My little ones, the Stars Betelgeuse 반, have been practicing a new play. It's yet another version of the boy who cried wolf.
This is just a practice run – but I think it's cool to show how they have fun as they become more familiar with the script and their roles. This is what English education should be at this age – focused play with English as a sort of side-effect.
I received the following essay today. It's supposed to be a TOEFL-level essay. I'm not super impressed, and the score I gave to it was not passing, but I nevertheless found it quite amusing. I copy it here verbatim, errors and all, per my usual practice (with some names changed to protect the innocent).
Question: Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? If you cannot say anything nice, it is better not to say anything at all.
The topic is if you cannot say anything nice, it's better not to say anything at all. Some people will disagree and some people can agree with this topic. I agree with this topic because of two reasons. The first reason is bad word can make people's feelings bad and my second reason is people can fight each other because of a bad word.
My first reason is bad word can make people's feelings bad. Because right now, I said Kevin sun of the bitch and he said me sun of the bitch too and I said sun of the bitch one more time and he said I'm diarrhea so we will continue to say bad word to each other. And I said him "You are a cavin!" and he said me "You are a cane!". So we can't be a friend because we can fight.
My second reason is people can fight each other because of a bad word. Before, one person whose name is K. He said bad words to other person whose name is C and they fought and they hurt so much so they go to the big hospital. I really saw it (it's lie). Ah, K said he is a gay, too. I go to the hospital which they're in, but they are saying bad words each other.
In conclusion, because a bad word can make people's feelings bad and people can fight each other because of a bad word so I agree with this good topic. There can many people that disagree with my opinion, however, I agree with this topic.
This is the last (sixth) question (section heading) from the handout entitled “초등부 강사로서의 나의 역량 자가 진단” (roughly, “self-diagnostic of my abilities as an elementary teacher”) which we discussed in a meeting a few weeks back – I discussed the first, second, third, fourth and fifth questions prior.
카르마 플러스어학원 홍보는
karma plus language-hagwon promotion-TOPIC
어떻게 하고 있습니까?
be-how-ADV do-PROG-FORMAL-QUESTION
How are you promoting KarmaPlus Language Hagwon?
This question annoys me.
This question is not about me as a teacher, but rather about me as an employee of a for-profit business. Although not unimportant, I sometimes get frustrated with the failure to explicitly recognize that there is a division here. Of course it’s important (see my recent post about the business environment of hagwon, for example: “marketing is king” and all that). But if I’m bad at marketing your hagwon, that doesn’t make me a bad teacher. It just makes me a bad marketer.
In point of fact, I think that I’m a pretty atrocious front-line salesperson. I’m too frank (honest) and I have very little patience for “customers” in the broad sense. But, having said that, I’m a very strong believer in the importance of marketing. I’m very sympathetic to the impulse and business need behind asking this question. Further, I think I expressed some talent in the field of marketing analytics, when I worked in the database world – which is to say, “I coulda hadda career in marketing.” I just happen to think that asking this question in this way, in a document that’s supposed to be about evaluating us as teachers, is inappropriate.
One thing it might be advisable for hagwon to do is to recognize that there may be different types of marketing talent, and therefore not to attempt a one-size-fits-all marketing plan that requires all teachers to also be salespeople. In dwelling on this, I’m beating an already dead horse, I realize. And I’ll be beating that poor dead horse some more when I finish the next part of my IIRTHW series. For that, I can only offer apologies to my loyal reader.
This is the fifth question (section heading) from the handout entitled “초등부 강사로서의 나의 역량 자가 진단” (roughly, “self-diagnostic of my abilities as an elementary teacher”) which we discussed in a meeting a few weeks back – I discussed the first, second, third and fourth questions prior.
감동을 주는 학생 관리의
impression-OBJ give-PASTPART student management-GEN
전문가가 되십시오
professional-SUBJ become-DEF-FORMAL-IMPER
Become an impressive student management professional.
Actually, it’s not a question, like the others. It’s an imperative. Do it!
This really seems to be a reference to the 상담 (“counseling”) role that I happen to have discussed at length in my exact previous post. In that sense, it doesn’t really apply to me, since my interaction with parents is quite minimal, mostly due to linguistic causes (i.e. my poor Korean) rather than a desire on my part to avoid it.
Nevertheless, I would also take it to mean issues of what we might call “classroom management.” In that sense, it’s important. Classroom management is hard. I have been having a lot of incidences of my lesson plan coming up “short” recently – I finish what I intended to do and still have 5 or 10 minutes of class left. When that happens, I will often just “chat” with the students for a while, or tell a story or play a game, but it does feel like a classroom management failure at some level, and it’s been happening enough that students are starting to expect it, and I’m not sure that’s a good idea. This is what you might call the time-management aspect of classroom management.
In the area of handling disruptive students, I’m more confident. I feel like over all I handle these situations well, and without too often invoking “higher authorities” (i.e. the dreaded “If you do that again I’m going to take you out for a visit with the 실장님” [front desk lady] and then having to live up to that threat).
In the area of record keeping, I think in fact I exceed my fellow teachers, yet I’m actually not very happy with how I do. I would love to have it all in a database, but the raw fact is that I’m too lazy to build such a database, and certainly management is too lazy to provide such a database except in the most rudimentary sort.
Overall, in the area of “Impressive student management professional” I would give myself a B-.
[In the form of various unstructured entries with fairly random thoughts, I’ve been working on this project for several years, and it’s come to have the name “If I Ran The Hagwon” (abbreviated as IIRTHW). This topic seems to be evolving into my first effort at something resembling long-form journalism on my blog. Here is Part II. I posted Part I last month. Additional parts (number to be determined) will follow.]
[Part I]
Part II – The Business Environment.
To understand what would make a better English language hagwon, it’s important to get some broad understanding of the business and cultural context in which a typical hagwon has to operate these days.
There are many aspects that make the hagwon environment “alien” to people from Western countries (and even, to some extent, perhaps other non-Western countries too). I’d like to talk about these aspects. In fact, they all derive from a single overarching fact: the hagwon “system” as it currently exists in South Korea is an example of unbridled capitalism in the field of education. This basic fact leads to a whole bunch of concomitant issues that come to our attention once we understand it.
Since I believe that ultimately, the key to success in business is customer loyalty, regardless of the business in question, I will try to connect each of these observations to the concept of customer loyalty. This will provide a sort of unifying theme for this exercise.
1. Alienation and workplace regimentation.
A core fact of capitalism is that it leads to alienation. South Korea’s capitalist economy doesn’t just generate alienation, but requires alienated, conforming workers as a precondition to function efficiently. This being the case, one of the purposes of South Korean education is to create appropriately alienated workers out of whole human cloth. Because of this, just like the military (another alienation-making-machine), Korean schools and hagwon have as a key non-explicit mission the alienation of students.
It’s hard to explain how important this is to the ultimate character of the hagwon business environment. Setting aside complex questions of what teaching methodologies actually work and what ones actually don’t work in a wider, theoretical context, in South Korea, specifically, there isn’t a lot of cultural space for what we might think of as empowering styles of teaching.
