I was just reading Kimchi-icecream’s post about Cell Phone Etiquette 101–A Course Korean University Students NEED!.  Sometimes at my school they would give out my phone number to students and it drove me crazy.  Never is there an English Emergency that warrants a call at 10 or 11 at night.  Especially here.  In Canada that was another matter – another country, language barriers, accidents, I’ll take a call at any hour if you’re in trouble and need help.

It got me thinking about how when I first got here and was in contact with former students, that it took me a long time to not regard them as students but as friends.  I’m making reference to people that my husband was friend’s with while we were in Canada (some of whom were my former students), not student students.

Which got me thinking about how sometimes students complain about their grades and say that it’s because you don’t like them as a teacher. HA, if you only knew.  Most of my favourite students, as in the ones that I would go have dinner or a drink with, were the poorest students.  The ones that never did their homework for some lame or lacking reason.  The ones that were quick witted and could hold their own if you were to toss them into a bar full of international folk.  The one that generally are poor test takers and not very articulate.

The good students, the ones with blow me away grades, well, they’re okay.  But the inner me, the non-teacher me, wouldn’t want to hang out with them… they’re far too studious.

A common unit in textbooks is about friendship and what qualities are important in friends (side note, textbooks here are region specific so that they mention things that are familiar to students).  Getting feedback from university students is interesting because their ideas really are so different from their parents (as it is, I assume, all over the world) but I suppose it’s just refreshing for me to hear.

Such things as the importance of family background, wealth and education, were rated as not important, not important and somewhat important respectively (of course none of this is statistically relevant, just a point of interest).  

When I asked them about family background there was a rather loud and resounding “NO” given, which was a bit of a surprise.  Obviously that was driven into them a wee too much and the pendulum has now swung the other way.

When it came time for wealth, a sensitive issue regardless of what nation you are in, I could tell some of the students that aren’t as well off were a tad uncomfortable.  This is when I love to provide examples such as this:

Do you think that there is a large divide in wealth in Korea?

(nervous students not wanting to talk about money, me either for that matter).

Well, how about this.  When I was waiting for the bus to come to campus today I saw many wonderful cars.  Audi, BMW, Benz, Audi, and I’m waiting for the BUS.  So, I think that there is a big difference in wealth here.

As a class, we all agreed that friendships can be difficult to maintain if there is a wide variance in educational levels – personally, I just don’t know what to talk about with people that haven’t done some sort of post-secondary education, even if it is a 12 week certificate, anything!!!  People read more when they have higher education levels, and so I find, they also have more (of what I deem) interesting things to talk about.

BUT, I was then reminded of a PhD student that I taught before.  When I was instructing that TESOL program, about 20 minutes before a new class was to begin, one of the staff members came up to me to tell me that 2 women that, at that time, worked for the Seoul ministry of education, as teachers and as advisors, would be in my class.  AND, so not to be nervous, but to do a really good job so that they would recommend the program to others.  GREAT!  Thanks, no pressure.

One of the women was finished her masters and the other was A.B.D. PhD.  Both were involved with elementary school children, if memory serves me correctly, grades 5 and 6.

It was a bit of an intimidating class to start off with because there were 23 students, 5 current and former public school teachers, 5 people with masters degrees, 3 gyopos, and one man with (I think) Cerebral Palsy.  BUT, he also had some learning disabilities, BUT he also spoke Korean, English and Spanish almost fluently and was studying Chinese/Mandarin.  He used crutches to assist him to walk and needed a fair bit of space and time to get anywhere.

Each student was required to prepare a warm-up activity so that I could assess them on their instructions and to a lesser extent the appropriateness of the activity (ie, is there a language focus, age appropriate, level and number of students etc.)  The main thing, really, is how they said the instructions, demoed the activity and their CCQ’s.  They had to actually get up in front of the class and run the activity and the students had to participate.

The ABD PhD woman, who’s Say it, Show it, Check it was impeccable, chose the worst activity EVER.  Her activity was to have the students stand in a line in groups of 4.  The person closest to the wipe-board was given a word and they had to whisper it down the line.  The person at the end had to RUN up to the board and write the word in order to get a point.  The runner then became the first in line and you repeated the process for everyone to get a turn.  The group with the most points wins.  Can you guess what the problem was????

Obviously if there is someone who has mobility issues you need to take that into consideration.  She was physically shocked when I told her that her activity would fail.  What got me was that, for the life of her, she could not figure out why.  I then asked the rest of the class if they could think of any reason why the activity wouldn’t work in this class.  Silence.  Then the man with Cerebral Palsy says “I think it might have something to do with me.”  Heartbreaking to hear.   

I don’t have a snazzy ending for this.

So let me mention one other thing.  

I was reading The Marmot’s Hole. here is an excerpt:

There is a quick moral for foreigners to learn. For some reason you think all the red tape and bureaucratic incompetence is limited to your lot, and then construe it is because the Korean government does not work for foreigners. Really the inefficacy and incompetence of the Korean government is the lot of everyone here. Which is the reason why a Korean can claim they do not discriminate with a straight face, they go through the same stuff on a daily basis. Reminds of an insight of a wise friend of mine, the best way to improve Korea for foreigners is to simply improve it for Koreans.

In the same class as the ‘family background, education and wealth’ questions, I also asked them what they do and don’t like about Korea.  I gave some examples about things in Canada and Korea.  Pluses for Korea were:

speedy delivery guys

so many things to do, at any hour, day or night

public transit

Some minuses:

pushiness

everyone taking lunch at noon (really, it seems as though the whole country stops to eat). [I've been told it's called the bellybutton hour]

One student that lived in Seattle for a year asked about other lunch options.  I said how we stagger the lunch hours so that it isn’t so busy everywhere and so that shops can stay open and help customers.  When I asked why they didn’t do this, she responded, sincerely I might add, “We didn’t know you could do that.”

Huh.  That’s kind of a summary sentence for here sometimes.  It is changing.  You often hear the issue of ‘developing/developed nation’ in regards to South Korea.  I think that financially and structurally SK is developed and so now needs to calm down, relax a bit, tell a few jokes and work on their people skills.

I put in a question to Ask a Korean!, about Korean humour and so am eagerly waiting their response (but I have a feeling that the queue is much longer than I originally anticipated).