Kids These Days

Over the past week, I’ve spent dozens of hours with little Korean children. Some of them are well behaved, some of them are not, but all of them are pretty fascinating to me, because not only have I never taught kids before, I’ve never taught Korean kids before.

I teach grades 2-9, of varying levels of English competency. Although supposedly the older kids are more mature, because of the differing levels of ability, the behavior and attitude of the kids is all over the map.

In general, I have found that kids are kids everywhere. Other than the fact that they speak (and look) Korean, I have a hard time seeing where the cultural difference actually influences their behavior. The younger kids have boundless energy and love to zoom around the room or throw things at each other. When you point out that this is wrong, they just look at you like you’re an idiot. I understand; they can’t fight what’s in their nature.

Similarly, the older middle-school aged students are less antsy but twice as talkative and gossipy, and a lot of them are little monsters. Maybe it’s hormones, maybe it’s youthful rebellion in earnest, but a lot of them I feel have a nastier impulse to see what will drive the teacher to either throw someone out the window or, better yet, jump out himself.

What was this nonsense about kids in Asia having more respect for the teaching profession? I certainly haven’t noticed this.

All the classes were extremely talkative and/or wild until I layed down some form of disciplinary rules. Nobody likes writing on the board, and the older kids get very upset when I split them up for talking. Ironically, I think that the younger kids are actually more responsive to threatening to lower their test grades (or fail them outright). That’s because, this being a private school, the younger kids take it more for granted that this is what they’re “supposed” to be doing, while the older kids  have surely learned by now that this just that place that their parents make them go at night and that if they were to get zeroes on all of their quizzes and tests there’s nothing I, as a teacher, could really hold over their heads (except for calling their parents).

I feel like that means I will have to establish order with the older kids largely through cult of personality. That’s been easier with some groups than others. I feel I have already bonded with some of the students, while in others it might take a while. Part of that has to do with the lesson plan. I started teaching in the middle of a Unit, and some of the material lends itself to more fun activities than others.

Last Monday and Tuesday were very stressful as they mostly consisted of me trying to catch up with what the students were doing prior to the time I got there. I also needed to get a feel for each class’ respective abilities and preferences. The little kids seem to enjoy songs and reciting verbatim lines from their book (how much learning actually gets done seems suspect to me, but then again, when I draw pictures on the board they are very good at identifying them). Some of the older kids don’t like to talk and would prefer to sit with their head down doing worksheets all day. And some groups are just more demanding in general, wanting some kind of more engaging and interactive experience that a textbook cannot provide.

My kids have asked me all sorts of questions. How old am I? Where am I from? Why did I come to Korea? Do I have a girlfriend? How tall am I?

Their cultural references are all over the place. They know Yoda, sort of, but they don’t know what movie he’s from. They know the Cookie Monster and Big Bird, but not Oscar the Grouch. The safest bets, movie-wise, to reference in the class, are Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. However, one class seemed very interested in “yogurt” until I realized they were actually trying to say “Hogwarts.”

You might have heard eastern English pronunciations anglicized to things like “Englishee” or “finishee” and this is a very factual trait among my students and also fairly annoying. I understand, up to a point, that some of our sounds are difficult for them to pronounce. However, many of the students CAN correctly make the sounds, like “ch” or “sh” without adding an extra syllable on the end; they simply think it’s extremely hilarious to do so. With my younger students, I will let it slide, but with some of my older/better students, I need to make it clear to them that if they have any aspirations of going to an English-speaking country and they continue to add extra syllables, they will be laughed at, and it will be miserable.

In Barcelona I got very used to asking things in Spanish and being responded to in English. Even with something benign like that, it’s hard to realize until you travel abroad the benefit (or detriment) of your ability to blend in. I would be a lot more tolerant of my student’s mistakes if I didn’t know that they were capable of much better accuracy.

But I have digressed (significantly)! Here are, in bullet points, some of my favorite moments from over the first week:

*my fourth grade students DEMANDING that I mark their papers with a smiley face and a 100% (if they did indeed get 100%).

*having them write stories about a dragon. At first, one of the students was being a wiseass and his sentences were “Mr. Dragon was hopeless, Mr. Dragon was important,” etc. I made him write an extra clause (ie, Mr. Dragon was hopeless because…) and it turned out, he did know what the adjectives mean! I lost the paper, but I think he wrote something like “Mr. Dragon was useless because all he does is breath fire and be ugly” or something like that.

*reading a student’s assessment of Oscar the Grouch. They were asked to use three adjectives to describe a character’s lifestyle, and while they agreeably characterized Oscar as “dirty”, they also thought he was “happy because he is free” and “free because Oscar can get all the garbage he wants.” That was a beautiful moment.

*one of the kids was whining “teacher! teacher!” and I went over to him to see what was wrong. He showed me a bloody tooth, and I, very concerned, asked him if he needed anything and advised him to go immediately downstairs so he could get proper medical treatment. Then he told me that this had happened three hours ago, he just wanted very badly to show me his tooth. “Oh, that’s nice,” I told him. And maybe it was. As long as he didn’t throw it at anyone.

*Using Yoda in a worksheet to teach students how to properly write sentences with subject-verb-object agreement. The pleasure I derived from this really had nothing to do with the students; it was just that it was my first self-made worksheet and I was so happy that I had come up with a way to entertain both myself and the students in the process of learning.

There’s been plenty of nice moments. My favorite class is a group of fifth graders who do everything quickly with 100% accuracy but also have distinct and fun personalities. Although they DO seem to get an unhealthy amount of enjoyment from an old knockoff of Jenga called “Stack-Em.”

Not everything has been nice. My lowest point was getting so angry at students that I broke a golden rule-no sarcasm in class (which someone pointed out to me might have actually been sarcasm on the part of the school)-and made some very very badly behaving girls write 20 times on the wall something to the effect of “talking while the teacher is talking or giving a quiz is a dangerous activity that kills people.” I initially wanted them to write “kills fairies” but I wasn’t sure if that would go over their heads or not. I was going for something insipid enough to make them feel embarrassed to write something that stupid on the wall. At the very least, they got the message that I wasn’t giving them free reign in the classroom just because they were a bunch of bitchy middle-school girls. I do know all their names, now.

Discipline will continue to be an ongoing issue. Speaking of discipline, the word count for this post is approaching 1500 words and so I’m going to stop and save something for later. We’ll get to my new hangout spot, my apartment, and the weekend in due time.