Korean students tend to be fairly passive, and require a fairly high level of supervision and extrinsic motivation. Efforts at cultivating intrinsic motivation will create discomfort and even suspicion among not just students but, more importantly, among parents and fellow teachers, who will ask questions such as, “why are you letting this child have fun at school? How is that going to help little Haneul for her next test?”
I might state, just as an observation for future reference: suspicious customers are not loyal customers.
2. Parents-as-consumers, children-as-products.
One thing that even the Korean hagwon owners rarely seem willing to admit is that on this capitalistic model, the children are not our customers. They are not paying the bills. The children are essentially products. I don’t mean this in a necessarily bad way – it’s just the reality and it’s better to have a firm grip on the reality. To be more precise, the students’ hopefully improved test scores are a service being provided. In light of this, a bad test score is emblematic of a defective service, and will lead very quickly to lost customer loyalty.
Nevertheless, within this conceptual frame there is still a lot of room for variation. Different parents have different opinions as to how they want their kids’ scores improved, and they may have various rigid or not-so-rigid views as to what methods should be used. They may be sophisticated consumers of education or naive; they may be traditionalists or innovationists.
Identifying and catering to these different types of parents (i.e. customers) is the key to acquiring and retaining their loyalty.
3. Market fragmentation and niches.
Given that some 80% or 90% of Korean students attend some form of hagwon, the market is huge. Although Korea is not an ethnically diverse country, it is an ideologically and culturally diverse one, with parents running the gamut from communards to vaguely Randian libertarians, from atheistic hippies to Pentecostals to Buddhists.
Education is (has been, will always be) an area where ideologies and subcultures play a major role, and capitalism is a system that encourages market fragmentation. The consequence of this is that there is a nearly infinite number of possible market niches out there. Not all of these market niches are viable, but I think this insight underscores one very important point: a given hagwon – especially a non-chain, “mom and pop” style, single-location hagwon – can occupy one or more of any number of possible market niches, providing anything from “fun English” to “hardcore pass-the-test cram English.”
4. The importance of “counseling” (상담).
The Korean word is 상담 [sangdam]. It means, roughly, “counseling.” In a customer-oriented business (e.g. telecoms) the work the people who talk to you on the phone trying to sell you stuff or solve your problems is called 상담. In the context of running a hagwon business, too, I would argue that is, in essence, a sales position. Rather, it is not just sales, but the after-the-sale “account manager” position common in large, service-oriented businesses.
Hagwon counseling includes mostly telephone “counseling” but also plenty of face-time with parents, too. If counseling is so critical, why do so many hagwon force the teachers into this critical, customer-facing position? Let’s take note of something: good teachers are not necessarily the best sales people. And good sales people are not necessarily the best teachers.
Obviously, in many people, there is some overlap – the skill sets are not, in fact, dissimilar. Conceding that fact, however, if I was running a small business I would work very hard to make sure that anyone who dealt with parents in this counseling role had lots of innate talent and lots of training (training in that account manager style counseling as opposed to just training as teachers) and that those counseling-based, customer-retention statistics (as compared to statistics linked to things like quality-of-teaching or student test
score outcomes) were tracked and documented.
In a small hagwon, this counseling role can be consolidated into a single person’s role. It can be that person’s sole job in a slightly larger institution, and in a large, successful hagwon, I can imagine a whole cubicle farm of “customer account managers” whose sole job is keeping parents satisfied.
This leads to a certain complication, however: if the sales people (the account managers) aren’t the same ones teaching the kids, there needs to be very clear lines of communication – a centralized database of student progress, teacher observations, parent requests, etc. I’ve never seen anything resembling this in the hagwon business.
This is where providing some reliable means of communication between teachers (service people) and counselors (sales people) is critical.
Just remember what this really boils down to: marketing is king.
5. The purpose and deployment of technology.
Technology is popular in Korean classrooms – more so in public schools than in hagwon, but certainly in hagwon too. I think it’s critical to understand one core fact – for a hagwon, where costs are critical and methodologies trend toward the traditional, technology is 95% marketing, and at best only 5% pedagogy. In other businesses I’ve been a part of in the U.S., in the past, technology is what is sometimes called “the bells and whistles.”
Perhaps it doesn’t help that I, personally, have always been severely skeptical of the genuine usefulness of technology in pedagogy. I think you can create a world-class school with chalkboards and dirt floors, and you can create content-free educational pap with computers, video conferencing, etc. There are definitely some things of great value. I love using a video camera to put the pressure on my students, to evaluate them, and later to review our progress. But I view it as unnecessary and irrelevant from a pedagogical standpoint. It’s “bells and whistles.”
Customers, on the other hand – the parents – have great interest in these bells and whistles. It’s smart to try to leverage our technology in ways that make customers feel like they’re getting something extra, something personalized, something valuable. Building and leveraging social web tools is critical, probably. My only point here is that we must never lose sight of the core fact: it’s about marketing.
Marketing is king.
6. Do all customers have the same value?
As mentioned above, the market is fragmented. That being the case, it’s critical for hagwon to identify and occupy specific market niches. Most of them do, but they often do so rather naively – which is to say, they occupy the niche without a clear understanding that that’s what they’re doing.
To get a leg up on the competition, explicitly identifying and pursuing specific market niches is indispensable. There should be a lot time spent figuring out what niche to pursue, and in recognizing that not all customers are the same. Different parents have different expectations, and different children have different needs. We
shouldn’t try to be all things to all people.
This idea leads to a corollary: sometimes it’s OK to tell a customer we don’t want them. Some customers are not “worth the trouble.” I like to think of Steve Jobs, who famously didn’t give a damn about customers who didn’t like his product. He would typically say something to the effect of: “Let them buy someone else’s product, if they don’t like mine.”
Likewise, the pursuit of customers just for customers’ sake is a really bad idea. I have seen hagwon management investing far too much energy and time and teacher goodwill in trying to satisfy parents or teach children where it’s clearly not in the hagwon’s interest to do this. Let bad customers go. Identify the good customers and work hard for them and earn their loyalty, but acknowledge that not all customers are the same, and some customers can’t be pleased.
We should be efficient. We should measure just how much effort a customer is requiring of us, and have a “cut line” whereupon we have to say, “I’m sorry, but I think this relationship isn’t working out.” Big companies do this very well – that super friendly and helpful customer service rep you spend so much time with is being kept track of, and there will be a point when his or her boss will tell him, “let that customer go.”
7. Reliable curriculum vs innovative curriculum.
The purpose of having a reliable curriculum is pedagogical. By reliable, I mean that it produces consistent and predictable results, which, in the hagwon context, of course, means rising test scores and satisfied parents. The fields of EFL pedagogy and teaching methodology may or may not have a great deal to offer on this front, but what I want to address here is something else.
A lot of hagwon try to convince themselves or their customers that they are providing innovative curriculum. This does not serve a pedagogical purpose – it’s a sales gimmick. In this way, innovation in the area of curriculum mostly serves a purpose similar to that identified with respect to technology, above: curricular innovation is a component of marketing and niche-building.
