Today was my last day as an employee of LinguaForum, and a last day at that location and with the middle-schoolers. I was pretty sad, and feeling a bit cares-to-the-wind about the whole thing, too.
Monday I start at ElBeuRitJi – and I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by what that will bring. Completely new kids, new curriculum, new environment. And it will be a lot of work – there’s consensus, there. The ElBeuRitJi people take themselves too seriously, and work their people hard. It’s not as relaxed a workspace as I’ve become used to here in Korea. And I’m not convinced I will like it. I’m struggling to keep an open mind about it all.
Here is a picture of my EP2-Tuesday/Thursday ban that I took yesterday.
Attrition in the face of the big changes meant that the last week or so there have only been the three of them. Hannah, Song, and Crazy Paul. Great kids.
I’d love to post pictures of my middle-schoolers, especially my now-to-be-much-missed Princess Mafia (aka TP1 Tuesday/Thursday), but the middle-schoolers are much more camera shy than the elementary kids, and I’m not one to force them to be in a picture for me. But I will miss them very much, and the TP1 Monday girls who were so difficult, sometimes, and those Gag-show boys from PTP/M, and all the rest of them. I’m getting teary…
Here is a picture of me with my erstwhile boss, Curt.
I like Curt – he’s a good guy, and down-to-earth. Note that the picture was tilted because Sylvia wanted to make sure Curt was taller than me – this is a very indirect way of showing deference to the boss. since he’s the boss.
Here is a picture of me with the front-desk-person, Sylvia.
She was always very kind to the students, very genuinely caring and friendly. I will miss her – I could always count on her to comfort a crying child (on those occasional times when I ended up with one in my classroom, due to accident or squabbles or whatever) or to oversee a child parked in the front lobby due to behavioral issues.
Category: The Wonders of Work
Caveat: 얘들아 깝치지마
I finally figured out the ending –지마: it means don’t [imperative]. It coalesced last night, as I was walking home, and I overheard two small boys playing, they were jumping off of a low wall along the footpath. One of them said to the other “하지마” (hajima – don’t do that). I have been familiar with this as a set phrase, but I had never successfully parsed it before into its component parts: ha [the verb to do] + ji [a verb-ending conveying conjecture or insistence] + ma [I think this is an informal intimate form of the verb 말다, meaning stop or cease]. So, at last I figured out that you can put –지마 (or the more formal –지마세요) onto any verb, in order to say don’t do X.
And the reason this finally clicked, for me, was because of another expression I’d learned yesterday from my students, and had been puzzling out: 얘들아 깝치지마 (yaedeura kkapchijima), which roughly means “you kids, stop being so obnoxious,” but the phrase is extremely informal, basically rude if not downright vulgar – so maybe a good idiomatic translation might be “y’all need to shut the hell up” (which is how an Army sergeant I once had used to introduce himself whenever he walked into a room, as a kind of signature phrase, and it was particularly humorous because he would say that, first thing, even when entering a room that was utterly silent).
Yesterday, I also found a great resource for learning abstruse tidbits of Korean language from a foreigner’s perspective: there’s a guy who’s been blogging (in English) his in-depth explorations of Korean for years now, at Korean Language Notes. He has a pretty academic orientation (which I find appealing given my own tendencies). I spent several hours surfing through old posts, though I’m at too elementary a level to understand all but some fragments of it.
I also successfully made use of naver.com’s Korean-Korean dictionary for the first time, which feels like a landmark of sorts – the ability to look up a word in Korean, and comprehend what it says about that word, in Korean. It’s a trivial step, but it felt like progress.
Caveat: 웹 사이트 했어요
I made a new website. I’ve decided to redirect my “jareday.com” domain to this new website, because I am building the site as place where my students can stay in touch with me, and the jaredway.com is a nice, memorable address to be able to give them. My personal, more general website will continue to exist at https://www.raggedsign.net/way, for those who are interested. And of course this blog is redirected from caveatdumptruck.com
So this is going to be for my students. I’m not sure how ambitious I will be. It would be cool if it was a place where they could build their own content, eventually – I’m evaluating the possibility of a .NET-based wiki-clone that might provide something intuitive for them to interact with. But for now, it’s just a kind of place-holder where I might be able to post some photos and notes to them.
The reason I’m doing this, of course, is that this is my last week with all of my students. Because when I move over to work for 엘브릿지어학원 (LBridge Language Academy) for the last 5 weeks of my current contract, I will have a completely different group of students – none of my current students placed into the upper level that I am slated to be teaching, there. Which, actually, is something that leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, as I’ve commented on before.
I actually had a student in tears over her disappointmnet about where she’d been placed at 엘브릿지. And I’m not the sort who would suggest that a student who didn’t show the appropriate skill level should be moved ahead just for her self-esteem, but this student is one of the brightest, most hard-working and motivated students I’ve had at the elementary level, and if anyone at LinguaForum deserved to be placed at the top level at 엘브릿지, it was her.
[Update 2013-06-16: the jaredway.com domain has undergone repeated redirections since this original post, but the current address is a “gated” blog with detailed postings on class adminstrative stuff and student work.]
Caveat: Blood. Sweat. Tears. Etc.
I gave blood today. Despite the fact that, at the moment, I’m not renewing my visa, because ElBeuRitJi is taking over my contract it has to be “revised” with the Korean authorities. As a consequence of this, I’m forced to now comply several regulations that were changed or created by the Korean immigration service since the date that my original visa and residence permit were approved 10-11 months ago – even though, technically speaking, I have only approximately 6 weeks left on the current visa.
One of those requirements is that I have to provide a “criminal background check” (also being called a “proof of lack of criminal record”). This is a hassle, because as far as the U.S. consul is concerned, there’s nothing they can do to assist U.S. citizens who need this kind of paperwork. I have to somehow work with my “local authorities” in the U.S. to get this resolved. I’m still researching, but given the dearth of clear information online on how a U.S. citizen resident abroad can most easily accomplish this, I will try to post whatever I figure out – maybe others can find it in this blog and it will help them. But no answers yet.
