::A Geek in Korea::

Today my manager called me in for Y.A.M. (Yet Another Meeting). This meeting was about some "complaints" my kindergarten mothers have lodged against me.  I never happen to get feedback directly from parents, but somehow I don’t tend to believe this is actually something they would said. According to my manager, the mothers of my kindergarten class students feel I am using too much Korean in class and should explain everything entirely in English all the time. Wow, it’s almost like the parents are reading my manager’s mind and repeating the exact thing he wants them to say.

Yes. My students are in English class. We study English. We speak English. We practice English. Korean is the functional equivalent of glue that keeps the students in chairs and focused on doing the task at hand. I speak Korean when it’s clear the students don’t know what they should be doing and want help. The students he is asking me to speak only English to know only a few hundred words, mostly nouns. Try controlling a class by shouting out the colors or numbers from one to twenty. What else do kindergarten students know? That’s nonsensical.

I’m the only teacher in the school that has requested that I have no Korean assistant in the class for the exact reason that I am trying to limit the amount of Korean in class. If I had a Korean assistant that would help me with the tasks like bathroom breaks and other kindergarten tasks, my students would be looking to an assistant instead of me for help. They know that if they want something, they have to express it to me somehow. English, Korean, whatever works.

The first step to getting students talking is to get them talking to me in any language. Once they can ask me, "Can I go to the bathroom" in Korean, they can repeat after me in English. If I had a Korean assistant in the class like the other teachers do, they wouldn’t even attempt this. They’d go to the Korean assistant to ask instead. My students are the best behaved kindergarten class in the entire school. I’ve never sent students outside for discipline problems. This alone means they are getting more English because I don’t have to stop the class to deal with bad students or children crying. Time wasted is not time well spent.

Do I need to use Korean in class? Yes, at times I do. When students start freaking out, or running around, I can either ask them the same question ten times in English and get no response, or say it once in Korean. Is this cheating? Perhaps, but damn, I’m not going to pull my hair out in a class just because I’m supposed to use English in a situation in which it makes no sense. 90% of what I say is in English, and that other 10% is when I can’t get a child to do what I want in English anyway.

My manager has been sitting outside all of our classes, listening this entire week. I’ve caught him peering into my classroom multiple times. He’s been listening in to see if my students are talking, and what we are doing. Today he actually poked his head in and asked why all my students were quiet and working. Since we were having a test, I’m not sure if he expected me to be shouting English at them or something. My students know that Korean in my class isn’t for conversation. It’s for practical reasons only.

Whenever he has a problem with teaching style, he uses his "The mothers say this," excuse. What he wants is blatantly clear. He wants me to spend the entire day speaking English all the day, confusing students, lowering overall comprehension. He wants to increase my stress yelling at students that don’t understand why they are misbehaving. He wants "only English" education to the point where it’s moronic.He just doesn’t get it. I’m not going to make my life more difficult just because he thinks my students aren’t having a difficult enough time understanding me in class.

I’ve heard of teachers that get fired for this very reason. Schools will go after people "fresh" off the boat since  they can’t speak any Korean. They only use English in class because they can’t speak any Korean. Cut the old experienced teachers with higher salaries for the cheap, fresh out of school teachers that come over each year. If students learn less, that’s okay, because it’s all about the English in class, not if the students are actually getting anything out of the class. It’s all about profit and appearance, not the education. If I ever forget that, I’ll end up on my ass unemployed.

Please forgive my rudeness.