Innovation is perhaps required if a current curriculum isn’t producing hoped-for results, but in the long run, if a curriculum is producing results, innovation is a bad thing, not a good thing. Innovation makes loyal customers uncomfortable and more often than not fails to impress new customers. It’s better for a business to find what’s working and stick with it, and most successful hagwon seem to operate this way.
8. The demographic problem.
South Korea has a demographic time-bomb ticking. The fertility rate has dropped far below replacement rate, immigration is still low relative to most OECD countries, and furthermore structural and social problems mean that despite this, youth unemployment is quite high.
That’s not what I want specifically to talk about here. What’s critical for someone wanting to run a hagwon business in Korea right now is the understanding that, beyond what I just mentioned, education is a shrinking market – and there’s absolutely nothing that can be done about it.
I made the graph below using data from Wikipedia (sourced, in turn, from a Korean government agency).
This graph makes very clear two things. First of all, explains why the elementary hagwon business was booming when I first arrived in Korea, in 2007. The 1990’s bulge on the left of the graph was just passing through the elementary system. Secondly, though, it explains why that boom was utterly unsustainable, moving forward, and why hagwon are struggling to find new elementary students to teach. Quite simply put, there are fewer students entering the system. The number of births suffered a precipitous decline of more than 20% in a single decade, and has stabilized at a new, much lower level. The number of hagwon in business in the 2000’s is unsustainable in the 2010’s.
This being the case, it underscores the importance of two things I’ve already mentioned. Customer loyalty is crucial. But also, in identifying a niche in which to operate, the focus should be on quality rather than quantity. The so-called upmarket niche is the only one sustainable or growable given current demographics. We can’t be churning out PC clones, we have to be making the Macs or Sparc workstations of the hagwon business.
Conclusions.
The preceding has been my effort to make a list of some of the issues that face the hagwon business in South Korea, as I have experienced them. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive list, and it may in fact have substantial lacunae. It’s only things as I have seen them, with an emphasis on the things that seemed most notable to me.
But I think they provide some idea as to the business and cultural context in which a successful hagwon must operate.
In my next part, I want to go on to the original purpose of this essay: what makes a good hagwon? How can I make one? What would I do if I could make one as I wanted?
[Part III]
It’s been taking longer than I intended to write the Part II of my IIRTHW article I began with Part I three weeks ago, now. My intention is to finish it this weekend, and get to work on Part III, which was my original intent all along.
Meanwhile, I thought I would share something I wrote for work. It’s a draft of what’s supposed to be a concise description of the debate program I designed, initiated and have subsequently developed at Karma. Like most of my writing, it ends up being distressingly non-concise, and I don’t envy the poor coworker who ends up trying to translate it into Korean – the document is intended to go into a Karma catalog (a sort of extensive sales brochure) that will go to parents. But it does manage to cover the parameters set out for me (why, what, how – all in less than a page).
Rhetoric is the name, in English, for the art of effective or persuasive speaking and writing. It is a very old concept, which comes to Western European culture from the Greeks and Romans more than 2000 years ago. Aristotle and Plato, for example, each wrote about methods of rhetoric and argued its role in leadership. Thus rhetoric is a foundational element of Western education and civilization, and even now with a good understanding of rhetoric a student has the essential intellectual tools to be successful among the elites of Western education.
Our KarmaPlus debate curriculum teaches classical, Western-style rhetoric in a way that engages students’ interest and imagination while providing opportunities to practice and develop all four language skills: reading, listening, writing and speaking.
Debate is frequently used in government and to talk about public policy decisions. In many countries, there are also academic debate competitions which function similarly to sports competitions. Most major Korean universities have English debate teams that participate in national and international competitions, and our debate curriculum is intended to introduce students to that style of debate.
A student who has mastered the essential skills as taught in our debate curriculum will have an advantage on any test that requires rapid, long-form speaking: iBT (TOEFL) and TEPS Speaking are the best known examples, but many foreign and elite high schools conduct interview tests for applicants where a basis in debate is valuable. Later in life, debating skills can be useful in business or career environments such as job interviews or product presentations.
Each debate class follows a simple, repeating pattern over a series of four or five class-hours. On the first day, we do a reading on the topic we will be debating and discuss answers to questions about meaning and opinions. This provides exposure to relevant vocabulary and concepts. Next we present a “Proposition” which is the idea to be debated. The teacher gives a detailed hour-long lecture on the background and possible PRO and CON ideas on this topic. For homework, the students write an essay (or several essays) about the topic, and the next class
they form teams for a practice debate, using their own opinions as well as opinions suggested by the teacher. Lastly, they memorize a speech and present it as a “debate speech test” which is recorded on video and scored by a detailed rubric covering many details: intonation, speed of voice, grammar, ideas, organization, research, etc. This is their test score and monthly grade. In this course structure, over four or five class hours we cover reading, listening, writing and speaking.
With respect to my great “absurd debate” lesson I came up with last week, here is one of the most excellent results, from Wednesday night.
Proposition: “This debate is boring.”
Even the PRO team told me afterward that the topic was fun. So in fact, the PRO team lost. These 7th and 8th are doing self-referentiality. Now I can feel like all those years with Cervantes are finally paying off.
This is the fourth question (section heading) from the handout entitled “초등부 강사로서의 나의 역량 자가 진단” (roughly, “self-diagnostic of my abilities as an elementary teacher”) which we discussed in a meeting a few weeks back – I discussed the first, second and third questions prior.
수업분위기는 어떻게 유도하십니까?
class-atmosphere-TOPIC how-ADV induce-DEF-FORMAL-QUESTION
What kind of atmosphere do you create for your classes?
I know that I’m a fun teacher. I recently saw the results of a survey to elementary students wherein my highest rating (and my only non-disappointing rating, frankly) was for having a fun and interesting atmosphere in my class. I’ll post more about that survey later.
I think I would have already guessed that this is not a weak area for me. I think I conduct a class with a good atmosphere, most of the time.
This is the third question (section heading) from the handout entitled “초등부 강사로서의 나의 역량 자가 진단” (roughly, “self-diagnostic of my abilities as an elementary teacher”) which we discussed in a meeting a few weeks back – I discussed the first and second question prior.
수업준비는 완벽하게 하고 계십니까?
class-prepare-TOPIC be-thorough-ADV do-PROG have-DEF-FORMAL-QUESTION
Are you thoroughly prepared for class?
This is pretty easy to understand – maybe with less ambiguity or semantic complication than the first two questions. There’s not much here, from a linguistic standpoint, to comment on. But it’s depressing, because my answer is quite simply: “없어요” [no I’m not].
I would say, though, that class prep is one of my weakest areas, as a teacher. I procrastinate too much and then I am inadequately prepared and forced too often to “wing it.” I find class prep to be stultifying and stressful, although I’ve always felt that was at least in part due to the Korean way of packing all the teachers into a too-small, too-cramped, too-noisy staffroom and not giving the breathing room needed to adequately prepare for classes. I seem to recall being better at prepping when teaching in the US, where I could sit in a silent classroom (my own classroom) during a free period and get things done without interruptions or distractions. Even then, procrastination was bane.
