Week Two: A Little Teaching, A Little Corporal Punishment, A Little Magical Place on Earth

It's the second week of school. The students are blissfully done with their midterms. The first year students are gearing up to take their 2 week field trip to America's finest schools: Harvard, Yale, UCLA, etc. This field trip will leave me without students to teach for a while again. I will discuss the field trip in the future. I will be doing some improvising here soon, in the meantime, I will be teaching the dreaded Economics.

The economics and political science teachers at the high school went out for a school sponsored dinner on Tuesday night. We went to the "bulgogi" restaurant, which turned out to be a very impressive, expensive traditional Korean meal where I had to sit on the floor for the first time. Not exactly the easiest thing to do for a foreigner. However physically uncomfortable I was was shadowed by one thing: I made a small breakthrough at the dinner. As I have said, my Home Room teacher, Mr. Lee, does not speak great English yet. I have a hard time understanding him and he does me. So, to adapt, I began speaking much slower and much more articulate. It was like a huge, metal door opened and we actually had a normal conversation. He commented that I was speaking different and I told him that I was making more of an effort to speak well. He appreciated my effort and I appreciated that I wasn't saying "I'm sorry?" after everything he said. I was also a little upset with myself that I had been the cause of our poor communication up to that point. But, I'm glad to have figured it out.

I was able to "teach" two English conversation classes this week. I wanted to introduce myself to the students, talk a little about holidays, and learn about Korea traditions.
The first class was boisterous, obviously more comfortable with their English than other classes. It was hard to keep one side quiet while the other side gave answers to the questions...but they did talk, they did communicate and I think, overall, it was a success.
The second class was a different animal all together. There was minimal communication between them and me. Getting answers to the questions I asked was like pulling teeth from a very tall elephant. I decided I should call on people to ask the question, but that usually incited giggling and frantically looking around. It was obvious that their English was not as confident as the last class and the next time I am going to be more prepared for them...maybe bringing a game for the lesson instead.
A few interesting cultural differences came from the conversation classes:

1. The older children do not celebrate Halloween...I thought they do. The students answered all my Halloween questions like they do celebrate. But, somewhere in the conversation, they told me that Koreans do not participate in Halloween. "Why?" I asked. "Because we are Christian and Christians do not celebrate Halloween." I told her that Americans are very Christian and almost everyone celebrates Halloween. "Yes. But we are more conservative," she said.

2. Christmas in Korea is very different from America. It is a "couples" holiday as mostly couples celebrate it by going out on dates. Children stop getting presents between the ages of 8-10, husband and wife do not exchange gifts with one another and families are not expected to come together on the day. I was a little more than depressed to hear everyone stops getting gifts at a very young age. That's my American consumerism and joy of shopping showing through there. But, more than that, I was sad that families do not get together again after Thanksgiving...it's so nice to look forward to.

As the midterms were over I was finally able to observe a couple of Economics classes. The class is split up between the Korean teacher, Ms. Yoo, and the American teacher, Brian. She teaches one day with the first of the chapter and Brian follows. When Brian teaches, Ms. Yoo is in the classroom to help with questions in Korean, to wake up the sleepers and to smack the back of the heads of students who dare have their Ipods out during a lesson. The last two might be worth a few more sentences :).
There is a lot of touching between the Korean people as they are very affectionate, overly affectionate to an outsider like myself. Girls hold hands in the street, men walk with their arms around each other, couples can't stand more than inches apart out in public. Like I said, a lot of touching. And the touching does not stop once inside a school building. If students are sleeping during the lessons, Ms. Yoo walks to each sleeper individually, puts her arms around their back, gives them several pats and says something in Korean. On average, I say it keeps the student awake about 5-10 more minutes. On Friday, for the first time, I witnessed the opposite of the nice pat on the back when she spotted two boys with an Ipod out. They each got a smack to the back of the head. A very hard smack to the back of the head. I am still wondering how to react to it. Bonnie was sitting in the class at the time so at least we could be shocked together.
I am still imagining how many American teachers daydream of that sort of no holds barred punitive decision making. It was slightly amazing and pretty frightening at the same time. I can't even fathom the reign of horror that would befall the American teacher that dared touch a student like that. I imagine assault charges would be issued at some of the more liberal schools. A local news channel might be called and the older generation, like my Grandma would watch, sigh and say, "What's the big deal? I'm sure they had it coming."

On Thursday nights we have been having a "Pizza Night" with our supervisor at Korea University, Dr. Lee. We discuss the issues we are having at our schools, the cultural differences we see and learn about, and eat a lot of odd pizza. One of the more interesting topics we discuss is the differences between what Koreans think of college and what Americans think of college. Koreans study for years to get into the top tier schools of Korea--all of which are located in Seoul. They forgo a normal childhood in favor of Hogwans (after school private tutoring) and weekend study. Mostly this would be the decision of their parents. If they do not get into the top tier school it is devastating. A less prestigious school is out of the question for many and the suicide rate is very high. According to the World Health Organization in 2009, South Korea's suicide rate was number two in the world. (America, in contrast, was number 40.) In America, in certain circles, this is probably true as well. However, for most American students, we have back up schools, we have parents who are proud just for going on to college, we still have many high school graduates who never see the inside of a college classroom. It does not seem to be as big of a deal in America.
In Korea, it's the only thing that matters to most. So what happens with those people who never got into the top tier school? Or, worse yet, the South Korean who never went on to higher education but instead went straight to work? When the question was posed on Pizza Night, no one could really give a straight answer. It depended on the type of person you were as to whether or not you would ostracize another for being uneducated. Some had friends who were not college educated but they could not discuss anything related to college with the friend. But I continued to wonder what about as a whole, as a societal attitude? I felt the Koreans in the meeting were tip-toeing around the conversation because they knew the truth is, in their still heavily Confucian world, there are still caste systems people live in here in Korea. I am of the opinion that the person who never went to college lives out the rest of his or her life feeling second class to those who did.
And this could happen in America as well, in certain families, but not as often and not as blatant. We are also not immune to a type of caste system that works toward keeping people at a certain level where they must strive very hard to pull themselves up from. But, as a foreign observer, I feel that it is so much more visible here. And those suicide rates only seem to confirm my opinion.

To round out this blog with something positive...Bonnie and I were invited to a magical place called Lotte World yesterday by Bonnie's Korean Buddy, April. It's a sort of pared down, cramped Disney World. It was awesome. I am going to borrow some of Bonnie's pictures (Thanks, Bonnie!) to show on the blog so I have something pictorial for this post. Enjoy!