foundation. Students bring different needs into the room, from ADHD to autism to plain nerves, and nearly all of them settle when the routine and the organization stay the same.
Example: Clear expectations, consistent routines, and predictable transitions. For a few students who need more structure, that predictability is the difference between staying on task and losing the thread.
From a student: a second grader wrote me a thank-you note last year. Her name is covered here since she's a minor. 
High expectations are a form of respect. When a choice causes a problem, we talk about the choice and what happens next, calmly and directly.
Example: In my team point system, points are earned for team behavior and each team decides how to spend them, so peers hold one another to the standard. When a team falls short, we talk about what didn't work and try again next round.
I am a father of two, and I hold myself to one standard: treat each student the way I would want a teacher to treat my own kids. That means patience, kindness, and respect, and it means listening when a student has something to say.
Example: At my Grade 2 open class, I told parents this directly. It is also why I take a question seriously even mid-lesson, even when it slows things down.
My teaching skillset, grouped by the kind of work. I plan with the Science of Learning in mind: retrieval practice, spaced repetition, and cognitive load.
I built a team-based positive reinforcement system grounded in Kagan cooperative learning research. Points are awarded for team behavior, not individual behavior, and each team decides together how to spend what it has earned.
That makes it different from individual token systems such as ClassDojo. Students have to hold one another accountable, and the team stays cohesive because everyone shares the outcome.
Read the full case study: rules, strikes and blue cards, daily routines, and the posters
The evidence behind the skills list. Jump to a section or read straight through.
Read the vocabulary system case study · See how the words are chosen
When I run into a classroom problem that off-the-shelf tools don't solve, I design the solution and direct Claude to build it. I don't present this as personal programming skill.
A Python pipeline that prints tests and answer keys for all 20 lists from a single source.
Case study24+ interactive lessons and games on a fixed 1280 by 720 canvas for classroom TVs, built from the coursebook I am teaching.
Case studyA formative assessment pipeline. I photograph student work, Claude scores and sorts it by skill, and a Google Sheet tracks each student and skill over time.
Case studyAn adaptive weekly, monthly, and yearly planner that recalculates pacing automatically when a lesson is skipped or cut short.
See it in My CreationsA desktop app (the Ribbon overlay) that runs over ebooks and slides as a team score tracker, timer, and randomizer, now with an attendance module.
Try the live demoTakes a photo of a rough-draft essay and produces a worksheet that helps students find and fix their own errors. I used it to rank essays for the school newspaper.
A conversational Claude project for second-draft feedback and rubric-based grades on essays students submit as text.
A five-lesson Grade 5 ELA unit on travel writing and evidence in reading, written as a teacher candidate in my DC K-6 preparation program, with clinical practice at Banhana English.
Three of the interactive lesson decks I direct Claude to build, shown as I actually use them in class. Each is a single self-contained page.
Tools I built to solve a real problem in my own teaching, and sample lessons I've made along the way.
I couldn't find a tool that did everything I needed for classroom management, so I built one myself, with a little help from Claude. This is Ribbon, version 3.
It's a lightweight tool that starts as a small floating button sitting on top of anything on your screen: a PowerPoint, a website, an ebook, a PDF, whatever you're teaching from. Click it, and it expands into a full ribbon of tools, still floating on top of everything underneath. I've since combined it with a separate whiteboard website, which replicates most of what my standalone lesson decks do, with far less prep time.
Try it here (no download version)
This is a self-contained HTML version. There's nothing to download to try it.
An adaptive weekly, monthly, and yearly planner. It tracks grade-level lesson progression against the school schedule, and when a lesson is skipped, cut short, or interrupted, it recalculates the class's position in the curriculum automatically.
A built-in AI advisor recommends whether unfinished content should carry into the next session, fold into a later review, or be dropped, weighing retrieval-practice and pacing tradeoffs. It tracks holidays and recurring events, and surfaces how many free days remain for games, review, or extra instruction.
Currently configured for Dongsung's own schedule. The underlying template could be adapted to another teacher's schedule with modification. Screenshots below; book titles and the school name are redacted.
An 800-word vocabulary curriculum across five grades and four proficiency tiers. Every word passes through six weighted gates, anchored to each grade-and-level cell's own prior-semester profile rather than one flat difficulty cutoff, so a high-level cell still demands rarer words than a low-level one even after the whole list moves up a notch.
Concreteness and age-of-acquisition weren't in the first version. I tested raw adult-corpus frequency alone first, and it let rare adult-domain words through while blocking perfectly good concrete words a child already knows. Adding those two gates fixed it.
I check my own work: every grade-and-level cell's average word length moved up slightly from last semester, never backward, never by more than about half a letter. That was the design goal — extend gradually, not jump — and the numbers confirm it held. Paired with an AI-assisted process that generates print-ready tests and answer keys directly from the word lists.
