::A Geek in Korea::

One of the coolest things about how seriously school I work at takes testing is the fact that students to fail tests are held accountable to a degree not found at any other place I’ve ever worked. The retests that waste students time are designed to give a consequence to the failure of a test. Either pass a test, go realize that you won’t be on the bus home. This is a good idea, as students study for the mind-numbingly boring vocabulary tests with a ferocious desire to pass.

Usually.

Again, one of my classes has worked out a way to frustrate and annoy teachers, slowing down the process and aggravating everyone. All of the students fail the test on their first try. Then they waste class time by studying the test and looking over the material. They have a ten minute break while teachers switch, then they attempt another retest. Since all the students retest at the same time, instead of a five minute test, it can take ten or more minutes to get everything graded and handed back. All this time students are running back in forth in the halls, and the overworked receptionists are trying to keep track of who has and hasn’t taken the test.

When class lets back in after their ten minute break, I often have no students in class if I am the second teacher they see in the day. I wasted five or more minutes as students drifted back in from a “five minute test”. If students fail this retest, they have another test after my class session. This becomes their entire focus during my class, and students actually complain if I don’t let them out early to give them more time before the bus leaves.

Whole idea is that you pass the test the first time, then you don’t have to worry about missing the bus or staying late. Complaining about the consequences of your actions when you know what you did would get you in trouble defeats the point. Students that fail their tests every single time need to get special treatment, because this “retest” stuff is starting to waste more time than it is worth to me.

Today in one of the levels of classes that is for students have never really gotten good enough to be pushed up the the next level with confidence, I nearly had a mental breakdown trying to explain an extremely simple test. I had been well prepared for the fact that if I didn’t give them all of the information required to finish the test, they wouldn’t be able to do it. While I can confidently give spelling tests to students much younger in all my other classes, these students are "special", in that they can’t do much on their own.

I created, what I thought, would be an elegant solution to the problem. I wanted to test the student’s ability to recall the synonyms and antonyms of words we’ve been studying together for three weeks. I told them to prepare to be able to name words by recognizing their definitions, or words with similar meanings. I modeled the test after an activity in the book. I gave them a list of words or definitions, then placed all the possible answers in a word bank at the top of the page. All any student needed to do was look above, copy the proper word next to the correct synonym or antonym. I even told them what to do in Korean as I handed out the test, the best I could.

Immediately students threw up their hands and said, "I don’t know the first answer. I don’t know how to do this. I’m not going to do this at all." If there is anything that angers me off more as a teacher, it’s the unwillingness to try even the slightest bit. These are, of course, the worst of the worst students for this particular level that react with such impatience. I went around individually with every single student that had difficulty and explained it to them until they understood. One particularly dense student took for explanations from me, his neighbors, and everyone in class, and he still didn’t know what he was doing.

Meanwhile, the students that tried managed to get about 70% of the same test completed before they ran out of time. They still failed, and I gave them many, many hints to get them there, but at least they showed me it wasn’t the test’s design that made their results. It was the fact that none of the students had studied.

I warned there would be a retest tomorrow, and it would be a "don’t go home from school if you fail the test" sort of retesting. All the bad students whined about needing to leave as quickly as possible, either because of other schools or due to the bus. I told them they better not fail if that is the case, so come to class prepared to do well. The marginally better students corrected their tests with the time they had left after I returned it to them, and I made sure everyone left with the correct answers for the test tomorrow.

I was pretty upset, so when I returned to the teacher’s room, I mentioned the situation to my director. She started questioning me about the reactions of different students in the testing situation. Who did well? Who did poorly? Who tried? Who didn’t? After I was finish naming names, she prepared a list. She suggested to the head teacher that she moved the higher level students to another class, and leave that class for all the students that couldn’t do anything from day to day. Instead of having students that almost pass a test, I’m going to be left with students that would rather stick a pencil up their nose than study. If that class gets subdivided and my "almost tolerable" students get split off, I might go crazy on a student before the end of the year. I think this is something they should consider in a class I see three times a week.

