I was the Walter Cronkite of My Middle School!

I have about three months left in Korea. I’m out of here at the end of February.  School is winding down. I no longer teach the third grade students, so my schedule is wide open.  The semester ends sometime in December. I don’t know when, which should speak to the level of responsibility I have at my job.

The speaking tests are horrendous though. Because third graders take their final tests and have to apply (you heard me, apply) to high schools, they’ve already taken their English speaking tests. But I’m in the middle of correcting and grading the speaking tests of the first and second graders. For me it’s a herculean task.  Repetitive and boring and time consuming.  Especially the part where I have to correct the dialogues they’ve written. Some of them are quite funny, but mostly it’s drudgery.

This week I had my last Friday morning English broadcast. I started out loathing it, but I’ve come to appreciate it, begrudgingly. I do like being a nerd and telling the students about NASA and volcanoes. When will I ever have a job that has been do a broadcast again?  I guess my journalist days are over.

Broadcast equipment

Ms. Choi preparing for the broadcast

Broadcast room - Ms. Choi, broadcast students and me shamelessly taking photos of myself on the TVs

That blurry, dark image on the TV is me. My God! I'm famous.

Me and my brave student cohost for that week

Ha! Ms. Choi's expression cracks me up.

A Teacher’s Dinner

Haemul pajeon

There was a school wide dinner last night to celebrate all of the hard work that the teachers put into last Friday’s sports day and Saturday’s festival.  Of course I had nothing to do with any of those preparations, but they are nice and invited me.  There must have been thirty teachers at dinner.  We went to a pajeon restaurant at a nearby university.  It was in an area of town I’d never seen.  I probably had at least ten helpful teachers and the principal inform me that pajeon is Korean pizza, though honestly it is more like a fried pancake.  It’s also made with green onions and, much to my chagrin, sea creatures with tentacles. I’m quite familiar with the dish.  Don’t they know I’ve lived here two years? It’s regularly served in the teacher’s cafeteria, where I eat. I had pajeon in my first two weeks here.

Pajeon is generally served with makgeolli, a Korean rice wine.  It’s pretty tasty.  Probably comparable to sake, but it’s served cool.  It also goes down easy, though I only intended on drinking it when an older male teacher wanted to cheers.  There were so many bottles of makgeolli on our table!    I was seated across from some of my co-teachers, who are so wonderful in the classroom, but didn’t seem so wonderful as conversational partners right then.  Every topic I broached just fell flat, from the mundane to the more interesting.  The restaurant was decorated in a charmingly cheap style.  Like a bar in some poor, tropical country.  The walls were hung with reed mats, there were christmas lights strung up everywhere and an array of plastic flowers and foliage.  I felt terribly sad.  I miss my family, my friends from home, and I have recently understood that I may very well spend this Christmas by myself.  I also think I’ve got a cavity in one of my molars.  It’s somewhere on my lower jaw on the right side. I tried not to cry.  I succeeded.

The waitresses were curt and fast.  So much food.  Like I said, I kind of turned my nose up to the pajeon because of the purple tentacled beasties, but they also served fried peppers stuffed with meat, which, when my co-teacher described it to me, I thought she said mint instead of meat.  It was certainly a meat which I would never be able to place.  Korea does love its mystery meat.

The Christmas lights looked pretty reflected in my milky liquor.  That made me feel better.  I also began to consume bowls of it (it’s served in little bowls) and that also made me feel better.  Ah, a bracing drink.  The principal sat at our table (there were four or five tables) and cheersed us and told stories that I didn’t understand, but which someone translated for me.  A beggar woman came by selling gum and he bought all of it and gave it to us.  He’s a nice man.  The teachers are quite happy with him from what they tell me.  I snuck out for some fresh air, as goes the dubious euphemism, and when I came back I had to change seats and I sat next to the principle. I was having a nice time.  He knocked over his glass of makgoelli.  It spilled into half eaten dishes and onto his seat and on the art teacher.  He left, red faced, and joined another table.  We cleaned it up.

After dinner I went with ten or so teachers for a coffee.  Mrs. Kwan sat next to me and I was so happy that she was talking to me, initiating most of the topics.  I felt like much less of an alien.  She told me the tentative dates for the English winter camp, so I also have a good idea of when I’ll be free for winter vacation, which I intend to spend in Thailand with Maria, a dear friend from home, and that I’ll have even more time off than I thought.