This is the second question (section heading) from the handout entitled “초등부 강사로서의 나의 역량 자가 진단” (roughly, “self-diagnostic of my abilities as an elementary teacher”) which we discussed in a meeting a few weeks back – I discussed the first question before.
학생에 대한 열정과
student-AT toward passion-AND
진정한 사랑을 갖고 있습니까?
sincere-PASTPART love-OBJ hold-PROG have-FORMAL-QUESTION
Do you have passion and sincere love toward your students?
The verb form 갖- is a contraction of 가지다. Other than that, this was pretty easy to figure out, although I had to recall that idiom -에 대한 “toward”. The most interesting aspect of this sentence is the semantics.
The Korean word 사랑 (“love”) doesn’t really have the same semantic valences as the word “love” in English. In reference to things, it cannot apply – you can’t “love” pizza in Korean, as you can in English. You can’t even love teaching, or literature. On the other hand, in the realm of human interactions, Korean “love” is much more widely applied. We would hesitate to tell anyone but closest family or a romantic interest that we “love” them in English. But as I’ve mentioned in this blog before, Koreans will say “I love you” (사랑해) to people in their day-to-day lives at the drop of a dime. I have students who say it to me, both in Korean and translated into English (without the awareness of the different valences in English), and I’ve heard teachers say it to students. I’ve even heard store clerks say it to regular customers (generally younger customers i.e. children). Just yesterday, an 8th grade boy taller and heavier than I am said “I love you, teacher,” without any compunction or awkwardness. I have a Westerner’s reticence to return the compliment, but I’m trying to get past it.
So asking me if I, as a teacher, feel passion and sincere love for my students doesn’t have any of the sniggering awkwardness that arises in contemplating the English translation, where we can easily understand what is meant, but where we would hesitate, in a professional setting, to phrase it that way.
Sometimes I come up with a "filler" lesson plan that's so successful that I end up applying across most of my classes. Recently, because of the end of the test-prep period, I had some mixed ability middle-school classes that weren't part of my regular curriculum. In these contexts, I get asked to put together a one-up lesson plan for a "speaking class." "Just teach them some speaking," my boss says.
In earlier times I would get stressed about these one-up classes, but no longer. I view them as a laboratory and as a chance to try things out. I have a little folder of ideas that I can pull something out of.
One idea I had was to do some "absurd" debates. I've done these before, but always very detailed and well-developed over several classes, in the style of my regular debate curriculum. This idea was a little different: get the ideas out there, brainstorm for maybe 15 minutes, and put the kids to debating right away.
This idea only works if you've already got most of the students (if not all) fully familiar with the basic debate format. Now that I've been doing this a while, I could be confident of this – most of the students, if they've had "Jared teacher" before, have done debate at some style or level.
With this prerequisite out of the way, this "absurd" debate lesson was wildly successful. I never saw so many normally bored or disengaged or struggling students begin to laugh at the propositions and giggle at the prospect of defending one side or the other of these strange propostions. A few students took a while to "get" the exercise, but once they did, they too were fully on board.
Here is a list of the absurd debate propositions I came up with.
"Santa Claus is a criminal."
"Black is the best color."
"Aliens make the best friends."
"Unicorns are better than zebras."
"A smartphone is smarter than a dog."
"The moon is made of green cheese."
"The earth is flat."
"The teacher is a ghost."
"This debate is boring."
I've done a few of these before, and may have mentioned them, but never all together like this. I need to come up with more – this has been one of the most successful speaking debate classes I've ever done. I never have had so many students muttering to themselves phrases such as, "재미있구나" [jaemiittguna = this is interesting]. It's very gratifying to hear this, as a teacher.
My main debate classes are for the middle-school students, these days. But when I worked at LBridge, we had a full elementary debate curriculum for the speaking component of the EFL curriculum, and I remain a strong believe that debate is great way to teach EFL speaking, especially in Korea where getting kids to do spontaneous conversation is sometimes quite challenging.
I further believe it needn't be reserved for high-level students only. I've been experimenting with teaching debate to my intermediate elementary students exactly the same way I teach to my middle schoolers, in the BISP1-M 반 (cohort).
The lesson follows a 3 or 4 class period pattern. First class introduces the topic and proposition, which follows a debate topic given in a really badly made "teaching newspaper" such as are popular here. The topic in April was "South Korean schools should adopt a 'free semester' system."
A 'free semester' system sounds like a big deal, but it really isn't. The suggestion is that Korean students spend too much time preparing for tests, with a mid-term and then a final each semester. A 'free semester' would be a semester with only one test instead of two. Yay, freedom! Sort of. The idea is that some given semester in middle school would be liberated from a mid-term, and time would be devoted to exposing students to career-planning type activities instead. This is middle-schoolers we're talking about… that said, I think what's being proposed has some parallels in some European models of education, in particular in Germany.
We did some discussion, and found that the students seemed to have a pretty good grasp of the issues.
For the second class they complete an essay either supporting (PRO) or opposing (CON) the proposition. I read the essays and return them with minimal correction (to keep things moving along fast). Then the students have a "panel" debate, where sides and positions are mostly up to them or sometimes chosen randomly.
Here is the panel debate with these BISP1-M kids, which we did on April 10. (Turn the volume down – when I made the video the sound got cranked).
The next class, they are to present memorized 2 minute speeches on the same topic, either PRO or CON (their choice if I'm in a good mood, randomly if I'm not – my mood being contingent on how well they've been doing on other homework and suchlike).
This is what I call the debate speech test, and I use a scoring rubric to give a test score which is their monthly grade. The scoring rubric weights effort and presentation style heavily – it's possible to get an A on the test merely parroting ideas from my own lectures or from the newpaper. This is because I don't see debate class as being primarily about critical thinking or problem solving, but about building confidence and fluency. So in this way, the students often memorize and assemble points from my talking or from each other, too. I think that's OK.
Here are debate speech tests for this same class, which we did on April 17. (Turn the volume down – when I made the video the sound got cranked).
This isn’t an aphorism or proverb, but rather a section heading of a handout from a staff-meeting a week or two ago, which was entitled “초등부 강사로서의 나의 역량 자가 진단” (roughly, “self-diagnostic of my abilities as an elementary teacher”).
I bring these Korean language handouts home and over time I study them, if I get the motivation. It’s rough going, but occasionally they offer insights into how my boss is thinking, or at least, how he feels he should be thinking.
The first section heading of this “self-diagnostic” is “강사로서의 자부심을 느끼고 있습니까?” (“do I feel pride / self-confidence as a teacher?”). The problem is that “pride” and “self-confidence” are both offered as translations of 자부심, but I’m not sure they are the same thing.