Being seen as a semi-coherent Korean speaker with a limited vocabulary that generally understands what students are saying can have it’s downsides. I’m generally expected to fend for myself in classroom situations. This is because usually I can handle most things that arise with ease. Usually. Those occasional problems in which my vocabulary fails me, or it’s not my responsibility to fix whatever is wrong, I have to deal with irate students that forget that I’m working at a disadvantage trying to understand them.

Part of  my responsibility as a teacher is that I have to give a daily vocabulary test in one class. This is a Korean language test, where the students have to memorize a certain number of words for the day, then regurgitate them back on the test. The students load their brains five minute before class, then unload in the first five minutes of class. The desk receptionists are entirely in charge of this test. They issue the words per week totals, they handle making and printing the tests. They handle grading and retesting of students that missed too many questions. They hold the students after class that failed the test and force them to take a retest. The students can’t go home until they  pass. Seriously. If they miss their bus, they have to wait an hour for the next one. No one wants that.

I hand out the tests, collect them, and make sure to hand back the tests after they are graded. Other than timing the tests so that they only take up five minutes of my class time, I don’t do anything regarding these tests. They are fantastic wastes of time when I am running short for material to teach. I love them. Students memorizing English without me working too hard? Great! The motivation to get out of the school and go home at the right time make students care about the results of these exams, unlike the speaking tests I give on a weekly basis.

Today, the test had some sort of mistake. A line had been incorrectly divided, with two questions on one line, and the Korean definition of the second word on the line got split up so that it looked like a separate question. Since the students are simply memorizing the words, then writing them back down, when the number of words and definitions didn’t line up exactly like they were expecting, they freaked out. Seriously. The entire five minutes was nothing but eleven year old students throwing hissy fits over a single misplaced question. I told them to just be quiet, take the test, and talk to the receptionist, because I had nothing to do with the creation of the test. I didn’t make the mistake they were complaining about, but they expected me to come over and manually move the text on the printed page with my mind somehow. When students memorize without really profoundly understanding the material, one little detail is a hard roadblock to overcome. It’s like  their boot drive got corrupted. "Drive Not Found. Abort, Retry, Fail."

The problem was, the students couldn’t explain the problem in English, and I didn’t need to fix the problem myself. I didn’t have the class time to devote to soothing the feelings of every single student. If they had a problem, I wasn’t going to be the person grading the paper anyone. I was simply the only person there to hear their complaints, so I had to listen to them, as if I was going to do something because I understood what was going on. I personally thought the problem was too easy to worry about, because the word the students know was something I did know. If a foreigner with an extremely limited vocabulary can pass your test, it’s probaby too easy to complain about anyway. No sympathy here kids. Take it up with someone else that cares.

Eventually their fits got too noisy, and when I collected the test for the five minute time limit, the whining was getting near intolerable. I eventually gave them a warning about subtracting rewards from their notebooks. Another school employee eventually came in and got the kids to settle down too. When the receptionist finally came in, she was given hell about the test. She looked over the problem and said that there would be no retest for anyone that missed that particular question. Crisis averted, the students when back to complaining about my homework instead of the five minute test. No one want to spend an extra second in school or learning if possible.

I’ve been shut in all day trying to grade papers and do some evaluations. I’ve graded so many "I like the World Cup" and "My favorite pet" journals that my mind can no longer focus on the corrections I need to make. All the missing prepositions, scrambled words and bad spelling takes a toll.

Since I been grading papers like these for so long, I’m pretty sure I can crack the Enigma code of the children’s grammar most of the time. Since word order and sentence structure is so different, I know some of the people I’ve worked with don’t have an easy time with journals. The phonetic spelling, or occasional Korean word or phrase doesn’t help either. While it might only be a few sentences of text, each can take several minutes to correct.