Another requirement is that I have to get a medical checkup – really, it’s only a blood test for a few communicable diseases and a urine test for drugs, I think. So today I went to a hospital with a member of the ElBeuRitJi staff and two other foreign teachers in similar predicaments to get poked and proded. Here’s where they took my blood.
Caveat: Portraits and goodbyes
According to my TP1M class, today is the last time we’re meeting. I’m not sure if this is true, but because of the merger with ElBeuRitJi, it might be – things are rather vague and uncertain around here lately.
So, because of that, I was feeling kind of sad, as I wanted to take the time to express my goodbyes to them well, and maybe even come up with a parting gift of some kind, or at least a little note. When we last met, Uijeong drew some bizarre, picassoish portraits of some of the teachers here, and my feelings were a little bit hurt because she spelled my name wrong, although she apologized when I complained about it and said it was a joke. I snapped pictures of her portraits with my cellphone’s camera.
The lettering under Ryan says, roughly “If you don’t come to ElBeuRitJi you are traitors” (I don’t know the exact translation, but this is approximate). I guess the idea is to convey the enthusiasm which Ryan has been showing for the new school – he always is very gung ho about whatever he does, and has always been a hardcore pitchman for whoever the current management is, so this is a plausible paraphrase, I’m sure.
Caveat: … or un-postponement
We were talking, in one of my classes, about the upcoming dissolution of LinguaForum and absorption into LBridge. One of my students said she didn't like LBridge, so I asked her why. She mumbled something about "people say things," and so I interpreted, "rumors?" She and another student nodded.
"What rumors?" I asked. She sat up a little bit, and looked me in the eyes. Then she ticked off on her fingers, while speaking with a clearly enunciated English: "bad students, bad curriculum, bad teachers…" One. Two. Three strikes. You're out.
Wow. I was surprised. Both at the content of what she said, but also with the sudden confidence and classical rhetorical flair with which she spoke. This was serious. Nevertheless, I started laughing – I think it was because of the irony of the situation, which was impossible to communicate to my students. That fact is, after never getting much in the way of clarity from my colleagues, nor especially from the incoming new bosses, I was getting a remarkably straightforward declaration from such an unexpected source.
Is it wrong of me to want to give more credence to my students and their "rumors" than to my colleagues or bosses? Is it wrong for me to feel that this whole merger has been handled with a rather cavalier disregard for the staff and students here at LinguaForum? And is it wrong for me to feel that this cavalier attitude is, ultimately, a poor reflection on the character of my new bosses?
This in-class discussion happened Monday night. Then, yesterday, the main boss from ElBeuRitJi came by and said to me something to the effect that we needed to discuss paperwork for my new contract. As if my decision to stay were a done deal. This caused me some stirrings of annoyance and resentment, and I repeatedly parsed the very short exchange we had had, wondering if I had misunderstood. And it's possible I did misunderstand – no one's English here is flawless – but I don't think so.
Further, I still have been unable to shake the impression I got from the principal of the Hugok campus (which is where I will be working and therefore the person to whom I will be directly reporting) that I really wasn't wanted there – that I was being forced on him by his boss, and by the circumstances of the merger, against his own wishes. Nobody wants to work for a boss that doesn't want him around, right?
Really, am I being culturally naive? I have almost no doubt that I am! Yet that doesn't in any way change my gut feelings.
So, after having made the decision on Monday to postpone my decision on renewal for another month and take a "wait and see" attitude, I'm suddenly leaning very much away from the idea of renewing. I sent an email to the new boss last night, to try to make very clear that I hadn't yet consented to a renewal. And to that email, there has been no response… silence. Which has been par for the course with these new ElBeuRitJi people – they are remarkably bad at communicating.
If there is anything I learned during my years working in the corporate world, it's that new and incoming bosses who fail to communicate well are going to piss off both customers and staff. Transitions of this sort need to be handled with a great deal of sensitivity and a whole lot of clear communication, especially where there are to be notable changes in organization and strategy, which this merger situation clearly holds in spades.
It can be very easy for staff (teachers, in this case) and customers (students and parents, in this case) to be left feeling alienated and ignored, if communication isn't managed well. And I think that is exactly what's happening. Parents and students are fleeing, or else shrugging their shoulders resignedly and saying "I don't know." The teachers and staff here are all grumbling and acting pissed off, regardless of what decision they're taking. The mood in the hagwon has shifted from gray to black, and more than one person has been quietly muttering the word "arrogant" as a description of the new management, which is an indicator that I'm not completely off base in my feelings.
I'm thinking… maybe best for me to move on. So much for postponing my decision – I think I've made it.
Caveat: Postponement
After several weeks of anxiety over whether or not to renew my contract with ElBeuRitJi (the hagwon taking over my current employer at the end of this month), partly because of it being a bit of an unknown, now I've managed to simply postpone the decision. ElBeuRitJi will "inherit" my existing contract, which ends at the end of August. So I have to work for them, regardless, for one month. That will give me a chance to get a feel for how they are, and for them to get a feel for how I am. Essentially, I will just not sign anything until down the road a month.
Meanwhile, I've decided to make a halfhearted commitment to the Obama campaign – I signed up on his social networking site my.barackobama.com. As I've said some months back, I was more of a Richardson supporter (although even that had its ambivalences because of my libertarian tendencies), but I'm so certain we need to exclude the Republicans from government (given that they have behaved in such frighteningly unlibertarian ways – in everything from size-of-government to social policy to civil liberties to foreign policy), that I've decied to just come out and openly support Obama – for what it's worth.
Caveat: Stay or Go?
Some observations regarding the conquest of LinguaForum by LBridge, and my own prospects.
I first met the new ubermanager at LBridge (president?), Andy, on Monday. I had an initial interview with him and then a second interview yesterday (Wednesday), in which he confirmed an offer to renew my contract and have me work as a teacher at the Hugok campus (elementary students), probably mostly teaching advanced-level speaking/writing; a higher degree of specialization is possible because of the larger size of the academy, and this is actually rather appealing to me, as I seem to do my very best with those high-level elementary students.
