::A Geek in Korea::

I’m used to not being understood 90% of the day. The only time I really want students to understand me perfectly clearly with very little help is when I am writing my homework. I write it as clearly and simply as possibly. I take five minutes of class to do this single task because it’s that important. I explain it to individual students that have problems with previous assignments. I check their notebooks to see if they are writing down my homework correctly. I really expect the students should know what they need to do when they get home to do my homework. For every good student in a class, there are a few bad ones that stretch my belief that they really are trying to learn any English at all. I have heard the LAMEST excuses for the past few weeks when it comes to homework, and it’s starting to really getting on my nerves.

“Teacher, I didn’t know how to do the homework, so I didn’t do it.” This excuse is lame, because I see students multiple days of the week, and students have a week to do the assignment. If they don’t understand the homework, they can ask me any other day of the week between classes. Some students take this advice and have someone explain their homework to them, or as a Korean teacher for clarification, but most don’t bother.

“Teacher, I didn’t know what the homework was, so I didn’t do it.” If you don’t know, you still have a week to do the homework, but you can also have your parents call the school and ASK me. I’ll field a homework question once or twice a week from parents that had sick students. Most of those sick students come to school with the homework completed, while someone sitting next to them will say that writing down the homework in their notebook was too hard, or that they had lost or changed their notebook and didn’t know what the assignment was.

“Teacher, I lost the paper.” This one had had a resurgence lately, since I’ve been giving out papers for students to do as homework for a month straight. One student today claimed to have left the work completed at his home, then opened his book and had the papers fall out completely blank. Ooops. In the same class, a student told me he was missing a book, asked me to copy the work for him, and tried to finish it before class started. For every bad student, there is another one that at least tries.

“Teacher, I was busy, I had a trip, I have tests, I can’t study.” Whenever I ask these “really busy” students what they were up to, every single weekend they tell me they were playing computer, watching TV, or playing with friends. Busy indeed. While I know students schedules can be crazy when preparing for tests, I know putting a few minutes in on my homework really won’t prevent them from doing something fun. They have a WEEK.

“I changed my bag/notebook/class time/schedule so everything I needed for this assignment is at home.” They don’t try to pull this with Korean teachers, because they’ll occasionally call their mother to make them bring the items in question to the school for proof the student wasn’t lying about it. I usually don’t bother.

I remember being a student. I know there are times when you forget things, or can’t answer them. I don’t punish students that make an effort to get things done. If students really can’t do the work, I won’t get upset. It’s just the same lame students doing the same lame excuses every day that get on my nerves.

In any class I’ll hear one or two of these excuses. Every hour, every day. It’s really getting annoying. I had a student that I explicitly explained homework to three times. I checked his homework journal, spoke to his mother about the homework on multiple occasions, and STILL had him not do the correct vassignment. Short of tattooing, there isn’t much more I can do.