Okay, I do.
I want to complain. I feel that even though there may be many hundreds of others doing so, I need to complain a little bit about the state of affairs I have gotten myself into here in Korea for another one-year contract. If I'm not totally mistaken or blowing things out of proportion or overgeneralizing, the middle school kids here have gotten worse and the elementary school kids have gotten better!
So I guess this'll be a complaint along with a non-complaint. The little kiddies have been WAY better behaved than I thought they would be! Aside from one or two, who are nightmares incarnate and there's nothing you can do about them, so far so good! SO FAR! And if I ever feel like I just can't deal with their fighting and noise, I just give them some colouring to do! It's been awesome! SO FAR.
As for the older kids... The ones I had high hopes for... the middle school kids who I had always had such great results with in the past here in Korea and the age group from which MANY of my favourite all time students come from, correct me if I'm wrong but most of them have turned into spoiled little brats.
I remember the good ole days here in Korea when these kids had the whole world of pressure and weight on their shoulders and they treated their foreign teachers with much the same respect that was required to appease their Korean teachers. Gone are those days, my friends! Half way anyway. They still give the fake respect owed to their Korean teachers. I see a lot of Korean teachers who absolutely live for that! But to be fair, the Korean teachers are probably only that way to get SOMETHING out of their jobs. They certainly don't get very well paid!
The kids just know now the distinction between the foreign and the Korean teachers. They may even know the wage differences and that we get BOTH days of the weekend off when the Korean teachers don't. And they take total advantage of that distinction. Maybe the kids know that if we, the foreign teachers, use many of the discipline tactics that are popular here, we'll be doing things that will get us fired in our home countries. Who knows?
Whatever it is, I have noticed a distinct lack of effort on the part of the previously accomodating, maybe OVER-accomodating Korean middle school kids! What has lead to this? In such a short time?
I was told before I got here that there has been a new ruling made that delivers the middle school student from the highly stressful high school entrance examinations. These have been done away with although the even more stressful college entrance examinations remain. I was all for the elimination in that it releases these poor, overburdened kids from the stress and high expectations that probably should not be heaped upon such youngsters just to get into a slightly better, (supposedly), high school.
But now that I have seen the results, I'm not so sure...
I know it may be hard to believe but, maybe taking away the harsh and overburdening schedules these kids have had for decades, has simply made them lazy. Rather than have them take the high road and continue on in a responsibly dedicated study mode, most of these kids have fully exercised their freedom. I used to think I would have LOVED to see that! But I don't think I ever pictured myself as their teacher in that freedom scenario. It's not fun. Lemme tell you!
And much like the bosses I have worked beneath, the kids have all kinds of tactics they believe are clever and they can use to outsmart the foreign teacher, but really, in most cases, the foreign teacher has seen this a zillion times in his/her less socially repressed society and is very aware of what is happening. They are just not comfortable letting the other party know it. Because that could jeopardize a pretty sweet set of working conditions compared to the crap job the teacher can get in his/her own country. So we, the teachers, ignore the jeuvenile tactics, leading these amateurs to believe they are outsmarting us, and we try to act like we are not aware of every little trick being played on us.
Just tonight I had a whole class of people, the boys mostly, (and this is just one of many wrenches they throw into the works that I have overcome countless times in countless classes, the boy/girl thing like 16 year olds are all crippled by their shyness toward the opposite sex so you can't partner boys with girls or they feel like they don't have to talk), who wouldn't do an incredibly simple assignment hoping that I would allow them time to do it based on my wrongful perception of their English ignorance. They wouldn't fill out a form of two things they like to do for each of the four seasons. I gave them WAY more than ample time to do so. They stonewalled me. So I just switched to a reading assignment and told them that the previous page would just be homework. AMAZINGLY even while engaged in the reading, many of the students who were having so much trouble deciding what activities they liked doing in each of the four seasons, instantaneously thought of answers when this assignment became homework!
It sounds like I won a victory there but, no, I really resent being forced to resort to tactical battles with my students. The nicest classes are those in which my students assume I have earned the grey hairs I have and am not a drooling idiot. My youngsters! Those who I thought I'd be battling with to establish limits, have inexplicably given me the benefit of the doubt, something they shouldn't even comprehend yet, and they trust me to be the wizened old coot that I am and impervious to any of their feeble attempts at chicanery. I consider that a great victory! Now if I can only get the older kids to concede that victory!
It's coming, I know, but the long, long road trying all the OH SO TEDIOUS, bubble gum, video game, jeuvenile strategies and having them fail with me, is just making my 6-hour days seem just that much longer. I wish I could just grab them all individually by the scruff of their necks, (which would get me fired for violence or sexual harassment in my own country), and yell to them, "HEY HEY HHHHHEEEEYYYY! Look at my hair! Do you think I came by this naturally? NO! It's because of many, MANY little pukes like you trying the same shit you are trying to pull on me right now. Do you honestly think you are clever enough to be the FIRST who will fool me? Check your ego at the door when you enter this classroom and spare us all the bother! Let's just have a student/teacher relationship of trust, shall we?"
I am one to maybe get a little dramatic when it comes to Korea. Because it's a pretty dramatic country! So I think of the Korean people. I wonder if the Korean people are feeling the same bump in the educational road that we foreigners are. So I wonder if Koreans sit around like those of us from other cultures and just rap about old stuff. I told my young class how lucky they were the other day to have the internet to help them with research reports. I told them I had to go to the library, get on the computer, then the microfiche or the card catalogue then find a book in the stacks then page my way through it, actually reading pages and pages of information I didn't NEED TO, until I got the information I had come for. They just have to Google. And, as usual, their reaction was, meh.