I told Andy I could not offer a firm yes or no at the moment of the interview, explaining that, as a result of the chaos of the merger of Tomorrow into RingGuAPoReom in January, as well as the general rumors circulating about the current situation, I was feeling a little bit "gun shy" about making a commitment. I said I wanted to understand better the curriculum I would be asked to teach, and maybe meet with my prospective managers, etc., before making a decision.
And last night we all went out to dinner (Andy plus most of the staff of our current academy). Andy somewhat offended me with a few repeated observations in the vein of "Jared doesn't like me, I don't think," and "can't we just be friends." He was interpreting my standoffishness with respect to the job offer as coolness to him personally. And I admitted that I am a shy person, in general, and slow to open and be trusting. I tried very hard to understand it all as a matter of cultural differences, combined with a bit too much soju (Korean firewater) circulating.
So Andy told me, last night, to go over to the Hugok campus today at 2 pm and talk to someone there (a manager? a VP of some kind? – his title wasn't clear to me at the time, though I know now that he's the VP there). Frankly, the ensuing situation was almost comedic.
The man at Hugok campus today told me that he had no idea I would be coming. Further, he in fact had not been informed that he would be receiving any new teaching staff of any kind from the two RingGuAPoReom academies being absorbed. And that, in fact, he had no open positions for teacher until at least September. I was puzzled. What's worse, he then launched into a complaint about the fact that although he had been led to expect, by Andy, at least 50 new elementary students as a result of the merger(s), in fact, based on a parental informational meeting held yesterday, at this point he was realistically expecting at most 10 or 15. Therefore he was even more puzzled by the idea that he would be taking on more staff at the end of July, when the two RingGuAPoReom campuses close.
And so I left, wondering what the heck was going on. Shortly thereafter, I spoke to Andy on the telephone, who apologized for what had happened (which he'd had conveyed to him by Curt, to whom I'd reported), and he said there was a misunderstanding. But it kind of makes me wonder about the reliability of the this whole enterprise, and the experience ties in with rumors that I've heard in a few places (not to name any names) that ElBeuRitJi is bureaucratic and impersonal when it comes to dealing with its staff.
Anyway, Andy asked if it would be possible for me to return right away to LBridge, as he had just had a telephone conversation with the manager there, presumably remediating the information deficit that clearly existed. I went back over to the academy – it's only a block away, down "Academy Road" as us foreigners call it (a street with an inordinate number of hagwon all up and down it for several kilometers continuously). And again, I spoke with the man who would be my putative new supervisor, and then I had a long and very interesting conversation with the man whom I would be replacing – an American named Doug.
Doug was at a whole different level of professionalism from any other foreign English teacher I've met, to date, in Korea. He is only wrapping up a one year contract with LBridge, but his reasons for putting in only one year were plausible, and were not linked to a negative experience with the hagwon, which he spent some time praising. The teachers are in teams of four, and each team is allocated to one level of student ability. So in moving from my current job to LBridge, I would be moving from generalist (grades 3-9, all ability levels) to specialist (grades 4-6, one ability level). Doug's team teaches the most most advanced level, which bears the saccharine-sounding (and patently un-English!) name of "ElDorado."
But I liked the curriculum, and it was easy for me to see my place in it. Which is what I was hoping to find, of course. Doug had been working previously as a history teacher in the States, and he'd integrated his interest and competence in that subject area to a partly self-designed curriculum not completely unlike the debate program I've enjoyed working with at my current job. He expressed positive feelings about the academy, and the chance to look at the materials and the teachers' prep space and the atmosphere there was, overall, encouraging. Then again, what departing employees tell their incoming potential replacements is never the whole story (as I know from sitting on the other side of the fence, more than once), and so I tried hard to read between the lines, too.
I went back to LinguaForum and graded some essay books, and chatted with Curt and Grace about the situation. Feeling stuck in the need to make this decision – should I renew or not?
When I got into my ER2 class today, I was moody and indecisive about the whole thing. And the kids had just completed taking the placement test for the new academy, so they were wound up and uninterested in the materials at hand, either. Further, because of the upcoming changes, I already knew that we weren't going to complete this month's unit, in any event – we only had basically two weeks left before the kids transfer into whatever new school they go to (whether that's ElBeuRitJi or something else is up them and their parents, obviously). With these thoughts in my mind, I made a snap judgment and decided to hold an impromptu debate on a topic that immediately had them all riveted in attention: Should Jared go to ElBeuRitJi? Pro or con?
Including them in my decision-making process, so-to-speak. Based on the above-mentioned offer, these students would be among those most likely, by far, to "stick with me." And after I had explained some things to them, they realized this. So we had a pretty brilliant in-class conversation about "Jared's dilemma," as I wrote it on the whiteboard. And perhaps unsurprisingly, they all ended up taking the "Pro" side in the informal debate, leaving me to debate the cons. But that was exactly the sort of experience I'd been looking for, actually. A chance to get outside of myself a little bit and openly discuss the merits and disadvantages of this one-year contract renewal on offer.
I even went so far as to outline a clear sub-part of the debate, which is my own questioning as to whether I want to stay in Korea or "move on." This was not something they could relate to as easily. "Of course" Jared wanted to stay in Korea. So that's a part of the issue that I will have to resolve on my own. But if we take as "given" that I want to stay in Korea, the outcome of our discussion is that moving to ElBeuRitJi is a good idea: it seems to offer a chance to work with the age group and ability level where I've felt my greatest successes; the institution is big and highly professionalized, which is an environment where I've excelled in the past; it provides geographical and social stability, since I'd probably stay in my same apartment and have many of the same colleagues, with other previous colleagues still nearby for social purposes; and it would give me a chance to remain "loyal" to at least some of my charges – those who opt to go to ElBeuRitJi themselves (or, rather, those whose parents so opt), and who get placed into the same ability level that I do.
