::A Geek in Korea::

Wikipedia defines Sadism as the sexual pleasure or gratification in the infliction of pain and suffering upon another person.

While I’m not sure my Head Teacher and Director get their rocks off on how much homework they give, they certainly get some gratification and some cash out of the amount of pain they cause students.

After work today, I had a late meeting with my Director and Head teacher. We had to go the planning of my classes now that I had taught each level. I wasn’t given a syllabus to know how quickly or what I needed to do each class, so I had been really on my own these first few days of the new term. I basically followed the mantra of "as much homework as I can assign before the student threaten to slit my throat", which is what I’ve been told this school deems a "moderate" amount of work.

An average student that has just learned to read must do at least two of the following each day:

• Read the unit story or phrases ten times a day.
• Listen to the tape of the story or book ten times.
• Write the vocabulary words at least ten times.
• Memorize some expressions for testing the next class.

These are the students that have just started reading!

We went through each of the levels I taught and worked out the approximate levels of homework that should be assigned over the course of a week depending on how many times I see the students. One level to the next, the work would generally increase. As sentences and readings got longer, things got scaled back, but other work was brought in. The goal was for me to be assigning about one hour of homework for ever day of class. I see students anywhere from one hour to three hours a week.

An hour a class would mean lots of work, if I was the only teacher they saw. However, most students are in class at least five to six hours a week. Every teacher will give the same hourly amount of homework ideally. If students stay two or three hours in one day, they have just as much homework each hour as a student that comes every day for a single hour. They might have a day or two do it, but that’s still a lot of work for a little kid to do at times.

Add to the fact that all of my students still go to Korean elementary or middle school, as well as multiple academies in other subjects. Some of my students study three or four times at different places after school. It’s no wonder that most of  the students that do all the work look like they are unravelling at both ends. We have "intensive" courses in the summer when they have breaks that eat all of their free time, and when they get back into full time classes we simply shift our times and keep the work load at full steam.

My highest level class has four books for our school alone. Bringing all of them to school everyday will probably cause them hernias by the time they get through the course work. Their weekly homework is an intensive dictation lesson. They also have to define about thirty words. My Director and Head Teacher asked why I was hesitant to give them even more homework, since there was potentially about one hundred or more words they could be learning in a unit.
I was worried with the level of work already required, as well as how much I was going to be pushing them, that they might actually quit from all the stress.

They actually admitted that while some of the students had dropped out because of stress reasons, the majority of parents were very pleased with the level of work we had been assigning, or at least the goal of trying to do an hour of work each night. It turns out that I can actually increase what I used to think was excessive homework to make it up to my Director’s promised "minimum levels" and still not have people complain to me.

That’s astoundingly cruel to me.