I had a bit of an FTW week this week. Korea took the brunt of it, but that's because it was caused by Korea.
A while ago, I'd say about two months ago, I decided to stop the insanity with my middle school classes. There are two who are doing a debate class and in each of those classes the majority of students do nothing. For any assignments or writing, they copy from the two or three students who do it and retain nothing. For debates they read what the two or three students have written and retain nothing. The rest of the time it's a good class in which to practice their Korean with each other. I started in January and it took me a couple of months to get the names of the students under control, get used to the school, the schedule, the new city and all the rest. I had received no real instruction or advice on teaching these classes other than, "Here's the debate book. Use it for the debate class. Here's the book the Korean teachers are using for the other classes. Just teach them conversation and pronunciation."
That was it. No interference, no micromanaging, complete classroom autonomy. Just the way I like it. I consider classroom dynamics to be one of my strengths as a teacher. I can read a class and I can tell when my classes are functioning properly, and when they are in need of tweaking, adjustment, or wholesale change. Even without speaking the same language as my students. These classes were, in my experienced opinion, in need of complete restructuring. I took it upon myself to implement a text that was a more reasonable level and style for the classes that were textless. I did one or two lessons in one or two classes using Interchange Intro, a very basic English conversation book. The classes were FAR more successful than any I had done to that point. So I informed the boss that the classes needed to get the book. This was the beginning of the FTW week I had this week.
The boss and I did not see eye to eye on my decision. I think it might have been largely due to the fact that most of these students had been put into a class with a textbook chosen by the boss, then after a week, the classes were mixed and the text was trashed. The parents were none too thrilled with this as you can imagine. They had to buy a textbook that their kids used once before their classes were switched around. I believe this was one reason why my suggestion of a new text met with her disapproval. Because the parents would have complained that they had just bought a book. "Now we have to buy another one?" they would say. I feel for the boss and know how the parents can be demanding at hagwons. In fact they can be very disruptive to the education process and HAVE been for me. I'll get to that in a minute. But on THIS point, I was overruled and told not to "give up" on the students. The owner of the hagwon where I work thought she knew better than me what my classes were in need of. She HAS known these kids longer than I, she DOES speak their language, and she IS Korean, (this makes a difference to Koreans), and she DOES teach these same students, so it's an understandable mistake, I'll give her that. But I am the one who is there when I teach these kids. I know what's happening in my classes better than she does. Period. But I need the job and am in no position to argue. So I put on my smiley smiley nice nice face and obeyed.
It wasn't more than a week or two later that some students had told his/her parent that I did not give homework and word had gotten back to the boss. I had not, to this point, (3 months into the contract), been told that the boss demands homework every day for every class. It had been mentioned that she likes structure, routine and homework, so, against my educational philosophy, I HAD been giving homework, just not every day for every class. And if the class had a particularly good day and finished the lesson material, I had been assigning the homework during class. If they managed to complete that as well, I had the pleasure of offering positive reinforcement for good behaviour and saying, "No homework today." It wouldn't have been long before the students realized that if they worked hard, homework would not be assigned. They don't need to know that homework WAS assigned and they had completed it. Another point the boss and I disagree on. She thinks the structure of every topic in every class and every educational tactic needs to be explained to the students. Anyway, even though my homework tactics promote harder working students, more learning and less crowd control in the classrooms, the boss took that weapon away because, "They need homework every class, every day. Why? Because it's a rule."
I'm not stupid. I realize this is not a school, but a business where I work. Not a single parent of a single student at this place is going to say, "No, thanks. I'd rather have just the 50 minutes of class time than 50 minutes plus 10-15 minutes of homework." They see it as bonus learning for their kids. FREE shit! Have I mentioned how Koreans react at baseball games when a 4-dollar baseball goes into the stands and is available for FREE? So I have no doubt that the rule is in place at the behest of the parents, regardless of the growing realization in the world of education that homework DOESN'T work.
I think I could have adjusted to this too if it were all that was required. But it wasn't. Since the boss had my attention, she took the opportunity to micromanage me down to the number of pages I should do every class and the division of classroom time for different classroom activities. Less fun, less arts and crafts, more boredom. She said the kids need routine. I said routine is boring. She got offended and said it's not. I told her that the word routine can actually be used as an adjective that MEANS boring. This most likely didn't help. She hired me to teach different things than she teaches and being a foreigner, she had to expect different teaching style from me. Now she was basically saying, "Okay, never mind that, I want you to teach something different than I teach, and I want you to teach it exactly the way I teach." I put on my smiley smiley nice nice face and obeyed.