So there you have it. To quote The Clash: "should I stay or should I go?"
Caveat: 식민주의 학원을 말해요…
I will talk about “academy colonialism.” It’s not my idea, actually. My ER2 students suggested it to me. [In what follows, note that I am “round-trip-romanizing” the names of the Korean businesses in question, to protect (somewhat) their online anonymity. Maybe, down below, I’ll explain what I mean by “round-trip-romanizing.”]
First of all, if I haven’t made it clear before: after only 6 months of existence, it turns out that RingGuAPoReom EoHagWon (my current employer, and the result of the buyout in December of the Tomorrow School-my original employer) is ceasing to exist. It’s what they call a “reverse merger” in the world of business. The parent company to the RingGuAPoReom EoHagWon has invested in a “healthier” and much larger academy business called ElBeuRitJi EoHagWon, and they are spinning off their tiny and just-started-out English academy business and merging it into this other business. So although the underlying ownership isn’t changing, RingGuAPoReom EoHagWon is being swallowed by ElBeuRitJi EoHagWon.
Naturally, the mood around work is grayish. All the students are being forced to move into a new curriculum once again, and a new environment. Our current campus will be closed completely, and the elementary-schoolers will go to one currently existing ElBeuRitJi campus, where there are already 500-odd students, and the middle-schoolers will be off to another already extant ElBeuRitJi campus, with a similar enrollment. And the high-schoolers are off in limbo somewhere, since ElBeuRitJi doesn’t do high-schoolers.
Since we can’t teach at both campuses, we teachers are being forced to make a catch-22 choice: middle-schoolers or elementary-schoolers. And with only two months left on my contract, I’m just kind of shrugging and smiling and biding my time. If the new environment is sufficiently appealing, I haven’t even ruled out the possibility of renewing, yet. Who knows?
Anyway, my ER2 students made a telling and semiotically loaded comparison in class today, when we were discussing the upcoming change. They said that RingGuAPoReom was Korea, and that ElBeuRitJi was Japan. Gavin nodded, grimly, and Tina made a disgusted face. The reference was obvious to all of us: we were discussing an act of vicious colonial conquest. Korea was conquered (“annexed”) by Japan in 1910, and suffered 35 years of brutal occupation and subjugation which left indelible scars on the national psyche. So it was no insignificant thing that they would make such a comparison. Given the cultural baggage, I’d never had dared put such a concept on the table.
When we first learned of the impending absorption of the academy, I had made the comment to Ryan that it was really mostly unfair to the children. Most children crave stability, and require it to thrive, and forcing two massive changes in less than a year – including changes to everything from curriculum and physical location to teaching staff and curriculum – was essentially going to prove psychologically traumatic for them. I mentioned the names of several timid and behaviorally challenging elementary-schoolers as case-in-point. Some of them had taken several months to get over the shift away from the Tomorrow School.
The ER2 students comments, today, confirmed that these students are neither ignorant of what’s going on, nor are they in any way neutral observers: they clearly have strong opinions and feelings about it, and I suspect very little attention will be paid them.
Footnote, RE my practice of “round-trip-romanizing.” Most of these English academies (어학원=EoHagWon), here, have English-based names, naturally. But in most internal documentation, and even in advertising literature, these English-based names are hangeulized (konglishified, i.e. rendered in the Korean alphabet). If you re-romanize the resulting hangeul following the official hangeul-to-roman rules, you get something that is generally unrecognizable as English at all, and in any event no longer recognizable as the original English names of the academies in question.
An example. Let’s say I have an academy called Happy School. I can hangeulize this as 해피스쿨, and then re-romanize this to HaePiSeuKul. See? It renders the name of the school “anonymous” to search engines, which are not in the least sophisticated when it comes to questions of inter-alphabetic transliterations. I think.
Caveat: Crazy about Crazy
The Korean word for “crazy” is “미친” (mi-chin).
When we say someone or something is crazy, in English, there’s not really a value judgment involved – at least, it’s not a very strong one. Being a child of the 60’s, myself, I would go so far as to say that there are plenty of times when the word “crazy” can be used to mean something almost complementary. As when you’re sitting, reminiscing with friends, and someone says, “those sure were crazy times.”
But if you say someone is “michin” in Korean, it’s a grave insult – at least on the level of “son of a bitch” according to some of my students, if not a great deal worse. There’s a great deal of cultural anxiety about craziness, here. And this got me to thinking about the issue with the madness about mad cow disease and the national paranoia over American beef imports.
Perhaps the real problem is the name of the disease. If it were only ever called Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), would anyone care about it, in its extreme rarity? Did the British name the disease unpropitiously? Are Koreans going crazy and rioting in the streets because of a crazy fear of craziness and of a crazily named disease?
What might Foucault have to say about that? And how might this national anxiety about craziness impact the reception of a text such as Don Quijote? Maybe I should research this – I saw a Korean language edition of DQ on sale at Kyobo the last time I was there. Maybe I’ll pick it up, and try to decipher clues to its reception. Ha… as if my Korean were even close to being up to the task. But it’s an interesting question, I think.
Here’s a coworker at the hagwon. He remains nameless.
Caveat: “나의 이미지”
A student of mine writes about her self image.
My image is white. White means glitter, truth, objectivity… I am very strange. I am do not planning. I just do inclined self or ask other people. I have truth for other people. I’m greeting to other adults. And I’m extremely obstinate. I am elementary school grade 4th. We eat dinner with relation. I said “I want sit here.” but, mother said, “No.” Finally, I am sit there. This is, I want to do, I do until end. I am uneasiness. I am coward. At saturday, I talk with church sister and friend about scary stories. I don’t like scary. I listen scary stories to other people, so, I don’t close window. My sister day, “You are fool and coward. It’s not scary!” As a result, I hit my sister. But, I’m really thank My sister.
I didn’t give her high marks for organization, but I told her it was a very vivid essay that had almost poetic properties. Which is what I think.
Caveat: If you can’t avoid it, enjoy it!