I've built one of these for every chapter of a full novel unit, plus dozens of others across four grades. Each one has a lesson plan included, built right into the deck. They take real time to make, so these days I mostly build them for game days, review days, and explicit vocabulary or grammar instruction — for most day-to-day lessons, a combination of other tools (especially Ribbon) and websites gets the job done with far less prep.
Grade 6, Module 4. A two-day pair covering listening, speaking, vocabulary, and a group mini-essay. Lesson plan included.
Grade 2, Unit 5. Two linked lesson hubs building transportation vocabulary and everyday phrases. Lesson plan included.
One chapter from a full-novel, EAL-focused interactive unit built chapter by chapter across the whole book. Lesson plan included. This is a demo of the format, not the full set.
More lesson plans — a five-lesson Grade 5 unit written during my DC K-6 licensure program.
Teaching in Korea since July 2008. Most recent first.
Dongsung Elementary School, Busan
I took this role on purpose, to add full-time K-12 classroom experience to my university and academy background.
Banhana English, Busan
Dong-A University, Busan
Delivered EFL coursework and TOEIC test preparation instruction over a nine-and-a-half-year appointment, alongside Banhana English.
Pukyong National University, Busan
INTI International University, Nilai, Malaysia
Delivered university-level EFL instruction in 8-week terms.
Rough totals, calculated from average weekly hours at each role, not exact records. Left off the CV on purpose. INTI is not included yet; I taught in 8-week stretches there and don't have a reliable count of how many per year.
Hours are estimates from typical weekly teaching loads, not payroll records.
Licensure, degrees, and the learning I am doing now.
The full CV is below and available as a download. A shorter one-page resume will be added here separately once it exists.
EAL/ELA educator based in Busan, South Korea since 2008, with 18 years of international teaching experience. Currently teaches Grades 2, 4, and 6 EAL and ELA at Dongsung Elementary School while co-leading Banhana English, a literacy and test-prep academy since 2016. Uses evidence-informed approaches, including retrieval practice, spaced repetition, cognitive load management, and Kagan Cooperative Learning, to structure instruction and classroom culture. Designs the instructional frameworks behind custom curriculum, assessment, and classroom-management tools. Holds a Washington DC K-6 teaching license and an M.Ed. in TESOL; pursuing a Secondary Mathematics endorsement.
INTI International University, Nilai, Malaysia
Delivered university-level EFL instruction in 8-week terms.
Pukyong National University, Busan
Delivered university-level EFL instruction across 15-week semesters and summer camps; received the Outstanding Teacher Award in 2013 and 2014.
Maple College and KJC Academy, Busan
Delivered basic English instruction to elementary-age EFL learners at two Busan hagwons early in his teaching career.
bryanmims.com — A personal portfolio site with my teaching philosophy, classroom systems, a Grade 4 math unit, and playable classroom tools.
Growth Spiral — A formative feedback system that turns photographed student work into instructional data: skills are automatically assessed and logged in a database tracking individual progression over time, informing targeted review, micro-lessons, extension activities, and flexible grouping. Currently under construction.
Ribbon — A standalone classroom management application developed for daily classroom use. Displays and logs daily and monthly team points, attendance, and behavioral data, and includes a timer and other functions used throughout live instruction.
Vocabulary Assessment System — An 800-word vocabulary curriculum across five grades and four proficiency tiers using a six-factor word-selection model weighing corpus frequency, CEFR level, age of acquisition, morphological generativity, concreteness, and curriculum fit. Paired with an AI-assisted process that generates print-ready tests and answer keys directly from the word lists.
Full-Novel Interactive Unit — An EAL-focused, multi-part interactive lesson series built around a complete novel, covering theme analysis, character development, comprehension, vocabulary development, and more, chapter by chapter across the full book.
Adaptive Weekly Lesson Planner — Tracks grade-level lesson progression against the school schedule. When a lesson is skipped, cut short, or interrupted, the tool recalculates the class's position in the curriculum automatically, and a built-in AI advisor recommends whether unfinished content should carry into the next session, fold into a later review, or be dropped, weighing retrieval-practice and pacing tradeoffs. Tracks holidays and recurring events, and surfaces how many free days remain for games, review, or extra instruction. Currently configured for Dongsung's own schedule; the underlying template could be adapted to another teacher's schedule with modification.
Lead Counselor, Talisman Summer Programs, North Carolina (Summers 2000, 2002, 2005) — a summer camp for children and adolescents with ADHD, autism, and other cognitive and behavioral challenges.
Science of Learning-Informed Instructional Design · Kagan Cooperative Learning · AI-Assisted Curriculum & Tool Development · Data-Informed Differentiation · EAL/ELA Curriculum Design, Grades 2-6 · Formative Assessment System Design
The best way to reach me is email.
Email: REPLACE-WITH-YOUR-EMAIL
Phone: +82 010 9098 1360
Location: Busan, South Korea
I am open to international school positions starting Fall 2027. My wife is also an educator, pursuing US teaching certification, and we are searching together.