I teach 10th and 11th grade girls. There are roughly 30 students per class. The students stay in the same classroom (it's the teachers who come and go in and out), with the same class, all day, for the whole year. Each student has their own desk and locker (closer to a cubby, really) in their classroom. At the little school that I work at, there are 3 classes in each grade, meaning that I (teaching two grades), have about 180 students in all.
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| A basic classroom. This was Movie Day. |
I see the 10th graders for one 50 minute class per week, and the 11th graders for three. There is a huge range of levels in each class, but on the whole, the students' language level is significantly stunted compared to those that I saw in Seoul. In time with trend of Korean English-learners, too, their knowledge of grammar, theory, and how-to-pass-tests is vast next to their timid attempts to actually talk.
There's a lot, to say the least, of pressure on students in Korea. They have to be good students so that they can go to good universities and get good jobs. Unfortunately, "good" is a relative term. From my standpoint, 99% of the students I teach are good students. You'd think it the great ones, then, who'd stand out. Well, I'd consider a whole half of them to be great, so even they don't really stand out. The ones who really stand out are the ones who approach perfection.
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| Out cold... pencil in hand... shortly before midterms. |
For the most highly-motivated students, anything less than 100% is a cause for serious concern. By the same stretch, when teachers make tests, one teensy error can tarnish their teaching career. Grades are everything. And any good student who wants to go to any good university and get any good job must measure herself according to the answer key. Talk about pressure.
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| Showing off their super-duper math skills. Students here do calculus by hand (logarithms, square roots, and who knows what else). Their plea to me when we took this picture was, A) tell the world how hard they have it in hopes of starting a "calculate with calculators" movement and, B) tell everyone in America how crazily smart they are in hopes of making foreign friends. |
Here betwixt the rice patties, that pressure seems to be a bit more narrowly spread. My Korean co-teacher has commented that the students at our school lack motivation and don't have the drive they need to succeed. While that may be the reality that forcibly faces the citizens of this country, I have a hard time not feeling happy when I see a couple of students sitting cross-legged on the lawn, smiling, or catch the same group of girls playing a silly sort of hide-and-seek in the English room on every one of their beloved 10-minute breaks.
Being in the countryside, there seems, somehow, to be slightly more space for bits of childlike beauty.
Thanks for reading :)