The sentence "if you can't avoid it, enjoy it!" was the cheery conclusion of a 5th grader's essay that I was grading today. I liked the philosophical sentiment of it, though I also thought it has an unspoken corollary: "if you CAN avoid it, then, by all means, do so." Some things in life are unavoidable, and we should take those things with calm, equanimity, and even try to enjoy them. But other things in life are clearly avoidable, yet all too often, we just keep putting up with them, tolerating them, letting them annoy us, when it would be all too easy to walk away from these things, or push them out of our way and move on. Sometimes I think we possess an excessive loyalty to the status quo, whatever it is.
Which brings me back to the "why" of my current adventure – vis-a-vis my ruminations about whether to renew my contract or not. Clearly, because of the option to renew, I am in an "avoidable" situation, as far as continuing my experience here. So the question is, do I want to continue? Are the benefits I'm deriving greater than the annoyances I'm suffering? What's the calculus of my life, so to speak?
Caveat: 좋지도 않지만 나쁘지도 않아
… just doing OK.
In the last month, I’ve reestablished communication with two very long-lost friends who found me because of my facebook presence. It’s pretty cool. So I have been tweaking my facebook profile with the realization that apparently it’s a good place to be “visible” in the internet world. Maybe I should make a myspace profile too?
I’ve also been working on trying to update my “website” – for the first time since last summer. I’m trying to re-learn CSS so I can get beyond the default formatting that I inherited when I built the websites last year, using the pre-made example kits that come with the ASP.NET development platform.
I’m very happy to have bought a new MP3 player. It’s nice to put it into “shuffle” mode and walk home at night through the humid streets, listening to Slick Idiot or Cat Stevens or U2 or Depeche Mode, completely random.
Here is a picture of me wielding an alligator and a stupid face for the benefit of my bemused students.
Caveat: Champions
Two weeks ago we had a debate competition among the ER-ban students (advanced-level elementary). This was a kind of consummation of all my efforts, and overall I was pretty happy with how it went. Some of the students clearly enjoyed participating and put in a great deal of enthusiasm and effort, which was great to see.
The classes divided into teams of 3-5 students, and at the end of the competitions (one on Monday and one on Tuesday), each of the ER classes had a champion team. Here are some quick portraits of my champion teams.
This is the ER2-Tuesday team. The most talented students, from the highest-level class. From left to right, that’s Tina, Christina, Maria, Cathy, and Stephanie. Tina is smart and a little goofy. She has a great sense of humor and is not afraid to try it out in English. Christina will someday be a famous cartoonist or manga author, and although she’s not intellectually inclined, her English is actually quite good. And she’s a great artist. Maria is brilliant and academically motivated. Not to mention brutally competitive. Cathy is one of those always-positive personalities that can make anyone around her happy, and never gives up. Little Stephanie, despite being several grades lower than the others, speaks phenomenal, idiomatic English and is quite thoughtful.
This is the ER1-Monday champion team. Actually, the reason they won was because John2 was visiting the Monday class from his home class, which was ER2-Tuesday. Otherwise the girls would have won this class championship. But they’re good guys, and I was happy to declare them the winners. From left to right, that’s Jake, John2, John1, and Joey. The ER1-Monday class has an informal tradition of making sure everyone’s English name starts with the letter J. Jake is extremely smart and very focused as a student, but needs to work on getting along better with his peers – he can seem kind of standoffish. But he reminds me of myself at a similar age. John2, as I said, was just visiting from the Tuesday “ban,” but he bonded quickly with the guys because they realized he was a huge asset to the team – he was only debater in the overall competition who actually spoke completely extemporaneously. John1 is the class goof, quite intelligent but uninterested in anything involving actual work. But he’s also almost always an asset to a class, because he’s constantly got something interesting or off-the-wall to say, to keep things entertaining. He says he wants to be either comedian or a doctor, but that he suspects being doctor involves “too much study.” Joey is moody but quite brilliant. He can often argue with his peers, but he also can surprise with his idiomatic, well-formed fragments of English.
This is the ER1-Tuesday champion team. They weren’t perfect, but they were impressive partly because they managed with only three members. These girls are among my favorite students in the school They are, from left to right, Taylor, Gloria, and Ellen. And me, looking bemused and dorky, as usual. Taylor is an extroverted yet amazingly intellectual kid, with stunning enthusiasm and a true gift for not only learning but also pulling her peers along selflessly. Yet she can also demonstrate a very competitive spirit. She’s a natural leader – and if she keeps her confidence, might someday be a stunning success. She wrote all of Gloria’s speeches for the competition, and refused to take credit for them, but I saw her doing it. Gloria is a super friendly girl who often gives the impression of understanding more than she does. She just grins and nods and shrugs, and only later do I realize she was faking it. But she has managed to make friends with the two smartest girls in the class, and she leverages that friendship to her own academic benefit, I don’t think cynically, but just as if it’s part of the natural order of things. I actually think she would do just fine in an immersion environment, because although she lacks a lot of knowledge, she’s extroverted and has good non-verbal communicative competence. Lastly there’s Ellen. She initially can seem very shy, and she’s much less extroverted than the others. But she’s got a quiet confidence about her, and in any one-on-one conversation, she’s among the best in the entire school – and not just among the elementary students, but including the middle-schoolers too. It’s not so much her level of ability as the fact that she refuses to ever give up. She just circumlocutes and puzzles along until she’s made her point, whatever it is. She will never take the linguistic cop-out and leave you with “I don’t know” or “I can’t explain.”
Caveat: Charisma, Authenticity, Control
Last night, one of my advanced students stunned me with one of those overly frank and penetrating observations that seem far-too-frequent lately: they said that I lacked "charisma." For a moment, I almost thought I had misunderstood. But it was too close to the mark (vis-a-vis my insecurities about my qualities as a teacher) to be a simple misunderstanding.
Another person recently remarked that my blog wasn't the "real" Jared. In essence, that it lacked authenticity, I guess. And again, guilty as charged.
