Teaching II – Elementary

Boring alert: very few pictures!

Contrary to the hype, the rest of my non-kinder day is really not all that exciting. The feeling of the squeezies is replaced by a genuine sense of accomplishment in seeing your kids’ progress and the intermittent lulls in class attention and energy are slightly less excruciating. Otherwise, I am in the same classroom all day with the same tiny chairs and the same weather, season, and number-related vocabulary words adorning my walls.

I have to say that there is a lot of honour and pride that goes along with the job. There are few better feelings in the world than watching the eyes of a young one light up at having received an answer to a burning question or in hearing an enthused “really?! Cool!” when they encounter some nifty new fact about the world around them. Indeed, imparting knowledge on the younger generation is an exciting and empowering experience I had honestly not anticipated. (Strange realisation – I am no longer part of the youngest generation on this planet). The amount of influence you have over these kids is truly something. Indeed, the pressure is high and it’s very important that you’re on top of your game and man enough to handle real-life sit’ations every minute of the day lest you lead these kids astray or warp their fragile young minds.

To be sure, teaching non-kindergarten youngsters is not without its share of annoyances. Some kids don’t care at all about their studies because this isn’t real school to them and their parents are just making them go. I have still not figured out the specific system but I believe that the hogwan is akin to what an after-school music or art class would be back home. That is, you can send your kid there for an hour or three after or between their real public school classes against their will. The kid gets additional learning (in this case in generic school subjects like writing and social studies) and your bank account gets smaller. I am teaching what is, in essence, an after-school program. It just also happens to be school. So while kids back home are playing soccer and karate and taking piano lessons after school, these kids are going to school #2. After school #2, though, they still have these more exciting extra-curriculars to attend as well. Mostly this jam-packed day means your average 1st grader usually goes to bed around 11 or 12 after a damn hard day’s work and gets up again at 7am to do it all over again. (See my earlier note about Asians taking over the world sometime soon).

Doing this job makes me realise that the Korean hogwan (or at least mine) really does trust an undergraduate degree from a Western institution as a true indicator of teaching ability. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t reflect on how important my job is to these kids or just how much of an impact my quality-of-teaching and energy level on any given day (or lack thereof) has on my children and the education they receive. This fact is an important one to keep in my head in order to keep my laziness and apathy in check but it can also make for some pretty exhausting evenings when I am tired and would otherwise want to just assign busy work or let the kids chat.

Sometimes I can get frustrated with the quality, style, or content of the material I have to teach. I am lucky enough not to have to design my own lesson plans, so at least there is less work to do on the prep side of things. The flip side of this pre-designed curriculum, though, is that I have to teach the exact page numbers and topics it says I have to teach on any given day. I have 3 different Social Studies classes a week and the texts for such are all über-American. While it’s nice for me to learn new things about the American constitution and how Mexicans are integrating into Colorado society, I feel that these kids would be better off learning about something with which they have more familiarity. Having a Canadian teach Koreans about the American Midwest is, well, strange at best.

All of the kids in my Social Studies classes are in either grade 1 or grade 2 and each of them is more or less completely fluent. The quality of their thought processes is on par with about a grade 4 or 5 back home and the striking thing is that this is their second language. I’m sure I’d be even more amazed at how smart they are if I could converse with them in their native tongue. My other 2 classes, though, are lower level kids around the same age who just started learning English last year. The respective pros and cons of these two types of class are thus: the lower levels are a breeze outside of the class because there is very little (or very simplistic) marking to be done. The in-class hours can be a tad tedious, though, because of the strain on both the kids and I to communicate with each other effectively across the language barrier. The more advanced students, however, are engaged and interactive in class, which makes the hour go by much faster. These classes each merit me a few hours of paper-marking each week, though, so I guess in the end it all evens out.

As I conclude this elongated, fairly dry account of my daily life here I realise that no matter where you are or what you are doing in this world, there will always be factors both good and bad upon which you can dwell to construct an opinion about your life. I suppose that this sentiment is quite fitting here in Korea – a country whose flag embodies just this sentiment with the eum-yang symbol as its central element.

I am sure that forever after I will look back on my life here with feelings of both frustration and admiration but I believe that it is this mixed sentiment that comprises a large and necessary part of all human experience. “Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so” may well be right. I have both qualms and passions about certain aspects of my work and at the end of the day it both frightens me away from and seduces me towards a future career as a teacher in some capacity. No matter which way you slice my side of the job, though, I still think I’d still prefer to have had a carefree childhood like the one I did than to be up past 11 doing homework in a foreign language when I was still in grade 2. If you’re still reading this and you have anything even remotely more productive you should be doing, go do it now. With these super-brainy, super-studious, fluently English children entering the workforce in the next 15 years, you won’t have a job for long. Slacker.