The evaluations are from classes I taught over a month ago. I have no test results, no homework, no faces to go along with the names anymore. Some of the students were only in my class for a week or two, and I didn’t even learn their name. I have absolutely no idea why it’s taken a month to get these evaluations onto my desk. Now here I am trying to think up specific comments for students I no longer teach, and who might have already quit the school. When the other teacher complained about how he didn’t know the students well enough to comment, they told him to, "Be vaguely supportive and pretend."

Nice.

Across the river from my apartment complex is Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, or KAIST as it is more commonly known. I can see the gates in the interactive tour if I look out from the door of my apartment. For the past week, they’ve been having concerts outside in the evening. There is no rhyme or reason to the songs that are played and reach our apartment. We get all of the bad Korean folk songs, crooning pop songs, and the occasional rock song.

I was on the computer, surfing the web when I heard the bass line of some song that was something familiar, but from the distant past. Forgotten. Old. What could it be? Suddenly, the lyrics floated out over the road noise and I got not only the toe tapping beat, but the song as well. They were playing "Cum on, feel the noise" by Quiet Riot.

I mean, Quiet Riot? Really? From time to time you get the idea that Koreans don’t know that kind of Hair Metal has been dead for twenty years in the United States. When you go to singing rooms, they have entirely too many songs by Helloween. It’s over people. Really. People still consider Metallica "hardcore"  here without irony. What gives?

This was just a blip on my WTF meter. The next song was back to Korean folk music that sounds exactly the same to me, as if nothing unusual had happened. I thought the strangeness had passed until the fireworks started. We went outside to watch the show, and low and behold, "Rock you like a Hurricane" by The Scorpions was playing. Now, that song is a total rock anthem, suitable for any occasion, from football games to weddings if need be, but I couldn’t listening to it without thinking about Harrier Jump Jets and Tyranno-vision.

Damn. Pop culture is ruining me.

I have a young student that really doesn’t have a very good attention span. Considering his age, it’s probably a very good attention span, but compared to his peers in class, he’s scatterbrained. I told him that he had a test the very next day. He had to go home write the words in his book into his notebook several times to memorize them, and come back to class able to spell them all. I told him this multiple times. He wrote this down in his homework notebook. He said he understood.

The next day, I saw him in the hallway. I asked him if he was ready for his test. He said he was. I asked him a word on his test, and he got it right. I asked him a second word, and he didn’t know it. I told him to go to class now, five minutes before the class started and look over the words again to refresh his memory. I then went to grab my books and get ready for class.

When I walked back into class, I saw that he, along with the rest of the students, were playing pogs (ttok-ji).  I broke up the game, then passed out the paper for the spelling test. The same boy said, "We are having a test! I didn’t know! I didn’t have time to study at home or before class started! Oh no!"

I slapped myself on the forehead, and almost wanted to scream. Had no time? Didn’t know?

Anyway, I gave the test to the students, and the boy failed the test. He got the lowest score in class and held it up proudly for the rest of students to see. He said he was happy. Then I grabbed the glue and affixed the test directly to his book. Now when his mother opens his book to see if he did his homework or not, which is a requirement for him to get rewarded at the school, she will see his test scores.

The boy went from defiant and happy to sullen and depressed immediately. I asked him what was wrong, and he told me, "I don’t want to go home now."

After 6 years of living in Korea, I’ve finally needed to buy another bottle of shampoo. Anyone that’s lived here a few years will realize what a tremendous accomplishment that claim happens to be. It’s not that I don’t wash my hair every single day. It’s just that my supply of shampoo, for a time, appeared to be limitless no matter how many times I would want to wash.

The source of all this shampoo? Chuseok (Thanksgiving) gift baskets and Teacher’s Day. There hasn’t been a year yet where I haven’t been given shampoo. It’s one of those practical, works in any situation gifts that Koreans love to give. At times, I had so much soap available to me, that I not only had enough for myself, but also for a family of four. My wife’s family, when she lived with them during our engagement, was also supplied by my excessive soap and shampoo inventories. I had a backlog of two holidays shampoo when I would manage to finish a single bottle when I lived alone. My mother in law used to re-gift my sets to her insurance clients when we had stripped them of the supplies we needed until the next holiday. We had entirely too much soap.