Last week, the thing that had me so frustrated was a remark by my boss Curt, when he said to me something to the effect that "If you can't control your class, you must not be a very good teacher." And, by Korean cultural standards, there are definitely classes where I'm certain I'm perceived as not being in control. Of course, he also said that if I couldn't make the clearly inadequate curriculum work in my classroom, then I wasn't trying hard enough.
I'm not even going to try to reason through the connections between these three observations. I don't know that any of them are inaccurate. I also can say, from the "inside," that they aren't the whole story, but that doesn't leave me feeling any less discouraged.
Lastly, it was announced yesterday that RingGuAPoReomEoHagWon (my employers) was going to be folded into another language academy venture just acquired by the parent holding company. And this other language academy has a stunningly bad reputation vis-a-vis quality and management, from the little I've heard or observed. Nothing stays the same for long. But given how I'm currently feeling, I can almost guarantee that when the moment comes to re-negotiate my contract, I'll opt out.
Life will go on. What's next?
Caveat: 헐!
I’m not sure exactly what it means, but I feel that I’ve come to understand its linguistic pragmatics quite well. The word is “헐” (roughly pronounced as a long, drawn out “hol”). I may be wrong, but I think that its literal meaning may be close to “broken” or “busted.” But in terms of pragmatics, it seems to be used very similarly to the way youth culture in the U.S. uses the word “dude!” as a kind of general purpose exclamation of surprise, interest or dismay. I’m trying to pronounce it authentically and use it appropriately, and a few times my students have been quite amazed and pleased at my having used it. 헐!
Today was a day of contrasts.
I had one extremely terrible, horrible class – a group of lower-level elementary students who just wouldn’t behave. I finally had a loud, verbal tantrum and set them to copying sentences, I was sooo frustrated. I almost never resort to these sorts of make-work “punishments” that are next best thing beating the kids with a stick (which is completely out of the question as far as I’m concerned, regardless of what my colleagues may do).
But I also had a fabulous class for the debate topic, with the lowest level middle-schoolers. The debate question was “Are pets a good idea?” – fairly elementary question, but about right for their level. And they all wanted to say “No, they’re not.” So we improvised, and they had to debate against me – I would make a little speech, then one of them, then I would, then another, then I would, and another. And I selected two of the students to be “judges” and placed a handicap on myself, since I allowed the judges to only score me up to 5 points, whereas they could score their peers up to 10 points. It went very well, and the students won. It was pretty cool, and I could tell they were having fun and actually learning something.
Then I had an interesting occurrence in my TP cohort, where I’ve been forced to give up the “debate program” in favor of a very dry, boring text that’s intended to prep them for the iBTOEFL (internet-based TOEFL) speaking section. They were moaning and complaining about the boringness of the book, and I was trying rather lamely to defend it (and failing, as I really at heart agreed with them). And then, after the class was over, they were standing around in the lobby area on between-class break and the six girls lined up in a row in front of the counter, and Pete was standing behind it, and I heard my name (Je-re-deu-seon-saeng-nim) and something about textbooks in Korean, and, lo and behold, they were holding a rebellion: they were collectively requesting to Pete that their class with me be returned to the debate curriculum. I couldn’t help grinning and I’m certain Pete saw my expression, and so I ran away and decided to let their complaints have their effect. And maybe, just maybe… I’ll get to go back to teaching something that I want to be teaching them. I’m excited.
Caveat: E is for Effort
Another thing that happened at that depressing teacher's day dinner last Thursday was when Grace said "E is for effort." This was in response to someone (was is Curt?) asking her what she thought of my teaching. It was said very positively, and she said some other positive things about me and other teachers, too, but upon reflection, I feel as if it's a classic example of being "damned through faint praise."
It's weird for me, actually. In most everything I've ever attempted in life, if I get a less-than-stellar review, the qualification has generally been something on the order of "very talented, but not the best effort." Consider, above all else, my fiasco in the PhD program at Penn. But more recently – the unpleasantness in Long Beach as a database programmer and administrator, and now this teaching experiment – the reviews have been inverted: "great effort, but, well, with respect to talent… no comment." What does this mean?
On the one hand, it's because I keep pushing myself to try new challenges. And, specifically, to try things where I know that I cannot fall back on my innate "Mr Professor" academic talents, such as administrative jobs and this very socially oriented teaching job. But on the other hand, is it some change that comes with getting older? Am I getting stupider? The talent isn't there anymore? So it's effort, or nothing.
Regardless, one thing neither Grace (whom I most respect) nor any of my other colleagues take the time to say is: great teacher. And, of course, there are where my insecurities lie, too. I was watching a cheesy Korean comedy in which a mom tells her daughter that teaching is easy – anyone who is a role model to others is a teacher. I'm trying to figure out what this means – I have an intuition that it will help me to understand Pete's perspective regarding misplaced idealism, maybe.
I guess getting an E for Effort is better than being told I suck, across the board. And I know that at least most of my colleagues like and respect me, at least at some level – there's the business of being nicknamed "professor" – just like at every other single job I've ever held. But Grace's comment… Pete's denunciations of my misplaced, inappropriate idealism (and I'm really not sure what this means, except that he's clearly perceived my excessive perfectionist tendencies and he feels – probably accurately – that these tendencies have no place in the world of hagwon teaching)… these things have me singularly gloomy, this weekend.
It was deeply, darkly overcast and raining all day today. A rich, textured, rainy sky, like the most gorgeous, reliably rainy August afternoons in Mexico City, although cooler than that. I lazed around the apartment and tried to study my Korean. I walked to the Homever store and, behold, there was Land-O-Lakes brand Pepper Jack Cheese for sale, imported from Minnesota. I bought some, for the nostalgia of it.
The nostalgic mood continued when I got back, and I listened to Cat Stevens for several hours. That's a trip back in time, for sure. I read a volume of the Deathnote manga (or manhwa as it's called here – long-format graphic novels) – these stories and related movies are so popular with teenagers here, I started reading them as an effort to have another useful basis to show some knowledge of their world and interests, but have found them appealing and interesting reads in their own right.