Does the term mean both? Do these concepts of “pride” or “self-confidence,” in particular, work differently in Western psychology? I would feel comfortable saying I have pride in my teaching, but I couldn’t never fully agree that I have self-confidence in my teaching. Excessive self-confidence in teaching leads to close-mindedness, which is the bane of effective teaching in my opinion. For me, feigned self-confidence is crucial in the classroom, but true self-confidence elusive – and I don’t view this dichotomy as a bad thing.
[In the form of various unstructured entries with fairly random thoughts, I’ve been working on this project for several years, and it’s come to have the name “If I Ran The Hagwon” (abbreviated as IIRTHW). This topic seems to be evolving into my first effort at something resembling long-form journalism on my blog. Here is Part I. Additional parts (number to be determined) will follow.]
Part I – What is an English hagwon?
To talk about this topic, first we need to define some terms, and provide some context and background. “Hagwon” is a transliteration for Korean 학원 [hagwon], often translated as “academy” or “institute,” but I’m not at all comfortable with those translations. In fact, a hagwon
is not an academy or an institute in the way we understand those ideas – both words convey a different although overlapping set of concepts that fail to exactly match up with what is conveyed by the Korean word “hagwon.”
A hagwon is an after-school supplementary educational institution, sometimes specializing in a particular subject area or sometimes more general. Sometimes they are focused on “exam prep” (in the style of what are called 学習塾 [Gakushū juku = “Cram Schools”] in Japan), but not always. In Korea, there are hagwon offering almost any subject you can imagine: I’ve seen chess hagwon, baduk hagwon (baduk is the game that is called by its Japanese name of “go” in English), computer-game design hagwon, lego hagwon, and robot design hagwon. The most common type of hagwon, aside from the broad-based, multi-subject test-prep sort, seems to be in the following topics: math, science, English, Chinese, and 국어 ([gugeo] i.e. Korean writing and literature for Korean native-speakers).
Hagwon serve all school grades, but the high school ones tend to be more strictly in the “exam prep” style (because the 수능 [suneung] is king – which is the Korean SAT-analogue), while the elementary and middle school levels are more diverse. (As a minor note on usage and linguistics, I have opted to treat the nativized word “hagwon” as an uncountable noun, hence the plural is also “hagwon.” I think this sounds more natural than putting an “-s” on it – e.g. “hagwons” – given that Koreans don’t make much use of plural markers.)
For the purposes of this essay, I will mostly talk about “what I know” – that is to say, I will focus on talking about hagwon specializing in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) instruction for the elementary and middle school levels, essentially grades 1 through 9. Before going into specifics, however, it’s worth the effort to make some more general observations about the “hagwon market”
and the nature of South Korean education.
South Korea has been ranked near the top of all the world’s countries on many lists of quality of education. The UN Education Index from 2007 puts South Korea at number 8 worldwide. A recent report by the Economist Intelligence Unit put South Korea at number 2, after only Finland, which includes data from OECD’s PISA project. But as someone who has worked in Korean education for the last 5 years, I find it remarkable – even inconceivable. My gut reaction is: are all the other countries really that bad? How does Korea do this?
The fact of the matter is that Finland and South Korea are almost diametrically opposed on most matters of education policy. Finland essentially bans private (tuition-charging) schools. In South Korea, private education flourishes, and, if you take into account the hagwon system in its broadest brush strokes, South Korea is arguably one of the most privatized and capitalistic systems of education on the planet: it’s an Ayn Rand fantasy version of education policy, given how lightly
the hagwon system is regulated by the government.
My personal conclusion has been that Korean education is good not because of matters of policy but rather because of Korean parents and culture. Korean culture values education, and Korean parents value education, and so they jump into the education market (on their children’s behalf) with both feet forward and with their wallets wide open. Without having been there, my suspicion is that Finland, in its almost diametrically opposed way, is successful for a similar reason: Finnish parents and Finnish culture value education, and they demand quality education from their system. Beyond such generalizations, I can’t really figure it out.
With that in mind, though, the conclusion is obvious: education policy isn’t as important as people make it out to be. Otherwise, how could two countries at such opposite extremes of policy both be at the top of the charts?
Korean public schools aren’t really that good. The year that I spent in a public, rural elementary school in South Korea was eye-opening. That time led me to understand that in point of fact, education in South Korea doesn’t take place in public schools. Public schools are more about socialization and building cultural consensus, and education, to the extent that it occurs, is mostly peripheral. It’s a sort of side-effect, or hoped-for outcome. And hence we find the flourishing
hagwon system. If you want your kid to learn English, don’t count on the public schools, despite their requiring English from 3rd through 12th grade – it won’t happen. Instead, send them to a good English hagwon. Likely the same applies for other subjects as well.
The hagwon, then, is the real epicenter of Korean education. The main thing that schools do that is related to education policy is give tests.
These tests, standardized in the extreme and mostly centralized by the government, are the engine that drives the hagwon industry. Parents don’t, in fact, enroll their kids in hagwon for the purpose
of education, but rather, their explicit purpose is that they want to improve their kids’ test scores. Even here, education, to the extent that it occurs, is a sort of side-effect.
It’s worth pointing out that this is hardly new. Since the beginning of Joseon in the 1400’s (and probably well before that in some form), ambitious families have been sending their kids to various academies and institutes with the goal of getting good scores on various types of tests. In pre-modern times, it was mostly the various civil-service exams, which when executed successfully could lead to government work and sinecures. This is how ambition has been fulfilled in Korea from time immemorial.
The hagwon system, then, is merely a sort of modern expression of this ancient system. Indeed, looked at in this way, the hagwon system is Korea’s native education system, while the public school system, introduced mostly by the Japanese during the colonial period, on Western models,
is just a sort of Western cultural window-dressing, and a convenient way to administer tests.
This is my effort to summarize what a hagwon is. In the next part of this essay [maybe next week?], I want to explore how the unapologetically capitalistic nature of this hagwon system determines what is possible and what is not vis-a-vis various educational methodologies, and vis-a-vis the
presumed purpose of English education – which is to provide some degree of competency in English.
[Part II]
[Part III]
or… The Horrifying Class
My students are filled with passive-aggressive anger toward their parents, and I almost wanted to cry today, having to interact with it. Korean parents push their children so hard. And sometimes unkindly.
We've been having the students write "Parents Day Letters" – Parents Day is a Korean holiday on May 8th, that is sort of a combined Mother's Day and Father's Day. The idea is that the kids get gifts for their parents, or write them letters, etc. So as an activity at Karma, we're having the elementary kids write Parents Day letters, in English.
One boy, in 6th grade, wrote his letter, and it was filled with the appropriate platitudes: thank you for raising me, thank you for helping me with my problems and being there for me, etc., all in the somewhat unnatural English to be expected of only intermediate ability, limited English. But then he came up and showed me something. At the end of his letter, he'd written "I love you." He pulled out something he had in his pocket, a flashlight. It was a black-light flashlight. "I wrote in invisible ink," he explained. And indeed, he had written in invisible ink: superimposed on his "I love you" was a clearly visible "I hate you" under the black light. I didn't know whether to amused or appalled.
