Today will be my seventh day of teaching in South Korea. I say teaching in the loosest sense of the term. My qualifications for this job are shameful at best: I am disease-free, have a bachelor’s degree, and a pulse. That’s what the industry standard is here but meeting the bare minimum isn’t exactly a heartening prospect. My students call me “Teacher,” but I wouldn’t necessarily call what I do “education.”
I work for a hagwon, which in Korea is a private school where kids go after regular public school to brush up on their subjects. And by “brush up,” I mean have even more information crammed into their poor sleep-deprived brains until almost 11:00 at night. There are hagwons everywhere; in Bundang, it is not an exaggeration to say they are on every street corner. Hagwons exist for every possible subject: math, science, history, music, and foreign languages. English language hagwons easily outnumber all of the rest.
Koreans value education very highly. They are extremely hard-working and want to master whatever task they set their minds to. An example of this is James, a Korean teacher at my school. While I’m on break, idly prepping for my next class, checking the online news, or daydreaming, James is reading an English book on the history of Federal Reserve so he can understand how to understand and translate current financial happenings in the U.S. for Korean clients. The Korean work ethic puts Americans to shame in a lot of ways. Admittedly, much of their hard work is because of the immense language/thought barrier that separates them from a lot of the English-speaking business world. But their focus on education certainly seems to translate into a solid economic engine centered around manufacturing and technology.
But that focus is not without its faults. In fact, focus might be the wrong word. Obsession might be a better one. And it’s an expensive obsession. One of my fellow teachers told me that 4% of South Korea’s GDP is spent on hagwons. And a full 2% is spent on English-language hagwons. That’s a lot of money but, when you realize that almost every family of any worth sends their kids to extra, private school every day, even on weekends, it shouldn’t be surprising.
That extra schooling takes a toll on the kids. I walk into class and some are just completely zoned out. They’ve got that shell-shocked thousand yard stare. They’ve been learning since 8:00 am and here it is, almost twelve hours later, and I’m supposed to get them excited about noun-verb agreement. Some of the kids are sharp and still have it together. But I wonder how much of what I’m teaching them they actually will retain. It can’t be much, because by the time they get home, they still have to do homework. Keeping 10-year olds up to 11:00 pm isn’t good for their health and exhausting their minds doesn’t help. That’s at least half the reason why I doubt I practice “education.” There’s only so much you can learn in a given day without a sleep cycle to internalize it all.
The older kids aren’t just doing vocabulary quizzes, though. They have to write essays, perform listening and speaking tests, have debates. Many are preparing to take the SAT in English, as well as the TOEFL exam. Some are at school until almost 11:00 pm. No wonder they all say their favorite thing to do is sleep.
I definitely understand the need for people to learn other languages. In a globalized world, it’s a vital necessity. America has gotten lazy by not requiring students to begin a language at a young age. We also do not have a wide variety of languages offered. Most of it is either Spanish, French, or German, which leaves us stuck in a very 20th century state of mind. But Korea is at the opposite end of the spectrum. Requiring every single kid to learn English without regard to skill or innate capability for languages is a ridiculous proposition. Some kids just flat out don’t get it. Their parents shouldn’t be throwing them at a subject the kids will never master.
Each class period is really short. 40 minutes is a very limited amount of time to take attendance, get their attention, explain a concept, and do a worthwhile exercise that will create some foothold of language within their mind. You really need to make them think about language in terms of logic, as though it’s a puzzle to be solved. I had my 10-year olds doing an “odd one out” exercise in which they had to pick out which word out of five did not belong and why. Then I moved on to having two separate criteria, meaning that one word was out when you looked at the problem one way, and another word was out in when you considered it in another light. One kid, Stephen, was very perceptive and even managed to pick out the fact that four words had single vowels in the first syllable and one word had a diphthong. Now, he didn’t know what a diphthong was, obviously, but he’s smart enough to be thinking in such terms. So hopefully that little attempt at getting them to see different relationships between words will plant a seed in their minds.
This will be a definite challenge, given that the kids are accustomed to learning in a very rote, formulaic manner. But getting them to ask questions and try to understand the logic behind language is the only way to really master it. Yet so much of English is based on context. Korean teachers have asked me for help with a lot of grammar issues. One is the use of “it.” The paragraph was drawn from the New York Times, a publication acclaimed for its great writing. But it contained a passive-voice sentence so garbled in intent and subject that I really could not explain to the Korean teacher what it meant. I basically said, “This is a really good example of really bad writing.” An American would have understood it solely because they would have seen that usage over and over. But, when I think about another instance, how does a Korean understand that it is more appropriate to say “the study of hormones” instead of “the study of the hormones” if you aren’t talking about a specific set of hormones?
If anything, I realize I need to make my own writing much clearer. So I am thankful for the little insights my job has shown me.
For now, I am off to teach some of my first classes with more fluent, upper-level English-speakers. Hopefully I will have some new and more nuanced insights to write about soon.
‘Til then.
