My First Day

Yesterday marked my official return to the life of an EFL teacher (or a linguistic imperialist, depending on how you look at it, but more on that later), as I had my first day of classes at the Elite English Academy in Cheonsang. To shamelessly dust off a cliched American idiom, it was like riding a bicycle. The techniques I developed for teaching (for example) the difference between countable and uncountable nouns came back easily, as did my classroom persona and "teacher voice." And while the majority of the students are very sweet, there are always the troublemakers. Let's just say that my culturally biased preconceptions that all Korean children are well-disciplined have been completely shattered. They're just like kids anywhere, with very short attention spans and absolutely no sense of shame about they say to me or to each other. All of them found the appearance of my hair (specifically the sideburns and side-part) hilarious. Admittedly, my hair is very different from virtually every Korean, but I was surprised by how amused they were. It's almost as funny as how the director, Mr. Park, and the other Korean teachers keep telling me, "University of Chicago, very good school!" I don't think they have the slightest idea of what the U of C is like, not to diss my alma mater in any way; I think it's just a school that they've heard of and are therefore impressed by. The students, and teachers, also have a lot of trouble understanding how to pronounce my name ("Stephen... like Stee-ven") because it doesn't sound like it looks. Korean is basically a completely phonetic language, so they all want to call me "Step-han."

All of the classes except one are thirty minutes long, which is almost too much time for a lot of the younger students to sit still and concentrate. The day passes remarkably quickly because of this schedule. I realize that I have only taught one day of classes thus far, but I think I am beginning to see some of the flaws in the hagwon system of English teaching. First of all, the students come to the school after having spent the first half of the day in "real" school, every one of them at their parents behest, and if it weren't for their parents' wishes I imagine most would not be there. And from what I am told, most Korean parents send their children to English hagwons simply to keep up appearances in the neighborhood (Erving Goffman, eat you heart out). Therefore, the students' committment to learning English is very low, with a few notable exceptions. But really, can you expect much more out of 7-12 year olds? Probably not. Second, and much more importantly, it seems that many of their learning techniques are based in rote memorization. I can't be sure, but I imagine that this extends to other subjects as well. The problem is that while repeated drilling of grammar points and memorization of conversation pieces gives the students a good idea of how the language should sound, it does not help build true comprehension. The students understand very well how their textbooks are structured, so when I ask a question from the text, they immediately know what the answer should be. But if I stray from the text and ask them a different question that isn't written out directly in front of them, they either stare blankly at me or respond as if I had asked them the next question in the text.

One final note regarding discipline: corporal punishment is apparently still a hallmark of the Korean educational system. The Korean teachers at Elite don't hesitate to beat the students with switches if they misbehave. Now, I have absolutely no desire to partake in this sort of discipline, nor am I expected to by the school (in fact, I'm specifically prohibited by a clause in my contract). However, because Korean students are used to being hit when they step out of line, they take great liberties with the non-Korean teachers whom they know will never hit them, and they don't respond easily to non-corporal disciplining. Thus, it makes the job of controlling the classroom that much tougher. But then again, I imagine it's not that different from teaching elementary school in the States.

So, I survived the first day. After class, I returned home and cooked some spicy octopus with somyeon noodles, delicious! And it all begins again today.