I shook my head. "Do you think that's a good idea?" I finally asked.
"Maybe not," he admitted, but grinning.
"Are you going to change it?" I prodded.
He shrugged, and returned to his seat. I may intercept the letter.
Then a 5th grade girl refused to write her letter. She was suddenly refusing to speak English. She's a pretty good student, but not very consistent, and she gets frustrated easily. I got a little bit angry, saying she had to write her letter. She wrote it. She brought it up and showed me. It said a lot of platitudes, but near the end it said, "Mom I hate you x 10 x 100 x 100 x 100." You get the picture. She was angry at her mom.
She was standing in front of me. I circled the phrase in her letter. "I don't think you should say that," I said. I could tell she was angry. I could see she was even on the verge of tears.
"But it's really true," she defended.
"I understand," I said, blandly. I really believe adults should validate the feelings of children as much as possible. "I think sometimes we shouldn't say things that are true," I suggested. "How about writing about something true that you can agree with. Something about the future?"
I crossed out her words and sketched out a possible answer on her draft letter. What I wrote was to the effect of: "Mom, I hope that in the future you can help me and show me your love." I pointed to my draft sentence and asked the girl, "Can you agree with that? Is it true for you?" I was kind of prompting her, and happily composing her sentence for her, because I didn't want to add layers of frustration with the English language on top of the frustration she was feeling with this assignment and about her parents.
She wrinkled her brow and studied it, to make sure she understood it – it's in English, after all, and she maybe had to sort it out or translate it in her head. Finally she nodded, but then she said, "I don't want to give her this letter." Adamant.
"I think you have to," I said. "It's the assignment."
She shocked me, then. "I really don't want to. Why should I give her this letter? My mom hits me with a baseball bat." Tears were coming, now. "yagubaeteu," she emphasized, repeating the term for "baseball bat" in Korean just to make sure I knew what she was saying.
I just stared at the girl, then, a little bit slack-jawed. The other students were staring, too. "We'll talk about it later," I said, somewhat awkwardly. I let her wrinkle up her letter draft and stuff it into her bag when she returned to her seat. At the end of class, I asked her was she OK.
She spoke rapidly in Korean, to the effect of: the bell rang, I'm getting out of here, leave me alone.
I let her go.
In the US, we're obligated as teachers to follow up on these kinds of revelations. Korea doesn't work that way – especially for foreign teachers like me, and especially not in a hagwon environment like mine. The most I can do it mention it to her homeroom teacher or the owner of the hagwon. Past experience with this kind of thing tells me that nothing at all will happen.
Parental child abuse as we conceive it in the US seems largely unrecognized as a crime in Korea, as far as I've been able to figure out. Yes, there are laws on the books about it, but they're only enforced rarely if at all. Just like the rules about corporal punishment in schools. Some schools follow the rules, some don't. Enforcement is random.
Helplessness is not a happy feeling.
My students did a rendition of "The Scary Dino" using cut-out, handmade paper puppets attached to disposable chopsticks. The kids love this type of thing, and never seem to grow bored of it. I think it's good learning, too. They memorize their conversation lines and songs over time, and those phrases come out in later lessons. It goes quite well, and reinforces my notion that a "dramatic arts" component would be quite successful in a hagwon environment, if only Korean administrators would open their minds to the idea.
Just to be clear, my student didn't draw this. I did. I had asked my student to draw something alongside a lesson we were doing, but she was not understanding. As I tend to do in such cases, I simply did it myself, showing her how to do it – then she knew what to do and did it too.
But I rather liked the drawing, in its simplistic way. Especially when I added the weird robot dog and the skeleton underfoot.
"Teacher, why are you so late to class?"
I was indeed late. I had accidentally looked at an old class schedule, instead of the most recent, and I had somehow vacated my mind of the fact I'd been switched on Wednesdays, to one hour earlier for this particular cohort of kids.
"You're very late," another said.
"I know," I said. "Sorry."
"You should pay us a dollar because of coming late," a student suggested. This proved a popular idea.
"Really? I have to pay you for being late?" I asked, in mock surprise. "Each of you? Really?"
"Yesss," they rallied.
I paid them.
With my second graders, we were going to do a play based on the story about The Enormous Turnip, with some musical bits, based on a script in our text, but the kids found the script too hard to memorize and disliked the costumes too. Furthermore, there were five characters but only three students. So we did a "dramatic reading" instead. I think they did fine. I'm happy with them and they are very cute.
The picture at the top was drawn by one of the girls in the play. She did it freehand and presented it to me, saying "Hello!" She's a pretty good artist.
I think one of the issues I've had with the hagwon business as I've experienced it is the utter disregard for genuine consistency in how rules are applied to students or parents alike. Or worse, the utter lack of rules. It's about relationships but everything is therefore subjective and unpredictable to someone "not in the loop." I guess there's nothing wrong with trying to have a personal relationship with each of your customers, but it makes for an unscalable business model on the one hand, and it makes for unpredictable quality of outcomes on the other. I get really tired of the line "well, for this student, do this way, because her mom wants that, but for this other student, do this other way, because his mom wants that other way." Some students stay late when they don't do their homework; for others it's forbidden. Some get "level up" even though their test scores are inadequate; others stay behind despite better scores. Some get special schedules: "little Haneul only comes on Monday's and Fridays, so you have to remember to tell her about the Wednesday homework."
This comes about in part because of all these personal relationships. But… there's no one tracking it all. It's not in any system that anyone has ever told me about. It's utterly unpredictable and unscalable. And ultimately, I think it leads to poor quality outcomes.
The end result is that you're not able to track your progress as an institution, you're not able to compare one student to another because they're all being treated differently. I have nothing against providing personalized attention and even bespoke curricula to students. But at some point, there has to be an objective standard: where are we trying to get this student, ultimately? What constitutes acceptable progress, and if the student isn't meeting benchmarks of progress, what should our response be? It's quite telling that I'm not even able to have this conversation with my coworkers, much less get any kind of answer. They are befuddled that it should concern me. The only thing that matters is: will the student continue to enroll at our hagwon? That's putting the cart before the horse… provide a quality education to your students, then customers (parents) will recognize that, and they will continue to enroll.
My boss has an ambition to be a successful
businessman. I know that he thinks highly of an entrepreneur like Steve Jobs – he somewhat idolizes him. In light of this, I'd like to make an observation about Jobs' business style, as I've understood it. Steve Jobs
never seemed worried about how much market share he was getting. Until
recently, Apple was always a "minority" product – a niche. Jobs would
identify a niche market at the "top end" and focus on quality,
consistency and attention-to-detail. He never worried about who was
interested in his product. He was happy to turn away customers who were
not interested in his product. He was happy to tell customers to go buy the competition if he wasn't meeting their needs. That created an elite and clubby feel to his niche, and conveyed an image of extremely
high quality, which may or may not have been really accurate. I think that kind of strategy can be successful in a Korean for-profit hagwon,
too. It's a similarly fragmented and commodified market, despite the huge differences. Don't try to be every thing to every customer. That's impossible.