How the hell did I go from shampoo for a family of four and more, to needing to buy my own shampoo? Timing.

Blame it on having two people living at the house, or the fact that my wife has been growing her hair longer, we do not have shampoo. Chuseok is a scant three weeks away, but we officially ran out of shampoo yesterday. We filled up the empty bottle and ran water through it for it’s soapy residue. None left. We had a set of sample packs we use for traveling we could use, but it wouldn’t last us the rest of the week, let alone the weeks needed to reach the holidays. So, we either had a few weeks of oily, foul hair, or finding some shampoo to last us in the mean time.

There is no guarantee I would get a shampoo and soap set this holiday either. I could finally be upgraded and receive the "SPAM" set for the first time, or get stuck with another oddball "Tuna set" I got one year for a holiday. Who knows what my new employer will get me, if anything at all! For the first time I’m actually looking forward to bringing home the soap sets so that we won’t have to carry any home from the supermarket.

I don’t consider myself a very popular guy around time. Usually foreigners that meet me say, "You’ve lived here how long? I’ve never seen you."

When my phone rang this morning at 7:00 AM, and my wife and I were both asleep, something either had to be wrong or unusual. The phone, which doubles as our alarm clock on most days, wasn’t supposed to make a sound until much later. I was still groggy when I pawed the phone open and put it to my ear. I didn’t get an immediate click of someone hanging up, but I was about to toss the phone back onto the nightstand when I heard someone speaking English.

What the hell is going on?

Now, I’ve only received a single wrong number in Korea that was by a native English speaker. Either the person that was looking for "Brian" two years ago has a terrible time trying to reach them, or it was probably someone I knew. Since anyone I knew in Korea was more likely to sleep in than I was, it was a good chance whoever called me wasn’t aware of the time difference. I do happen to have friends and relatives that like to scatter themselves around the globe from time to time.

It turns out, my parents just got around to calling via Skype, and the call forwarding option I had paid for worked perfectly. The contact ID my parents tried to reach wasn’t available because my computer was off, so it dialed my phone. If I hadn’t answered the called, I would have been able to listen to their voice mail when I logged into Skype. My father was actually surprised it worked so easily. He didn’t expect to reach me on his first try. Had I answered the phone in Korean like I usually do when I know who is calling, he might have hung up.

What an absolutely wonderful piece of technology. Now my parents and I can actually stay in contact easily instead of worrying about the times when we are available. My parents are always working, and I have times when I absolutely can not answer a phone. Now that I can be reached for free (or next to nothing) at any time, by anyone, anywhere. That’s simply mind blowing.

It’s so convient, in fact, that I might need to train my parents to use another website, The Time Zone Converter, unless I want to get more early morning phone calls.

The finding acceptable seating for students in one of my mid-level classes is something akin to playing a game of chess. One student fights with another. Girls want to sit together, but only by age or elementary school. Other boys only study well together, or work better alone. I’ve gotten to assigning a few seats, then banning other combinations and letting the students figure out where that leaves them. Eventually I’m sure there will be some sort of combination found that lets everyone study in peace, but I have yet to find it.

One of the students in my class has only had a week with me. He was in other classes and got dumped into my level for the first time. He’s already been prohibited from sitting behind or next to the smallest boy in class because they get into fights constantly. This new boy isn’t making any friends in class, because he spent the entire class fighting again. The student fighting with him knows me and has been in my classes from the beginning of my teaching at this school.

My whole thing with boys fighting in class is this: If you aren’t distracting anyone else, and I don’t hear about it, beat the shit out of each other. I don’t care. The second someone else complains, or I have to hear you whining about who hit who, I’ll come down harsh like a hammer and you’ll wish all you had was a bruise from some student. This was my father’s discipline style, and it works.

