::A Geek in Korea::

My students aren’t ones for subtlety, so I was a little confused as to what they were doing during the vocabulary test they were supposed to be taking today. One student was whispering to another across the room, and they were using hand signals and writing notes. Since this was during their vocabulary TEST I was obviously a little annoyed with the behavior.

The weird thing was that if two students were flashing notes and cheating on the test, the other students would INSTANTLY rat them out. Instead, every student that got involved in the conversation got more and more involved in the pointing and whispering. By this time, I was really annoyed. I thought there was going to be a fight or that they were talking badly about each other, so I didn’t know what to expect.

Eventually the test ended, the students exchanged papers, and I had to walk out of the room to hand in the scores and pick up some paper for the students to complete their assignment that I had forgot on my desk. When I went back to the classroom, I saw four of my gossiping students out of class talking to the director. I thought this was about something they had been talking about during their tests, so I went over to see what had been going on.

It turns out that the gossiping students had caught another student cheating on the test. He had a cheat sheet hidden in his bag, and he was cheating on his vocabulary test. That’s why they were so annoyed and agitated during the test! They hadn’t said anything to me, but everyone in the class had known what was going on. Everyone except the cheater, that is.

The director said she was going to handle the situation, and thanked the students for their unusual discretion. This is the first time students didn’t point and someone doing something wrong and yell, “RULE BREAKER!” in one form or another. I guess it was their way of letting the boy tie his own noose.

After the director reviewed the video tape from the class, she pulled the boy out of class and gave him a nice little talk about cheating in class I didn’t get to see. All I know is that the boy looked to be crying when he returned and wouldn’t make eye contact with anyone in the class. I guess he was ashamed that everyone had turned him in. It seemed far more effective than when they turn each other in for speaking Korean in class, which they did multiple times today in the very same class.

Odd sort of justice Korean children follow.