Caveat: Teacher’s Day
Thursday was "teacher's day." I'm not sure what this means, and it wasn't really that serious an event. But several of the students gave gifts, and a few of the parents brought things too, and after work we went out for 생선회 (saeng-seon-hoe – sashimi i.e. raw sliced fish), apparently an occasional tradition.
Several of the teachers got pretty drunk – that's a very common tradition on "after work outings" and one reason why I've been careful to remain a teetotaller here – that's the easiest way to avoid getting into embarrassing situations, as happened Thursday night, when Pete got pretty plastered and proceded to launch into a diatribe against me and my idealism. I felt embarrassed on his behalf, and self-conscious on my own, and it sort of brought to the surface the major tension that has existed between us.
There's no resolution. I don't know what's going to happen.
Here's what one 4th grade student wrote in a little note to me for teacher's day – it was the only handwritten note I received, and it was more touching than all the little pieces of soap and canned coffees and cloth flowers: "JARED Hi! I'm a Jinhyun Celebration teacher's day (Shiny Jinhyun)".
Caveat: 뺑끼
The word of the day: 뺑끼 (bbaeng-ggi). I don't know what it means, exactly – my students seemed to feel it was important that I learn it – they emphasized the spelling of it and the emphatic pronunciation. Sometimes I can't tell if they're pulling my leg, or messing with me in some way. So I didn't just want to take their word for what it meant.
I couldn't find in the naver.com dictionary I use, nor was it in the dictionary in my phone. I googled it, and found it in another online Korean dictionary called zKorean. And also, it was in a long list of words titled: "틀린 말 바른 말" (teul-lin mal ba-leun mal = "wrong talk right talk"). I'm assuming it's either slang or somehow not-quite-correct Korean. The one dictionary said the meaning was "paint." My students insisted the meaning was "lie" (as in, to tell a lie). I could see how one meaning could shade into the other, in slang terms.
Caveat: Meditations for a Newsletter
My boss is trying to put together a newsletter for the school, as part of a broader marketing strategy. He asked me to write some material (most of which would end up being translated, since the target is parents, not students). Because I'm not feeling particularly imaginative, I thought I'd use some of this pre-translated material as the content of my blog today.
Pronunciation Clinic. Each passage
provides opportunities to explain specific pronunciation problems.
In the above passage [not reproduced for this blog], for example, we talk about
-
"dark L" versus "clear
L" – the letter "L" in American English has two
pronunciations, depending on if it is at the beginning of a syllable
(clear or "light" L) or at the end of it (dark L).There are two difficulties for Korean speakers in learning
these sounds: 1) Korean has no sound like the "dark L"
and 2) the Korean ㄹ has
a "clear L" sound, but unfortunately, only at the end of
syllables (because Korean ㄹat
the beginning of a syllable is not an "L" sound at all,
but an English "R"!). This means that Koreans are used to
saying the "clear L" sound only at the ends of syllables,
which is exactly where English always changes to a "dark L".
For some speakers of American English especially, when we hear a
"clear L" in place of a "dark L" at the end of a
syllable, it can make it difficult or even impossible for us to
understand, since in our language a "clear L" at the end
of a syllable is "impossible"!This passage
(above) has a perfect contrast of these two sounds, in the words
"normal" versus "normally". The "L"
in the first is at the end of the syllable in the first word, so it
is a "dark L", while in the second word, because of the
adverbial ending -ly, the "L" "moves" to the
beginning of the following syllable, so it is a "clear
L".Because Korean has no sound similar to the "dark
L", and because they tend use "clear L" instead, this
creates confusion for native listeners. I tell my students it is
better to change the "dark L" into a weak, vowel-type
sound similar to "O" (or Korean 어).
Thus the last sound in /normao/ sounds more like "dark L"
than /normal/ where the last "L" is a "clear L"
(American English speakers will hear /normar/ if you make it a
"clear L", and that's not a word!) -
"Schwa" is the name we
give in English to the sound we write phonetically as /ə/. This
sound is the most common sound in the English language – and
it doesn't exist in Korean! So it can be difficult to learn. Part
of the problem is that the schwa sound can be represented by any of
the English vowel letters – a, e, i, o, u, y. Look at the
following:
-
'a' in about [əbaʊt]
-
'e' in taken [teɪkən]
-
'i' in pencil [pɛnsəl]
-
'o' in eloquent [ɛləkwənt]
-
'u' in supply [səplaɪ]
-
'y' in sibyl [sɪbəl]
English often changes vowels to schwa
when they are unstressed. For example, the word "the" is
almost always pronounced [ðə] because it is an unstressed word
in English. But people are surprised to learn that, in the very rare
case where the word "the" is stressed, it is often
pronounced [ði]!
Another good example in the above
passage is the word "satisfaction" which is pronounced
[sætəsfækʃən]. Note the stress is on the third
syllable, and this causes the vowels in the two syllables on each
side of the stressed syllable to "drop" to the schwa. The
best way for Koreans to learn this sound is to listen to a native
speaker carefully and repeat the sound in various words over and over
again.
Keys to mastering English!
People so often ask me, "what is
the easiest, fastest way for me to learn to speak English like a
native-speaker?" Here are some ideas.
Imitation.
There are many things to remember, but
I think one important thing that people often forget is that learning
a language requires constant imitation.
Do not be afraid to repeat what you hear. And repeat it again.
And again. Memorize phrases, and repeat them to yourself as you walk
places, or when you're alone at home, or as you go to sleep, or as
you wake up.
Inhibition.
Another important
thing is that you must not be afraid of failure. Someone once said:
"Speaking a foreign language is something that everyone
appreciates, even if you do it badly." In this way, it is
different from most things – nobody wants to ride in a car with a
person who drives badly, or eat food made by someone who cooks badly.
But even if you speak English (or Korean, or whatever language
you're learning) badly, you're still a hero. So don't be shy.
