Brainwashin'

So, teaching. I know that's probably the thing most of my friends back in America are most curious about, so after the brief introduction to what's going on before, this is my first subject to tackle.



There are a few different models of English education in Korea, but the one I deal with is pretty common. As I mentioned before, I work at a hagwon, which is a private after-school hours-institution. There are English hagwons for every age and skill level. Mine is pretty run of the mill, dealing with kids from first grade up, although there's only one class of high school students, and I teach the next oldest group of kids, which has one kid in 9th grade and the others are all 7th or 8th. In all cases, all students do six periods a week, three with a Korean teacher, three with a foreign teacher. For MWF students, that means two periods a day, for T/Th students, it means three periods a day, each day with 2 periods of one teacher and one period of another, which switches every other day.

We have a pretty set curriculum at my hagwon, which is the case with most institutes. Unlike some, though, we're also told exactly which pages to do each day, which means we have no substantial lesson planning to do, unless we want to add in some extra activities or visuals for kids. I usually don't. I think my colleagues don't either, but I could be wrong; we don't really get to sit in on each other's classes.

In most cases, the schedule works like this: The foreign teacher does a couple pages of dialogues and vocabulary reinforcement, drilling the kids a little bit, and doing some workbook pages to doubly reinforce it. There's very little teaching in our situation; in all honesty, we work more as correctors than as teachers. This is not always true at hagwons, but it's how it works at mine. The Korean teachers do the actual grammar teaching.

Our classes are small... average size of maybe 6-8 students, though I have one of 13. The kids are absolutely adorable, in my opinion. The younger, the better. At that age, when they're energetic and annoying, somehow, its more okay than when they're older.

As far as being older goes, the middle school students are a totally different story. They're sleepy, depressed, and overworked. Of course, the same can be said for most people in the world, but we all hope that middle school students have it better, or easier. For those that don't know, education in Asia is, in a phrase, bat-shit insane. Students basically have to go to school from 8am til 10pm, in many cases, often with several hours on Saturday, too. The public school ends at around 5pm for middle school students, I understand, and for high school students I've had different reports, so I'm not sure what's true. In any event, after school's over, its time for more hagwons. Unfortunately, that means that by the time they're home, its too late for them to really internalize what they've learned, or practice it, or let some of their (hopefully) new-found skills spring to use in the rest of their life.

So they basically never have time to study. Or breathe. Or live. Shocking, then, that they should be so distraught, isn't it? Of course it isn't.

Why is it like this? Hopefully you're asking, if you don't know. Maybe someone can chime in and give additional reasons, but I'd say the answer is basically due to the overall homogenization of Korea, and most pertinently the homogenization of its economy. There are a few big companies that basically rule Korea. A couple are familiar names to the whole world: Samsung, Hyundai. There's also LG, of course, and then a pretty much Korea-only company, Lotte. These guys make everything here, or pretty much everything, including jobs. Everyone goes to university and hopes to get a job at one of these four companies, and really everyone seems to want to work at Samsung.

To get an idea of how much these companies contribute to the economy here in Korea, consider that the GDP is about 1.5 trillion dollars per year (CIA Factbook). Samsung alone puts up about 10% of that, at 16,200,000,000,000 won earned last year, which is pretty close to 15 billion dollars. How many people did they hire, though? 25,000, of which only 9,000 were new college graduates (courtesy of DongA News -- thanks Jihee!) I haven't found any estimates on college graduates per year, but its fair to say that there at least hundred's of thousands of graduates each year, with a college attendance rate that far surpasses most developed economies.

To work at Samsung, you have to compete against everyone else, of course, and the applicant pool is far more vast than the available number of jobs. To get the job, you need to have the right test scores, the right certification of skills you probably don't really know how to use very well (you just went to hagwons for the skills, which stamped off on you after you complete a perfunctory test at the end of your term to get the certificate) and you really need to have gone to one of the top three universities in the country.

Everyone knows this, so parents are rightly worried. There isn't a spirit of entrepreneurship in Korea. Small businesses aren't a thing here, although they of course exist; they're just not really trumpeted as a useful pursuit in life.

In all reality, all hope is not lost if you don't work for one of those few companies. I know quite a few people who are satisfied working in graphic design, and they do it for small time companies. Seems to work for them, and I'm sure there are lots of other options there. However, its certainly not prestigious, and that's definitely a big thing here.

So what's a mother to do if she knows her child has to get all these crazy test scores? Put their kid through all the available schooling possible, making the common error of thinking that school-time= improvement time. One thing I've learned from all my years in private education is that the less time a student has to engage with material outside of class, the less possible improvement you'll see.

Nevertheless, at the end of the cycle, once a student has gone through tons of education from inception to the end of university, they end up with the same inflated test scores as everyone else, making the job application process paradoxically even harder.

Actually, Korea knows that this is happening (even if the mothers seem to be blind to it). President Lee Myung-Bak, a deeply unfavored figure in the country, recently did a tour of vocational schools, trying to say that they're a good alternative for people. Sound a little bit like politicians in your home countries saying that maybe college isn't for everyone, or that maybe we shouldn't push for such high college attendance rates? It should, if you read the news much. There are both good things and bad things to be said about this line of thought, but it isn't gaining much traction yet in Korea as far as I can tell.

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In class, we have 40 minutes. It usually takes a few minutes to get everyone's attention, and depending on the class, it can take anywhere from 15-30 minutes to get through the material assigned for the day. After that, its usually play time. Depending on the class, this either means Uno, or some sort of vocabulary game, especially the Touch game, where I write vocab on the board and split the class in two teams, whereupon they send successive pairs of kids to try to smack the correct word that I call out at any given time. These seem to be the top two favorite games of all time of my students, and though we sometimes try to switch to other games, we always come back to these. Uno is incredibly boring to me by now, having played hundreds of games in the past few months, and, in fact, sometimes incredibly irritating. Its weird to watch students who've also played at least 50 games that still don't quite understand the rules. At this point its definitely not because of a language problem, but, instead, because of basic comprehension problems.

The levels of English in students are highly variable, sometimes even in just one class. I guess this is sometimes what they call "intelligence". Some kids, despite their inability to speak English, are still good at communicating. Others just look like deer in the headlights, all the time. Of course there are also many kids that have decent levels of English, and I've been fortunate enough to have three classes of students where I'd say that the level is actually pretty high, almost approximating native English-speaking students of the same ages, with certain almost unavoidable differences.

The attitudes of the kids seem to be almost universally positive, in my classes. I don't know if I'm lucky, or what, but they're just cool and want to have a good time, and I get to act super silly with them. This might come as a surprise to many people, who see me as always cool and collected (or boring and serious, depending on your preference), but I actually love being silly. I find its a heck of a lot easier with kids.

I think that about wraps it up, actually. If anyone reading this has any questions about the kids or school life, leave comments below! I'll answer them.