Caveat: I can’t. Not in English.

I've been teaching my annual unit on "All people have a right to self-determination" to my various debate classes, over the last few weeks. The pacing and level of detail with each class has been sligthly different, because each class has different levels of interest, motivation, and ability. Mostly, I time the unit to coincide with 삼일절 (Korean Independence Day, March 1), because one of the readings I give to the kids is an English translation of Korea's declaration of independence. The translation I have is really well written, for one thing, and it talks about self-determination of peoples (in the context of Wilson's Paris Declaration and the end of WWI).

One of the ironies of teaching this unit is that I have ended up teaching the kids a lot of history, and, more specifically, we often – depending on the direction of the class discussion – delve into Korean history, specifically. This evening, I had a rather interesting experience.

When I lecture on Korean history, I'm venturing into fraught territory: I know a lot of history, I've read a lot, but I'm by far an expert – especially in Korean history. All it takes is a few history-buff kids among my audience to point up various mistakes or glaring omissions in my observations. I have a student who mostly sleeps in my classes, although she will occasionally wake up to deliver a slightly-more-than-mediocre speech, if she's in the right mood. But she never prepares or does homework of any kind. Well, tonight, she woke up. She was very engaged, and paying attention. She was interested in Korean history in a way that clearly has never been interested in English. She wanted to argue with me, about the Jeju uprising of 1948.

I was stating, somewhat out of my ass, that the 1948 uprising was at least in part about the Jeju people seeking self-determination. I know enough to talk about how Jeju was originally "taken" by Goryeo in the year 938, when it was called Tamna and had its own culture and language, and how over the subsequent 1000 years it was thoroughly Koreanized. You might say its history resembles Wales in that respect. And I've always felt that, in the background, a yearning for self-determination must have at least had some part in the uprising in 1948, which was so brutally repressed by the American-sponsored president of South Korea, Rhee Syngman, that it's sometimes described as genocide. But the more overt causes of the uprising were, logically in that point in history, communist sympathizers and activists trying to subvert the nascent South Korean anti-communist regime.

So this student wanted to underscore that although the near-genocide in Jeju was undeniable, it was most definitely not about self-determination, in her view. It was a bunch of rabble-rousing communists who provoked an overreaction on the part of the government. She was struggling to explain this, in English, and she lingered after the class ended, to argue with me. She said, "you're wrong," and shook her head. "But I can't explain."

"Explain it to me… try. You can." I have always sensed that she was one of those students who hates English mostly because it doesn't allow her to express herself easily, because it's so hard to be eloquent. She has confirmed this.

"I can't. Not in English." She was almost crying. She really wanted to make her point.

The issue ended unresolved – she had to run, because it was 10 o'clock, the hagwon was closing. But I have this idea that that is what I really want, more than anything else: to turn English class from a boring memorization of canned phrases or vocabulary or grammar into an intrinsically motivated conversation, where suddenly students want… need to express themselves in English. And then English won't be a boring subject, but they'll start to see what language (any language) is for: communicating ideas effectively.