Good evening loyal readers, internet wanderers, and insomniacs. I apologize for not updating the blog more regularly. My trip to Japan took me away from the blogosphere for a week or so, and I've just been too damn lazy to update it the rest of the time.
Today was the start of the fall semester at my school. I have to admit that I got a little spoiled by the students I had during the summer camps. (Korean schools have about a five week summer break, but this is really in name only. Most of the students either come back to their school for camps in various subjects, or study even more rigorously at the private academies their parents send them to after school.) The summer camp students actually have an interest in English, and the classes are a manageable size (12-15 students). My regular classes, on the other hand, have 40 students apiece, half of whom view it as an opportunity to catch up on their sleep (which is not entirely irrational on their part, since the material we cover in my classes is only tangentially related to what they're examined on).
Another problem is that many of these students are painfully shy about using whatever English they know. The Korean education system is built around the rote memorization of facts. Making mistakes is a sign that you didn't study hard enough. Language learning, however, is predicated on using new words, phrases, and grammar constructions that you're not entirely comfortable with. This invariably results in mistakes.
As such, most of my students are deathly afraid of using the language that they spend so much time studying. A darkly amusing aspect of my job is watching students literally cower in fear at the prospect of answering a relatively innocuous question such as "How was your weekend?" Today, I though I would try to bribe my students into talking. Each student who read their answers to the list of questions about summer vacation that I gave them would get a caramel. Ah, but the prospect of candy was not enough to get more than four kids out of forty to raise their hand. Hell, I don't think most of these kids would speak English if I was handing out 10,000 won notes* to everyone who participated.
(10,000 won is roughly equal to $11.)
Don't assume that I don't enjoy teaching these kids, however. I do. Any success I have in getting them to understand English is doubly satisfying given the burdens that we're working with. They are usually very kind and sweet to me outside of class, even though having a strange man come in and start babbling at them in a foreign language must be kind of weird. (Imagine being a middle school student, and having someone come speak at you in Korean for 45 minutes each week.)
Frankly, Koreans are one hell of a lot more appreciative of education than Americans. My students here are never anything but cheerful to me, even though my efforts to extract English from them are pretty much torture a lot of the time. Contrast this with the attitude of many of my students at Davis, moping through life because no one could possibly understand the cruelty of having to live in California and attend one of the 100 or so best universities in the world on their parents' dime.
Most Americans tend to have an inflated sense of entitlement. In fact, one of my professors at Davis said that about me one time. Now, I'm not going to defend this guy too much (he has an ego that is extremely inflated in relation to what he has actually accomplished in the field), but in this case what he said had some truth to it. I've often been one of those people who I was so disdainful of in the last paragraph. Let's face it, it's pretty easy to complain about how others don't understand your feelings, but it's a whole lot harder to try and understand someone else's problems. Most of us have been trained from an early age to believe that we're "unique" and "special." Now, there's certainly a lot that is admirable about having a strong sense of self, but can't this pretty easily turn into pigheadedness? Isn't it possible to become so absorbed in standing up for "what you deserve" that you trample on the feelings of everyone else? I'm certainly not going to stand up for every aspect of this culture (or hell, even most aspects of it). It does, however, seem to do a little better job than ours of imparting that ever important lesson- that life is not always fair.
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