They dropped me off in my neighborhood. The history teacher with the wig drove.  I’m so used to riding in the car with taxi drivers that riding in the car with someone normal driving feels positively too cautious and slow.  Though I hadn’t drank in an hour and certainly wasn’t drunk (not drunk drunk) I had a sour stomach.  I read for two hours with a vague feeling of nausea, and no idea why I had it.  At 10:45 pm some bastards came knocking on my door.  How rude! I think it had something to do with finding out the number of people living in the apartment building.  They had clipboards. I wasn’t prepared to answer the door, but I thought they deserved to be yelled at for disturbing people so late in the evening.  I was sick, as I said, and feeling uncomfortable, so I opened the door with a comforter rapped around me and yelled at them in English. They didn’t seem as offended as I desired.

I finished my book (The Secret History, by Donna Tartt) I don’t know how many times I’ve read it now.  I love that book.  Well I finished it and fell asleep and nothing ever became of my nausea.

When you teach in the Seoul public school system you will always have a co-teacher in the classroom with you.  That’s a Korean English teacher.  They run the gamet.  You may have a teacher who is unable to control their own classroom, let alone assist you while you are teaching, who struggles with English, the language in which you communicate, and spends your entire lesson with their backside in a chair.  Or you may have an experienced, delightful co-worker whose control of the students make them a joy to teach and the teacher a joy to teach with.  I’m lucky because I have mostly had excellent co-teachers who I’ve learned (am learning) a lot from.

But I have had to also learn to control my anger toward the impotent teachers.  I am not saying I have mastered that yet.  When a teacher fails to control the students the brief time I have with them and spend reprimanding them is frustrating and probably ineffectual.  When I am calling for everyone to wake up, pay attention, and the Korean English teacher’s mouth is agape and does not follow my lead, I get pissed.  When, from across the room, she watches me try to quiet chattering students who are right in front of her and she doesn’t contribute and pointedly looks the other way, I get super pissed.  Limp fools!  Where is your backbone? Where is your sense of duty?  Tee hee, duty.

One of my favorite English teachers is also one of the teachers who I’ve had problems with in the classroom.  Poor thing.  She seems totally beat this semester.   Our first class this Monday was a low level boys class.  All of her classes are low level, no wonder she looks unhappier.  There are three or four boys who muck it up for the rest of the kids.  I can’t teach until these handful of boys sit down and shut up, and I don’t think anything but an act of God could do that.  I see the bored faces of the potentially good students and feel bad for them all.  Well, the ringleader of the annoying boys lit some paper on fire in the classroom while I was teaching.  Then his pal turned on a fan on the wall to disperse the smell of smoke and the ringleader tossed the singed paper out of the window.

At least this isn’t the US.  It would be so much worse.

The ban on corporeal punishment, which was to begin in October, already seems to be wildly failing.  The older, male gym teacher in my office still regularly whacks the boys with a stick.  Not to say that I don’t see the benefit to myself if I was allowed to wail on the little fucks who won’t shut up and who light fires in the back of the classroom.  Stress relief!

My friend Amanda who has taught in Korea and in the US told me that yes, it is much worse in the US.  Especially because they can talk back to you.  Maybe there are some benefits to speaking a language most of your students can’t understand.  She also said that the favorite topic of the teachers at her school is the kind of mood lifting drugs each takes to deal with the stress.  Damn.

It’s fun to talk about the outrageous stuff that happens at my school, but mostly my students are really good kids that I really enjoy interacting with.  And I really enjoy my job.  Also, to people unfamiliar with corporeal punishment, it seems like the halls would be filled with wailing and fear, but that isn’t how it is at all. My objection to it is that it legitimizes a kind of violence that I think is bad for a society and for individuals, and also that it isn’t an effectual form of punishment.  Teenagers value their time way more, and if you took that from them it would be a much better punishment I think.

