Caveat: On Feeling Trapped – “For Better or For Worse”

My friend Bob wrote me a long email recently in which he discussed feeling trapped in his job. I, too, have struggled with that feeling, although perhaps in different ways or for different reasons.

I certainly have days of deep, deep dissatisfaction with my "life as it is" these days. The last few days have been in that category – I feel like a failure at work and that permeates all the other aspects of my life, since I have let work become so central to my current sense of self and identity. This is, of course, a dubious move from a mental health standpoint, but it seems almost unavoidable, for when I dwell on other aspects of my life, I find myself even more disappointed.

I won't say that I feel that I am a bad teacher. I don't actually think that. What I will say, however, is that I may be a bad teacher for this environment – what Koreans need and want, in a teacher, isn't necessarily where my strengths lie. Nevertheless, I remain, and keep trying.

Recently, our middle-school TOEFL-based program has been dying. Students have been dropping out of it in a steady attrition, either migrating to the so-called "TEPS" cohort or leaving KarmaPlus altogether. The reasons are obvious: being in the supposedly "premium" TOEFL cohort isn't getting them the high scores they want and need on their school tests. 

The reason for this, in turn, is because TOEFL and a Korean middle school English test are quite different animals. TOEFL is a fairly well-designed test, intended for university level, that seeks to determine a student's communicative competence in English. TEPS (Korea's special home-grown English test) and the middle school tests that seem to follow the TEPS lead are not tests of English communicative competence. Instead, what they most resemble is perhaps the types of tests in Greek and Latin that high-schoolers did around a century ago. With frozen idioms and artificial texts, they quiz you on minutiae of grammar and vocabulary and are brutally unforgiving of small mistakes that the TOEFL, by design, essentially ignores. 

If a student forgets to write -s on the word "drive" because it happens to be in the third person singular, the TOEFL scorer may take note, but the impact on the final score is minimal as long as the writer's ideas are clear. In the tests my students take, however, a missed -s can mean a hit to the final score that fails to get one into one of the elite high schools.

I have students who have gotten 80 or 90 points on practice TOEFL tests (a level that could get them into an American University, provided they meet other admission criteria of course), but who blow the naesin (school test). These are the students who are dropping out.

OK… this is a digression. My TOEFL2 cohort has died – there weren't enough students left to keep it running. We only have one TOEFL cohort left in middle school, and it's a mediocre collection of students at best – the English stars are all gone. 

As their teacher, I feel like a failure. I can't help them prepare for naesin by teaching TOEFL, it seems – knowing English isn't enough. What they need is meticulous attention to grammatical detail and the capacity to memorize obscure English vocabulary. I guess I'm willing to try to teach this, but I need to "train myself." Additionally, ironic though it is, I will have to further master Korean to be able to teach anything for naesin at all: the test is in Korean, after all (not the texts or words, which are English, but the questions – i.e. the parts that say e.g. "Underline the noun phrases in the below sentences" or "Which sentence below contains no grammatical error?").

I started out intending to write about feeling trapped. I guess my answer is… sometimes I feel trapped, but I'm kind of just accepting that I feel that way sometimes, and not fighiting it. I'm here for the long haul, it seems – both because I'm tired of quitting things (my life has been that of a "serial quitter," as my former coworker and friend Tyler once said with huge impact on my psyche), but also because I'm now a cancer patient who can't easily get insurance and inexpensive healthcare in my own country (I don't trust that obamacare actually solves the preexisting condition catch-22 – it doesn't appear to have done so).

I do not use the metaphor "I'm married to Korea, now" lightly – I mean to capture exactly that level of meaning: "for better or for worse…"

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

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