Decide what students you want to teach, decide what kinds of parents you
want to work for, and stick with them. Never be afraid to say "I'm
sorry, but this hagwon is NOT a good place for what you want. Please
shop somewhere else." There are many parents and students who might be
too expensive – in both time and effort – to match what you can offer.
There a
many niches in the English hagwon market. Choose ONE. Only ONE. Then… do it better than
anyone else.
I said to my student, "Whatcha doin?"
He shrugged.
"Do you understand my question?" I asked. He was a fairly advanced student.
He shook his head.
I slowed it down, but I deliberately retained the phonological contractions, because I had an intuition as to the problem, and I was curious. "What cha doin?" I repeated. I was turning it into a lesson.
There was a long pause. Then he asked, "What is 'cha'?" He was perplexed.
Indeed. Here's the thing: he's not a beginning student. If ever there was a sign that the kids need more interaction with native speakers, this was it.
I want to build a lesson plan around this "Good-Bye Poem." It's a composite of several versions I have found. I'm sure there are many variations.
The Good-Bye Poem
See you later, alligator!
After a while, crocodile!
In an hour, sunflower!
Maybe two, kangaroo!
Gotta go, buffalo!
Adios, hippos!
Ciao, ciao, brown cow!
See you soon, baboon!
Adieu, cockatoo!
Better swish, jellyfish.
Chop, chop, lollipop.
Gotta run, skeleton!
Bye-bye, butterfly!
Better shake, rattle snake.
Give a hug, ladybug!
Blow a kiss, goldfish!
Take care, polar bear!
Our school day now ends.
So, good-bye, good friends!
I could see making the lesson for my lowest level (1st and 2nd graders) all the way up to my most advanced (e.g. my current "poetry" unit with my 9th graders).
My BISP1-M class had been making me upset. Every time I keep points in the class, or we play a game, they nearly come to blows arguing about rules and turns and points. I don’t have this problem with other classes, but because of this, I had told the class that I was no longer “keeping points” (i.e. in-class, game-based points) and no longer paying “dollars” (my private currency I give to students so they can shop at my “store”). Further, my minneapolitan rainbow monkey (used in the popular sport of “monkey darts“) was banned from class.
This made the class quite sad, but we’ve been limping along since then.
Today, not intending to, I brought the minneapolitan rainbow monkey to class. He was sitting on the podium at the front of class, and, upon seeing it, a fifth-grade girl who likes to go by the name Laracle (which is Korean pig-latin-analog for Clara: 클라라 -> 라라클) jumped up and grabbed the small toy monkey and danced down the middle of the classroom, like in a reunion in a romantic movie.
“Oh, Monkey!” she exclaimed in a sing-songy voice. “오래만요!” [long time no see].
It was cute.
During the vocabulary quiz in the same class, another boy somehow managed to forget the Korean word for “wing” (날개) – either that or he was making a pointless (and point-losing) joke. He drew a picture of a wing, showing he understood the meaning, and perhaps for another class I’d have given credit for his answer – but I wasn’t feeling charitable. See the picture of his test paper at right.
I have been forcing my most advanced class to read poetry. They're not really that into it, and I know it's hard. I make them read it out loud – not like memorized, but with practiced semi-dramatic readings and presentations.
I believe it's a good way to teach them to think about and internalize the cadences and intonations of English – and intonation and cadence are major issues with these kids – more so than vocabulary or grammar or even word-for-word pronunciation. So that's the plan. Who knows if it really works. And Hamlet's soliloquy is pretty ambitious, I realize. We spent a full class discussing obsolete vocabulary and context. They were interested in that. Then each of them read it for me.
The sound quality is poor – for which I have to apologize. Their voice quality is better than the video might suggest. The camera's mic is good, but the hagwon is noisy and the walls are thin. It's hard to get the sound only from the talking student. I need to invest in a stand mic maybe.
The text:
To be, or not to be–that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep–
No more–and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep–
To sleep–perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. — Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia! — Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.– Hamlet, Act III, scene i.
The song below (and referenced in the blog post title) isn't really related to the anecdote below, except that they both involve crying.
I have this one class where my patience runs thin. The ISP72-T 반 (which is mostly 8th graders) has some boys who really lack the ability to control their actions in class. They mouth off (in Korean, and half the time I have no idea what they're saying, I just know it's inappropriate, partly just by watching the reactions of the kids around them), they complain and protest every single assignment, they find excuses for un-done homework, they play footsie under the desks.
I selected one of the ringleaders today and lost my temper, a bit. I put a desk in the hallway, where I could see him out the door, and made him sit there. He's a "class-clown" and always happy-go-lucky, never doing much of anything in the way of homework (though he's not the worst by far in the class), though he's genuinely funny many times – he has a good sense of humor. But I'd just had enough of his constant acting up and not paying attention, mostly because he pulls away the attention of the other students.
His reaction, sitting there at the desk in the hall, was unexpected. He cried.
I thought about something I wrote last week: that I hope never to be the teacher that students remember with fear or loathing. I hope I'm not one of those teachers. I misjudged his resiliancy and wounded his complacency, clearly. It's one thing when a 2nd grader bursts in tears. It's a bit disconcerting when it's an 8th grader who's as tall as I am.
So he had a hard day. And I have a day when I question my effectiveness as a teacher.
What I'm listening to right now.
La Yegros, "Trocitos de madera."
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.
Almost 4 years ago, I posted a list of 11 things that, in my humble opinion, would make for a better (and possibly more successful) hagwon – for those of you not in Korea, remember that “hagwon” are the ubiquitous and nearly universal after-school extracurricular academies that Koreans send their children to, as a supplement to an otherwise rather poor public education system. Most of my time in Korea, I have worked for various EFL specializing hagwon (there are many other types including math, and multiple subject hagwon for example), and these comments are intended solely to pertain to EFL hagwon.
That list from 4 years ago was written at my one-year anniversary at LBridge (which was the biggest and by far most successful hagwon I’ve worked for – though “successful” means only “at that time” as it later went bankrupt). I think all the items on it still pertain, and I wouldn’t really adjust any of my thoughts from that time. But I’ve decided, all these years later, to begin make this “list” a “feature” on This Here Blog Thingy™. So, I’ll add some new items for the list, now or later, as they arise or cross my mind. I’ll called it: IIRTH (if I ran the hagwon) – maybe make it a category on the blog if it grows enough.
So here comes item number 12.
Some of the most productive time I’ve felt that I’ve spent teaching in Korea were the several months of the summer school session I had at Hongnong, when I had my own classroom to decorate and maintain as I wished – and I did!
This evening, I made a remark about this idea to one of my fellow teachers. She sighed and agreed it was a good idea, but she gave a reason I actually had never heard before for as to why hagwon don’t do it that way. “Hagwon owners and managers like to have all the staff in a single room so they can communicate better.” I laughed. “Really? I would say my gyo-gam [vice principal] was a much more effective communicator than any hagwon boss I can think of – we simply had meetings all the time.” I gazed at our boss’s office as I said this. My coworker laughed. “I mean, when was the last time he communicated with us, here in the staffroom?” We laughed some more. (These are paraphrases, not exact quotes.)
