::A Geek in Korea::

I switched low level classes with my foreign coworker a few months ago. He was out of his depth dealing with fifteen pre-readers that had never  studied with a foreigner before. I learned long ago the subtle are of jujitsu required to turn the mocking laughter directed at a teacher into a tool for good classes. One student in particular would have infuriated me my first year in Korea.

This boy is “special”. He steadfastly refuses to learn English or speak any English words ever. He’ll respond to anything I say in Korean with, “I don’t know English. I can’t speak English. Why are you asking me to speak English? I don’t understand anything you say in English. Stop asking me anything, I don’t know.”

This is particularly frustrating for someone that things that the barrier of communication is failing on their end, like a first year teacher might assume. However, when fourteen other students instantly grasp what you explain, and one boy is sitting in the back of class stabbing a pencil into an eraser as if that eraser had murdered his family, you know something is up.

When we do writing assignments, he’ll scribble gibberish and try to get me to correct it for him. When he has to draw a picture, he tries to get me to do it for him. When he has to play a game, he only wants the reward, never the task involved in getting it. He’d be happy if I let him out of the room to drink water and go to the bathroom over and over. Whenever this boy tries to pull his, “I don’t know,” routine, I don’t let it get to me. I put him back on task, make sure he’s putting in some kind of effort to pay attention, and move on.

I have an hour with this class a week. It’s not my least favorite class, despite this particular boy being infamous for poor effort and special “slowness” in grasping English. Worrying about one bad kid when there are fourteen other relatively good ones that are there to learn isn’t how to get a class to be fun and educational. He’s a place holder until the school has enough students at that particular level that they can boot him back down to start over again. He doesn’t know a single letter, and can’t string together an English sentence to save himself, even if he tried, which he doesn’t.

The Korean homeroom teacher said that the bingo game I was going to do to review vowel sounds might not work because this particular student wasn’t going to be able to participate or play along. She feared he was going to sabotage the game for the rest of the students. She was issuing a fair warning. The class in question isn’t even up to official  phonics reading and sounding out words yet. The brighter students, which make up for about half the class, can already read because they know the alphabet and sounds, but the slower students have yet to figure out how some letters and sounds make words in English. They aren’t expected to know how to do that for another two months and it’s completely fine. The fact that half the class can already read simply signals that the Korean teachers do an amazing job and that hard work with younger students can show tremendous results.  The slowest boy doesn’t even know all of the letters yet, and likely can’t recall any of the sounds. He might take another six months to turn around, if he ever does.

“If I let that particular boy determine what we did in class all day, we’d spend our time eating pencils and picking our nose. I’m going to have a successful bingo game, slow student be damned.”

I went into class armed with pre-printed basic CVC phonics words, lots of bingo markers, and some candy. Bingo without a prize at the end is the worst game ever. I bought a pack of Maeshil Jelly (Known as Japanese Une Plum flavor) as a prize. I’ve never had them myself, but they are individually wrapped and aren’t too big or expensive to buy for the occasional class room full of students.

The students needed to land two bingo to win, and then I’d call off their words to check to see if they had actual won. Keeping in mind that the slow kids wouldn’t be able to listen to a word and find it written down, I wrote the entire list of “bingo balls” on the board, then when I barked one of them out, I’d circle it. Even if a student couldn’t read, they could find the same shapes repeated on their  paper. This list of circled words also came in handy checking the accuracy of the words after a bingo was called. If someone had a word covered that wasn’t circled, they had made a mistake.

After each word, I’d also go around and check all the students that I knew couldn’t read well to make sure they hadn’t missed the word I had called. Since the words got circled and stayed up on the board, they had the entire game to find the words they needed. Other than understanding how to play bingo and win, there was nothing else to it. Even the slowest student could manage to cover words if given thirty minutes total to find them, right?

During the bingo game, the slow boy took to either folding up his markers into small shapes, punching the girl sitting next to him, or drawing on the table. The girl next to him punched him right back, and there were no other seats to put the boy, so I was stuck with them waging low stakes warfare in class most of the time I was walking around. The girl is somewhat naughty herself, and ended up stealing some candy from a boy that sat behind her that had won the first double bingo of the day. The slow boy then stole that candy from the naughty girl, and despite being explicitly told NOT to eat the candy, shoved it in his mouth when he thought I wasn’t looking.

He told everyone in the class in Korean, “Don’t play the game! Don’t play! Stop playing the game! The candy tastes terrible! Oh, the candy is so terrible! I want to spit it out! ”

I turned around when I heard him try to complain about my candy. I walked over and starting smiling at him. “Did you eat the candy when I said you couldn’t?” He wouldn’t answer, because he had the candy in his mouth and didn’t want to get caught. At the same time he wanted to spit it out and had to keep his hand over his mouth just to keep from launching it across the room. I just kept watching him, so that he couldn’t spit out the candy. Watching his face as he tried not to spit out that candy was so amusing, but had he actually gotten sick I’d have felt terrible. I think from the way he was protesting it was more about trying to give me a headache than actually not liking the candy. Forbidden classroom consumed sugar is still sugar after all.

“Oh, is the candy bad? Don’t say that, because you shouldn’t be eating it in class. No one else eat the candy in class, and if you don’t like it, just give it to a friend next time. I don’t want to hear you don’t like my candy.”

So, while the bad student did try to sabotage the class, I got the best of him this time. If I had been a first year teacher I’d probably have lost my cool and gotten taken by his antics, but to see him choke down some bad candy made my day. The rest of the class loved getting the candy as a prize, and I had exactly the right amount to award everyone with something, but for winners to get just a little bit more to make them feel special.