Today class was going well. I’d see the two boys swinging at each other under the desk, but they weren’t causing much of a problem for each other.  I told them to stop, got ignored, then ignored them. Then when we were doing some other work, the boys started up again and I couldn’t teach. I had to stop and correct their behavior. Now they were getting me angry.

I asked one of the boys why he kept fighting with everyone in class. He started getting defensive about getting singled out and justified it by saying that the other boy had been punching him too. The problem is that every time he gets moved around class, he fights with someone else. No one was beating each other up in class before this boy showed up anyway.

For some reason, the boy got up. Somehow in the course of trying to either explaining the events, or pantomiming something, he took a swing at me. He grabbed me, pushed me, and gave me a punch in the side. I’m not happy when ten year old students act out their aggressions on me. I warned him, with the entire class watching, "Do not touch me again!" in Korean and English.

The boy stopped, grinned, then poked me with a finger. The entire class inhaled in, "Oh no he didn’t" sort of anticipation. I knew I had been challenged, even by someone a third my size and weight. Walk away from this, and I’d never have control of a level with these students in it again. The boy didn’t expect me to do anything, but like I said, he didn’t have me as a teacher for more than a week. When someone is challenging my control of a class in the first few weeks, I’m not a person to be messed with. 99% of my students know this, and he was just that last 1% to find out.

I took his hand, mock Hapkido style, and turned him around and marched him out the door. I gave him a nice "stay here. Don’t move." sort of command. I looked at the clock. I had about three minutes of class left. These students all ride a bus home. Either I disciplined the boy now before he missed his bus, or there is a good chance he might disappear before I could get him in front a Korean speaker.

Tactical decision, I let the other students go early. If this comes back to haunt me, with students asking to leave earlier, I’ll deal with it. Right now, I needed to get this boy under control.

I grabbed the nearest native speaker, my Director, who was in the meeting with a parent. Unfortunately, she couldn’t make time right way, so the boy got to stew for a few minutes on a bench and come up with a few nice excuses. The bell rang, the rest of the students were left out, and I grabbed another teacher to yell at the boy for me after I explained what he did. There was another bus departing in an hour, so the boy got to stay the entire time and get scolded. Score one for revenge!

The director talked to the boy after the teacher was finished with him, and he came to my class to apologize. He said he was misbehaving, and wasn’t listening. He claimed he thought I was playing around when I said, "Don’t touch me!" with a look of death in my eyes. Yeah, he isn’t a particularly bright student.

The parents were called as well, so it looks like everything in our power to deal with the situation has occurred. It seems the mother wasn’t very talkative other than saying, "Oh my, no! He shouldn’t do that!" We shall see if anything actually comes about from the disciplinary action we took. The Director said that she understands that for the first few weeks, being tough is okay to establish control. After that, she said, she expected the students to settle down. I sure hope so.

Some of my students encountered the word "chivalrous" in a story about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.  They were reading the story outl oud with me occasionally helping with pronunciation. As soon as I saw the word, I knew there would be a problem. Not only is it a difficult word to explain and to say, there is a special problem relating to the way it would be broken down into Korean characters when kids are trying to pronounce it for the first time.

Instead of saying it "chivalrous", as we would, the tendency in Korean would be to turn the first syllable into "Shi", the second into "bal" (there is no "v" in Korean), third "rus". This is bad, because "Shi-bal" is a Korean exclamatory sort of curse word. It’s the thing you would yell before you attack with an onslaught of other foul sorts of words. The number "18" in Korean sounds also very close to the same word.

Despite my help, the students still had a problem saying the word correctly in English without giggling. I often get students that go to enormous lengths just to get me to say the word "18" in Korean just so they could pretend I said something different. This was the same thing, except they had to talk about King Arthur for paragraphs and his "chivalrous" nature. It was non-stop laughter been the students.