Comfort Zone lets me down and an NSET’s educated (though not formally educated in education) opinion on education

Comfort Zone, a restaurant in Hyewha, is one of my regular weekend haunts.  It has an appealing atmosphere, a  staff who speak English, and western style food that, if not quite the best around, is at least quite inexpensive and significantly closer to my neighborhood than Itaewon.  I’ve never said a word against it, but this is the second weekend in a row that there credit and debit card machine hasn’t worked.  How a business can go nine days without fixing something as integral to their pocket books, I don’t know.  They’re chill and have just added it to a tab for me because I didn’t have cash.  I’ve worked my fair share of service industry jobs back in the US, and a malfunctioning credit card machine is fixed in hours at best, within 24 hours at worst. Your boss wants to kill you (even though you are blameless for the fickleness of technology) and the customers want to kill you too, just because you’re the messenger.  Just another case of the rampant incompetence I see in this country.  (Disclaimer: I don’t hold anyone personally responsible for it all.  As much as I gripe about these things in my daily life and in my work life, I work with several extremely competent and amazing English teachers.)  Take away: I like this place.  Fix your damn machine.  They are new to modernity and all of the systems that come with it, a fact which I was more apt to remember when I thought I would be able to join the Peace Corps.  I was even pissing in the squattors with relish.  Look how adaptable I am!  Ah well.

The students take their all important final exams starting Thursday.  (This exam is the only grade that matters.  It’s especially important for my 3rd grade students who will be applying to high schools soon.)  I don’t have a lesson plan for Monday and it’s Sunday night.  Boy I’ve been here before.  On Tuesday and Wednesday I have to continue the speaking tests, so I wasn’t motivated to bust my balls making a useful review for the students.  I asked Ms. Choi about the material they would be tested on which we’ve covered in my class.  There are two questions.  Two.  I’d mentioned to the impeccably dressed and forever nervous Mrs. Kwan that I would produce a review for our classes, but with Ms. Choi’s information looks like a review shan’t happen.

Elizabeth has referenced something on her beautifully designed journal implying that I shouldn’t disdain the Korean educational system for passing students no matter what their grades because grades don’t motivate students.  I emphatically disagree, though I can only draw on my experience in one Korean public middle school and my own experiences as a student.  Here is the quote she snagged from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance :

The student, with no hard feelings on anybody’s part, would have flunked himself out. Good! This is what should have happened. A large amount of money and effort had been saved and there would be no stigma of failure and ruin to haunt him the rest of his life. No bridges had been burned.

A rebuttal: Firstly, this is way out of context so I’m not terribly sure to what age of student they are referring to.  Moving on. Grades are not arbitrary.  Ideally they should be a reflection of what one has learned but also, and probably even more, the effort and responsibility one puts into the assignment.  (I’ve been on both sides of this fence.  I’ve been a student with good grades and with bad grades.  It was never about my intelligence but about my work ethic.)  Work ethic is something you have to teach.  You have to teach organization and responsibility, because those are life skills too.  Ahem, even I could use a few refresher courses about organization.  Besides, a grade in itself can also be a reward, because at best it is positive reinforcement.  If a student’s grades are low, that should be a sign to their parents, their teachers and themselves that they have to alter their habits to keep up and actually get something like an education while they are at school.

You are doing a student a disservice by promoting them into higher grades when they can’t perform decently at their current grade.  They haven’t learned responsibility or the material which will be built upon by the higher grades.  It’s ensuring that students who are behind or get away with being remarkably lazy will continue to do so, or be unable to get their work together.

If a student isn’t motivated by the material, does that mean there isn’t value in learning it?  Of course not.  Emphatically of course not.  There are things to be learned in material we don’t find interesting because we aren’t omniscient beings and don’t know what can move us.  Maintaining a narrow world view is nothing to be proud of.  Plus one can learn things from a teacher or a material that one didn’t expect.  That’s true for everything in life, so there.  It’s also good to learn to attempt to understand and care for things which one doesn’t have an immediate passion for.

Failing is failing is failing, grade or not.  There are things I’ve failed at when a grade has never been possible, and it feels like crushing failure.  A bridge has been burned.  In work life and personal life those failures can be more monumental to overcome because unlike school,  you may not be given an extension.  A friendship, for instance, doesn’t have summer courses.  Education will give people many many many extra chances.

I do agree that motivated students would be motivated if there weren’t many grades or many reviews.  But educational systems don’t get to pick and choose.  They can’t, nor should they, only take the brightest and most motivated students.

I’ve said it before, there may be a thousand flaws in school systems, but god damn I believe in education.  It’s a beautiful thing for an individual mind, and it’s essential for a nation’s development.