::A Geek in Korea::

My school loves to suck the fun out of any holiday. Our "end of the year review and giant test" week falls on the few days between Christmas and New Years. Remember that time, where you had no elementary school on the horizon for a few months, and how impossible it was to concentrate on anything other than your gifts, free time, and playing in the snow? For some reason, we plan our biggest tests around the times where students have the hardest times concentrating.

I’ve been preparing all my classes for their final examinations by distilling a 100 page book into short discreet sections that they must study to pass my examination. For the most part, I’ve simply copied a section in their book, adapted a few questions, then pasted them onto the test sheet. If they study all the material I told them to, all of them should get 100%. In some of the classes I’ve told them the questions on the test. I still don’t expect them to pass.

Trying to keep students in their seats is nigh impossible when they know they’ll soon be free from the shackles of Korean school. Also, it’s very likely that some of my students will either be going abroad next month, or quitting the school. I’ve heard or read three or more students that will be quitting the school to bullying. These are students I like, that will be leaving the school because the teachers didn’t discipline the bad students. I get so upset when I hear such things, because I stamp on bullies pretty hard in my classes when I catch them. Unless it happens on the bus, or in Korean classes, in which I can’t do anything. There is no "right of refusal of service" when it comes to our school. The profit motivation is stronger with larger classes, even when idiots and bullies are thrown in. I wish I could simply tell my coworkers, "Keeping this idiot in class is actually COSTING US GOOD STUDENTS." Alas, that sort of reasoning falls on deaf ears.

At one point today, my students had such a hard time concentrating, I threatened to get a stick to poke them. Every time one student would turn around to talk to his classmates, I would prod him in the back with my marker to get him working again. It was like trying to guide a blind mule down the Grand Canyon. "Look here. Write." We were doing something fun in class too. It’s not even like the material was his standard book work.

A new torture method devised by Korean teachers is to keep students an extra hour for failing tests. If no one performs well consistently in a class on the vocabulary tests, students are kept after class to write words a certain number of times. This doesn’t seem to work in some classes, as there are logistical limitations to keeping the entire school for an hour. Someone has to watch the buggers, and there has to be enough classrooms to allow the next hour to study.

Can we just forgo the pretext and get shock collars for this week of class? It’s about the only thing we haven’t tried at this point.