I imagine a Korean elder, hopped up on soju, talking about the days before remote control air con and telling how they all feared the dreaded fan death by leaving the fans on to keep them from sweating too much on a hot summer's night. I'm the same. I have dialled a phone, used a floppy disk, eaten eggs and butter when they were dangerous, done a lot of things these kids don't recognize. Yet the tricks they are trying to get away with on me are exactly the same ones the previous generation tried, (unsuccessfully), to fool me with.
I have no doubt that they'll realize I'm no amateur and they'll stop the crap and just do what I want them to, and they'll learn more efficiently for doing so. But it still bugs me that THEY don't know that yet. I wish I could do something that would make them all realize I'm someone to be reckoned with, like take them all out to an ice rink and teach them the fine art of body checking. One at a time rattle their fillings and pound some respect into them. I'm sure that would work!
I guess what I am saying is these kids, not the younger ones, but the older ones, are really insulting my intelligence and my professional pride by not trusting me.
And I didn't have this problem the last time I taught Korean kiddies. When was that? Hmmmmm.... I guess we're going back a bit. Not including camps, where the kids don't have enough time to try their deviousness on you, wow!, I suppose it's been a long time! Maybe that's why... I haven't really taught Korean kids for more than a few weeks at a time for 10 years! But I still have a hard time thinking that things have changed so dramatically in that short a time. It's a sad reflection on this country if they have! And I'd say they have.
In a year, let's come back and see if I have any students who don't trust me. Shall we? That said, it's a lot harder to get these kids to trust you. And I'm not even saying that's bad! I'm just saying it's a pain in the arse for a guy like me trying to teach 6 hours a day, a workload that is hard enough with cooperative students.
I'd be interested in finding out what other long time teachers in Korea think. Are Korean kids worse or better? Are they less trusting? And is that a bad thing? As a teacher I will tell you it's a double edged sword. I like the new freedom afforded the Korean people. I do! I wished it upon them for so many years! But at the same time, I begrudge them the freedom that allows them to make my job much MUCH harder!
There have been many levels of change in the world over the years. Best illustrated by
Imagine the changes like this in Korea! Used to be the younger kid had to get quarters to play the video games that give him the vicarious experience the old war vet lived through. In Korea these days the kids have enough spare cash to BUY their own video games. Most of them. I see kids in my classes open their wallets and they have more inside them than I have in mine!
So last week I created a lesson that would out this group once and for all. I used an old stress test I made for my students in the 90's and 2000's here. Same questions and everything. It wasn't something I made up though. It was an officially recognized stress test by some magazine or psychological entity. I don't know what. But legitimate. Then I put a reading assignment on the back and told them that if they faked like they couldn't finish the stress test in English, they'd have the reading assignment to do AND it came with a page of homework questions. BOOM! A whole 30 minutes of English conversation!
All my students took the test as did their counterparts 15 years earliear. The results were magnificent! This year's batch had stress in the low numbers to negatives. Aside from the few who had moderate stress levels and these, (NO coincidence), happened to be my best students. As for the olden days? EVERY student had HUGE stress levels and most were absolutely wonderful to deal with in class. The few who had lower stress levels were the students who had behavioural problems.
This year the norm was low stress level and behavioral problems. In the good old days it was high levels of stress and little to no behavioral problems. SO what I concluded was simple. Low stress in the Korean middle school student is the gateway to behavioral problems. Maybe the older generation knew what they were doing!
I got other interesting info from the sustained English conversation too. I found that I have students who don't go to bed until 6 or 7 in the morning!!! And they don't wake up till 3 PM! There were other gobsmacking realizations about this incredibly coddled, spoiled, younger generation of Koreans as well! No chores. NONE! They get money for nothing. NOTHING! And they get a good amount of money! The minimum wage here is an unbelievable 6030 won per hour. That's like 7 Canadian bucks an hour. These kids get more than that in allowance! So NObody has a part time job! NOBODY!
I have read articles written by foreigners who were high up in big companies here like Samsung and spoke fluent Korean and worked here for many years. They say that the biggest problem in Korea is the men have no work experience in their teens, then they have a couple years in the military, and you get them applying to work at companies like Samsung in their mid twenties with absolutely NO work experience. Unless you have an airline and you're looking for pilots. Then I guess flying in the military will be good work experience. But most military experience is not all that transferable to the work force. No part time jobs, no work in their teens or early twenties. You get a person green as green can be at an age much older than such inexperience is found in most other countries.
At least in the old days they went to all kinds of classes after school and applied themselves in them. Nowadays they don't even do that! They just take up space in the classroom, chat with their friends in Korean and mess around. They have plenty of cash to spend, video games to play and no jobs or chores or responsibilities except showing up for classes. The studying doesn't seem as big a responsibility. One of my cohorts over here had a student hand in a writing assignment that was illegible. She commented that he had obviously not even put in enough effort to make the thing readable so he should do it again. The parent got angry about that comment and complained to the school. You hear of that happening quite a bit.
So it appears that a lot of the parents are actually guilty of contributing to the delinquency of their children. If they could see their kids in my classroom sometimes they might think about lowering their allowances or giving them chores or maybe letting them get a part time job. I used to just come up with a fairly interesting lesson and the kids would love it and repay my efforts by giving some of their own. The new princes and princesses I seem to have in my classes have to be tricked into doing what they all know they should be doing. I'm getting to a point where I'm about to give up putting in the effort. I could more easily just give them boring, simple lessons. It's what they deserve.
But I'm not quite there yet. Like I say, I have hope that they will eventually smarten up and just play along. But right now they are making my job a challenge. It's weird. I was worried about the younger kids. I guess you just never know.
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