Spies that work for cookies.
Teaching April 11th. 2007, 11:17pmThere is always a joker or daily problem maker in one class or another. One student will get the reputation for being sarcastic or rude. Other students get annoying when the same student keeps wasting class time.
Our head teacher has set up a series of spies in each class. If any student is really bad and ignores the foreign teacher, causes problems, or is very rude they get a warning. The “spy” in the class will say something like, “We should tell the head teacher about this. Do you want us to tell her what you did after class?”
Usually that warning is enough to calm students down. No one wants to make the head teacher angry (including me). It’s ingenious to use peer pressure in this way. Korean students love ratting each other out. It’s a natural behavior and isn’t frowned on.
Empowering a student or group of students to become an official rat to watch fellow students means that they take the monitoring of behavior of classmates as one of their duties. Having a redundant set of spies in class helps from it becoming a means for revenge.
The students chosen are usually the most responsible and trusted in class, but if they have problems collaborating their stories, they won’t be given special treatment out of class. Being a good spy earns extra rewards by teachers. Not being spied on and being trusted when a dispute arises in class is also a perk.
Since the only time a spy would ever speak up in my class is after a student ignored my directions anyway, I don’t mind the head teacher keeping tabs on my students behavior through “back channels”. The more students know that eventually everything they do gets back to their mother in one way or other, the better behaved they should be. This is better for me.
It’s ironic that in a country with an dedicated number for spies (112), we have an effective little ring operating in our school.
5 Responses to “Spies that work for cookies.”
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April 12th, 2007 at 12:59 am
O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. How do the spies know they’re not being spied on?
April 12th, 2007 at 9:49 am
I went on a stock count the other day to a company you would love. The company is a video game distributor and the stock they have was hundreds of thousands of games for Wii, PS2, DS, PSP etc. Anyhow, I wanted to pick your brain about something, do you know if it is possible to hack a UK PS2 to play Region 2 discs on a Korean tv? I’m assuming that they the PS2 itself is geared to run only on PAL tvs and thus won’t work on NtSC. I’m also assuming that Korean tvs are not geared to handle either like tvs in the UK are?
April 12th, 2007 at 9:52 am
Is this post a quantum leap back to Nazi Germany?
April 12th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
I’d guess that your assumptions about the PS2/NTSC Korean television problem are correct. I’d check whatever Korean television you have or want to buy to see if it has some sort of “PAL” mode available.
April 12th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
Oh, every spy report is verified by another “agent” in the class. That’s what the whole “Let’s report her!” thing some of the students do is about. It’s so that all the spies in the class remember what to complain about. When the students get called in to verify the report they are all on the same page when they get quizzed about the behavior in question. It’s sort of a mini-poll, “Is this bad enough that we’ll all complain about it?”
None of this stuff is official school policy. The only reason I know it’s all going on is because I can understand what the students are saying. My foreign coworker has spies in his class that he doesn’t even know are working for him.
This system does get abused. Some of the girls in one class conspired to get one boy in trouble on occasion, but eventually another boy to spy to keep the bad girls in check. Alliances form and crumble and seating arrangements in class can show the results.