Here is a picture of my Hongnong classroom from August, 2010.
It was mostly just incidental that I happened to learn that Joseph Kasun passed away recently – I'm not in touch with any of my onetime high school teachers, but someone's posting on facebook caught my attention and so I came to know that my high school history teacher, Mr (Col) Kasun had died. His obituary is here, in the Times-Standard, Humboldt's newspaper-of-record. Here's an internet picture (right) showing him with ice-cream in front of a recognizably Arcata High Schoolish building – perhaps even his classroom (at the windows)?
I didn't have much of a personal connection with Mr Kasun. As a student, I remember not thinking much of him – he seemed theatrical and reactionary and prone to pendantic declamations that suited his record as a veteran and former Army officer perfectly. As a disconsolate youth with hippie-commune parents, to me he seemed both dangerous and buffoonish, like the bizarre uncle in the movie Harold and Maude. But he was, in fact, a fairly effective and most definitely memorable teacher, and he was principled enough not to spout his extreme conservative agenda too blatently into the classroom – I knew he was conservative (his wife was a major figure in the Humboldt pro-life movement and a Reagan activist) but I didn't ever feel he was trying to convince me to be conservative.
And here's the thing – I think of old Col Kasun often. Not quite on a daily basis, but he comes to mind several times a week, and in fact he'd been on my mind the same evening that I got home and saw the facebook post reporting his death. How is it that this should be so?
I'm a teacher. I'm not a high school teacher, but I teach gifted middle-schoolers, which is close enough. And even though I am, primarily, an EFL teacher, my methodology is deeply wrapped up with teaching "subjects-but-in-English." Specifically, I often find myself being a history and social studies teacher, such as was Mr Kasun. It's inevitable when talking about topics such as democracy, fights for independence, or social policy, that Mr Kasun's passionate and sincere style will sometimes come to mind. He would stand up at the front of the class and gesture his pointing finger while making oratory on the topic of our hard-won American freedoms or American exceptionalism. What's weird is that I can unintentionally channel Mr Kasun in gesture or tone, while the topic is, instead, Korean hard-won freedoms or Korean exceptionalism, while the kids stare up in that perfect teenage mixture of awe and boredom. And I find myself thinking to myself, 'jeez, that was a fine Colonel Kasun you just did, wasn't it?'
And I go home to read that he has died. I never had been in touch with him, since high school.
There are teachers you really like, in school. But as a teacher, those aren't always the teachers you think about, much less the ones you channel or become.
I really liked Mr Mauney, and Mr Meeks, and Mrs Williams (who had a different name, maybe, later, due to divorce or remarriage) and Mme Dalsant. But I rarely think of them in my teaching. Instead, I meditate on Mr Kasun or Mr Dohrman (sp?), both of whom I find myself channeling, sometimes to my own deep chagrin. Or I contemplete Mr Allan Edwards, who terrified me so much as a high school freshman that I never really recovered, and all these years later, I sometimes remind myself that, whatever else I may have as positives or negatives as a teacher, at the least I'm not terrifying my students to the extent they contemplate suicide. At least… I desperately hope not. I admit I've caused the occasional first or second grader to burst into tears – who hasn't? – but that's a far cry from inducing so much fear and loathing in a 15 year-old that he still has nightmares about you 30 years later.
That's a little bit off track, vis-a-vis a sort of obituary on Mr Joseph Frank Kasun. But the point is, I think of one past teacher or another almost every day – especially those teachers that left indelible impressions, be they good or bad. I think there may be something to the aphorsim that goes something like: it's better to be remembered as a teacher, even if disliked, than to be forgotten.
RIP Col Kasun.
오늘 삼일절입니다. 지난주동안 저의 수업들에서 민족 자결권 각 국가의 권리를 토론의 주제로 가르쳐 했습니다. "우리 조선은 이에 우리 조선이 독립한 나라임과 조선 사람이 자주적인 민족임을 선언하노라." – 1919/3/1 운동 독립 선언
Last Thursday, my students used puppets (in custumes!) to perform a version of Little Red Riding Hood. I played the wolf, using an alligator puppet. The little girl is a white rat puppet and her mom is another alligator puppet, while grandma is a wombat puppet and the hunter is an ostrich puppet.
It's all just slightly incoherent, but I like it anyway. I love my classes with the little ones – basically I just play with them in English. It's a good gig.
I was talking to a student in hallway. I happen to think this student is somewhat smart, but she doesn't try very hard, and she gets low scores on tests and such.
She had impressed me, a while back, with a speech in one of my new intermediate-level debate classes which she'd penciled on some scrap paper in class in the few minutes before it was required. The speech was entirely compatible – in clarity, understanding and detail – with speeches the other students in the class had spent the last several weeks preparing (writing essays as homework and getting my feedback on them), but she'd done it in the few minutes before giving the speech.
I have a long history with this student, too – she was one of the elementary students I taught at LBridge, in 2009. I remember thinking the same thing about her then: a kind of stealth intellectual, under a facade of lazy, dumb teenager.
I asked her why she pretended to have lower ability in English than she really did. I can't remember exactly how I phrased the question, but this is a level of discourse that most students nominally at her level wouldn't even understand, in English. She just shrugged, and said "It's easier."
Following a hunch, I asked, "You understand everything I say, but you pretend not to?"
"That's right." She grinned sheepishly and sauntered away.
Sigh.
In my young-ones class, yesterday, we were drawing our own versions of the current Disney book we're reading. The kids drew some horses, for example.
The book is a very simple reader based on the recent Pixar movie, Brave.
Here is the book cover, and the page we were working on.
Here is my version – I always do what I ask the kids to do, as it makes things easier to explain and it's more fun, too.
Here are the kids' versions. I like their horses.
I'm teaching a lot of debate classes, these days: more, by almost an order of magnitude, relative to previous terms at Karma. And I make video of all my students' speeches. And I evaluate the speeches and give scores. This is a laborious process, and part of why I'm feeling overwhelmed with work. But I have decided it's a really great way to get middle schoolers actually talking in English class. The combination of natural adolescent reticence on the one hand combined with the horrifying discomfort of speaking a foreign language they don't feel confident with, on the other, means that getting middle school English students to actually talk is about as easy as pulling teeth from a chicken. But if you turn on a video camera and tell them it's a test, they'll stand up at the podium, shaking and quaking, and give their damnedest. It's a bit coercive, relative to my most preferred methods, but overall I'm pleased with how well it works.
Here's one of my favorite classes, giving some speeches on the debate proposition: "Immigration to South Korea should be encouraged." They complained that this topic was difficult, but they all said it was interesting, too.
As a bonus, this video has a complex connection to an earlier blog post: I'll have to give a door prize if anyone actually identifies the connection. I don't know if I have any blog readers loyal or attentive enough to do this. So this is a kind of stealth-test.
