::A Geek in Korea::

Somewhere along the line, the school I work at has shifted to a more brutal, more rude sort of place. The tone the students take had gotten nastier. Young children cursing their peers. People not doing homework, bad attitudes, that sort of thing. Positive reinforcement only works when the students can do something to get rewarded. If they stop trying, what then? What can you do to change students that stop doing their work? What if the parents are too busy? What if you can’t leave it up to anyone else?

One example of things going wrong is a class I have with older students. They used to try extremely hard to get every question correct on everything they do. Now they are intentionally failing tests with zero correct answers. They are signing in tests and turning them in blank in protest. They have warped the system to suit their purposes. They want to spend an extra hour of time hanging out with their friends doing homework at school, rather than working at home or before class since they have no free time.

They think their parents won’t see their test scores, or don’t care if they do. Either that, or the punishment they get at home is worth enduring to get more free time that would have been devoted to studying English vocabulary words. Homework isn’t that bad when you can copy off four friends and get it done faster.

These students got “dealt with” a few days earlier by my director. After I had walked out at the end of the hour of another bad class, I told my director that they had all failed their tests, hadn’t done their homework, and had spent the entire hour talking in Korean to each other. She said, “I will have a talk with them.”

She didn’t say it in a grim Nazi “I vill talk vif dem” accent, but I might have guessed something was up at that point. There was some inflection in her voice, I’ll leave it at that.

Since they are my last class of the day left it at that, but I later heard what she had meant by this remark. She went in with a wooden stick and rapped them on the hands for each of their misdeeds. I’ve been told she uses a wooden drum stick, and swats open palms. It’s enough to force students to write with their other hand. Some of the boys were saying that it was hard enough to make them cry. The very next class, their tests scores went from 0 to passing.

I am of a very mixed mind about this development. I find it deplorable to hit students. It is something I would never, ever do as a teacher. In this case it was immediately effective.While I wouldn’t hit them myself would I use their punishment to my advantage? Would I use the threat of violence to scare bad students into doing a better job on their homework and tests? Absolutely.

Today, in another class, several of my students were totally half-assing their work. They had skipped parts of homework without asking questions, failed their vocabulary tests, and generally been slacking off. I warned them that my director had picked up a more direct form of punishment, and that they needed to watch out, because they might be next in line when the “hammer” falls. As if summoned, my director came into the room and asked me to step out of the class.

I went back to the teacher’s room, and she did whatever it was to punish the kids. Whatever it was, she didn’t want me to see. All I know was when I returned, one of the students had a sore hand, all of them paid attention, and they really, really wanted to have their homework finished for the next class.

One particularly naught boy asked me if I had told her to come in and punish them. I told him I had no part of that exchange. I didn’t know she was going to do that, and I didn’t sanction it. No matter the dislike I might have personally for a student, I don’t want to see them hit in class. To be honest, if I was going to pick a student to get punished the worst, it would have been him, because I know he’s lazy and up to no good.

I might be claiming innocence since I don’t raise a finger to hurt anyone, but when I was checking his work, I caught this very same student cheating and copying homework for the director’s class when he should have been working on my assignment in class. Did I tell my director about that? Absolutely.

I don’t like the fact my director is hitting students, but it is a common practice at the “hard core” schools in the neighborhood. I turned down a job at one school because their foreign manager seemed to get sadistic glee out of punishing students. I had told the manager that I thought their methods were too extreme, and that they had sent my cousin to the hospital due to stress, anxiety about punishment, and humiliation. I was genuinely fearful when I saw the manager couldn’t contain a smile while thinking about hitting students. There was this sick nostalgia in their eyes. That’s not right, and I don’t want any part of it.

Some parents will absolutely choose to join a school because they know their is a discipline system in place that encourages study by force. The option of last resort, for burnouts and lazy students. Part academy, part reform school, teachers with brutal methods are often the most popular. I find that completely fucked up, but I’m also benefiting the short term gains of improvement at the moment.

However I’ll never forget seeing a student racked with test anxiety, fearful he would get hit by his mother for getting a test answer wrong, curled in a ball vomiting in terror at age nine. Do I want all of my students to turn into neurotic headcases? Hell no. Do I want them to study? Of course. Do they want to study? Not at all. What is to be done?

I guess this is what I have to put up with for now, but when that contract needs to be resigned, I’m really going to have to weigh the decision carefully if this escalates any further. There will be a point where I’m going to say I am uncomfortable with this occuring in my class, and if it costs me my job, I’m prepared for that. If I was asked to punish students myself, that would probably be where I would walk off the job for good. I won’t end up on that side, and I don’t care if it hurts my chances of finding another job in the future. That’s not something I’d live with comfortably.