This is what I have been doing and things have gotten progressively worse with both the elementary kids as well as the middle school kids. It's so bad that I have organized dissent in some classes. Students meeting and agreeing to do precisely the opposite of what I tell them. I seriously doubt that it would have gotten to this point had I been left to my own devices. I've had rebellious students before and have had students trying to convince other students not to listen to me or do my work, but this was only a couple of times and the other students never joined the mutiny.
It's gotten so that I can't make it through a day without yelling at students in at LEAST one class. Usually more. The bosses tell me that I am free to kick students out of class. That hasn't helped. Just two days ago I had a few students who were throwing a pencil case at each other. The lesson I was doing required students to be walking around in the classroom so I didn't stop it until the pencil case had been thrown a couple of times. The student who had the pencil case, a boy who has been maturing into a middle school dissenter right before my eyes and doing less and less every class, wound up to chuck the pencil case at another boy. I stopped him and sternly said, "Don't even think of throwing that!" He threw it. I told him to get out. They NEVER get out when I tell them to get out! They just sit there silently. That just makes me fucking insanely angry! "Get the hell out of here before I throw out the door without opening it!" Still the defiance. So I go over, pick him up by his shirt and almost have to carry him out of the class. This is shocking to the other students. They see me as a toy.
You know how if you give kids a helicopter spin or throw them up in the air or put them on your shoulders they will ask you to do it again until your arms fall off. You have to disappoint them and tell them you have to stop. You hope they recognize your limit and stop saying, "Again. Again. Again," when you look ready to keel over, but they usually don't. That's the situation I'm in. I have been hoping that the regular yellings I have been administering in the past couple of months would establish limits and the kids would try to stay within these limits. Instead they are saying, "Again, again, again," and won't stop until I have to yell at them. Every day.
After a few minutes I went out into the hall to get the boy and bring him back into the classroom. He was crying. Probably because the other boys had thrown the pencil case too and they had received no punishment. The fact that he had been told not to throw the pencil case and he had looked right at me, understood the command, and thrown it anyway, a pencil case, with scissors, compass, box cutter, sharp pencils, a brick, a syringe full of Ebola, he had thrown it while looking right at me, well that was secondary. This was a travesty! Justice had been miscarried and I was to blame! So now he hates me. This is how the manufacturing of dissent is happening.
I am not a disciplinarian. When I discipline students, it just makes things worse.
The same day in one of my problem classes, one of the debate classes, two of the students who had been a problem before were doing the same things. I had asked the boss to talk to them or their parents before, but it had done no good, (if she had done anything at all). They talk in Korean through the class, don't do anything until they are ordered to do it and then they require me to explain it again to them because they hadn't been listening. I let that go for most of the class. Then they start playing this game on paper with a grid and white and black circles. I think it's similar to the game "Go." They have done this several times and been warned several times. So I tell them to never play that game again in my class or I will kick them out. The one, nicknamed, ahem, David, says in Korean to his colleague, "Okay, let's go." So I say okay, see ya later. Well NOW he can't go because I WANT him to go and the plan is to do the opposite of what I want. So after ordering them to go and getting the all too familiar defiance, (WHY don't they go???), I go get the boss from her classroom. She comes in and finds it's the same two I had told her about before. The paper with the game on it is gone but I explain it to her. She says in English, because she is trying to convince me that she uses English with the students when she teaches, (which she doesn't), and that they can understand her, (which they can't), and I couldn't believe this, she says, "This is a popular game in Korea. It is good for their minds. It makes their brains strong." I don't know what my face was like, probably
While this was going on BOTH these brave civil disobeyers were holding their red-faced heads in their hands and practically crying, and the rest of the class was miraculously speaking English to each other.
So that's pretty much it. I have to go into class, blow a spaz, possibly get physical with somebody and THEN I can do my job. As we've seen this week in Canadian parliament and the "Elbow Gate" scandal, the level of physicality I have already shown is just not acceptable to a Canadian! I can't keep doing this or I'm going to haul off and smack somebody. And I would REALLY feel like a failure as a teacher THEN.
I left off one of my previous posts wondering if the good students would keep me here or the bad students would chase me away and I feel like Morgan Freeman in "Seven" right now: "The assholes have the upper hand! The assholes have the upper hand!"
Then I surf the net and hear Matt Damon talking about our topsy turvey world and how civil disobedience is not the problem, but civil obedience is. Because I have no money and need this job, I obeyed. And look at the shitstorm I'm in now! I love the line in Matt's speech about the declaration of interdependence. How nice would THAT be? The whole world working together to make things right. Ahhhh! That's just a pipedream. The world is too stupid and too obedient. Fucking world! I better get ready for work...............
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