Speak! Every effort is worthwhile.
Confusion is Fun!
The
last thing I tell my students is: "If you understand everything
I'm saying, you're not learning anything." If I think my
students are understanding everything, I start to use more difficult
words or grammar on purpose, because I want
them to be a little confused. It pulls them along. So don't feel
afraid or frustrated if you don't understand everything you hear in
English – see it as an opportunity to learn something new. Learn to
love the feeling of confusion you get when you hear difficult
English, and remind yourself that the feeling of confusion means
there is something new there for you to learn.
I really should take my own advice on language-learning, with respect to better and more effectively learning Korean. It's always easier to give advice than to follow it, though. Sigh.
Caveat: Money vs Passion
We've been having our monthly debate in our debate program classes, and the topic is "Is money more important than passion in choosing a career?" The kids seem particularly engaged in this topic, and fairly equally divided on both sides (unlike some earlier topics) – this makes for good debate. I've heard some excellent and creative arguments, especially from the "passion" side. The best emerged today during a one-on-one discussion with a student (a sort of after-the-fact interview to help them learn to get more out of and put more into the debate next time). She said: "Money can't make passion, but passion can make money."
"That's brilliant!" I effused. "Where did you come up with that idea? Why didn't you use it during the debate?" She shrugged and said she forgot it during the debate. And she admitted it was her mother's idea. Still… at the least, she did a great job translating it into idiomatic English, as her mother had apparently conceived the idea in Korean.
Caveat: Allegations of Entertainment
Or… Entertaining alligators.
I have expanded my alligator collection, much to the joy of my younger students. I guess it gives us something to talk about in class.
Here is the original alligator, waiting to chomp someone’s finger, and, much smaller, a little one kind of to the side closer to the computer. That’s my desk at work.
Caveat: The Orphan Father
There is a social phenomenon in Korean culture that has been receiving some press recently, which goes by the name "orphan fathers." It's the situation that arises when upper middle class and wealthy Korean families decide to give up on the Korean education system completely, and buy a second home abroad (almost always in an English-speaking country, such as Canada, the U.S., etc.), for the sole purpose of having their kids live there and attend schools in that country.
The fathers (it's inevitably the fathers) keep their well-paying jobs in Korea, and the mother and the kids move to the second home abroad, and he supports them. Visas are less problematic since they're not actually working in the host country – they're just there pumping Korean-earned money into the economy, so host countries welcome the phenomenon.
But of course, it has led to more than one family break up, and the parents receive a lot of curiosity and sympathy: the fathers working impossible hours and sending all their money abroad; the mothers in a foreign land, often without their own level of linguistic competence and socially isolated. Lots of heart-wrenching documentaries on the topic.
OK, we've covered the background. What I'm really going to post here is a small little essay one of my students wrote. Amy is a 5th grader, in the intermediate-to-advanced elementary cohort (we call it ER1). She was asked to discuss her opinions on Korea's education system. I post what she wrote, verbatim (errors and all), because it's remarkably apropos my own post of yesterday, and further, provides an example of the extent to which the students themselves, even at a fairly young age and with limited language skills, are conscious of Korea's ESL education shortcomings. Of course, I also like it because she agrees with me about the need for English-only classrooms (I think, if I understand her thoughts correctly).
Korean english study system is very old. Because many students study abroad english. They learn english and leave there homes. There is left the father. The father named orphan father. Orphan father is only lives in home. Orphan father is social problem. The solution is Korea english system change. Teacher and student speak english in school. The textbook is variety level needs.
Caveat: Markets and Methods
I'm approaching the two-thirds (eight month) mark of my one-year commitment, here. And so, I want to try to set down my reflections about what I came here to do, and what I have been doing.
I guess I'm not that happy with things. There's the professional side – the desire to come and "try out" teaching, again – to try to replace the lucrative but ultimately frustrating and disillusioning career I'd been organically creating for myself in the world of database software development and business systems analysis. Then there's the personal side – the various personal challenges I'd set for myself as part of coming here.
First, I can only say I'm pretty disappointed in myself, with respect to the latter category. I haven't been using my extra-curricular time either productively or even particularly enjoyably. My creative writing has been at a near standstill since arriving in Korea last September. The work on my perennial never-started thesis on Persiles remains… never-started.
And my efforts to learn the Korean language keep crashing against the double barrier of – on the one hand – a lack of opportunities (and/or willing tutors) to have intensive real language practice, and – on the other hand – my own inexcusable deficit in motivation.
Not only that: I haven't even been particularly prompt or efficacious in taking care of those small bureaucratic necessities, such as my income tax problem. I procrastinate on doing paperwork, or miss the appropriate time to make a call to the states, or forget to follow up on an email to my accountant.
Meanwhile, I muddle along in the professional sphere. Before launching into a diatribe of tribulations and complaints, however, I should underscore one important fact: despite everything, I still enjoy going to work each day more than I did when working in Long Beach. I enjoy the children almost without exception – even the most behaviorally obtuse 6th grader is a huge improvement over my utterly brilliant yet fearsomely erratic and eerily unsupportive boss in Long Beach. And the school's staff politics are nothing compared to the backstabbing head-games prevalent at Paradise Corp in Burbank. And the 40-something hours I put in each week are certainly an improvement over the 80-plus I was putting in before – if I remain disappointed in how I am utilizing my off-time (see above).
So now, regarding the job: a critical review of my working experience in Korea, so far. At the outset, it is important to separate two things: 1) criticisms and thoughts about my own performance and behavior on the job, versus 2) criticisms and thoughts about my professional environment – the school, my supervisors and colleagues, the general situation of ESL education in South Korea. These things are interconnected to a high degree, however – especially in the sense that the same subjective feeling or experience can be discussed in view of either perspective, and the former, above, always will color the latter. For this reason, keep in mind that I combine these two issues indiscriminately in what follows.
First, I have some ideas about pedagogy and method. My exposure to these concepts is not extensive. I would consider it extensive if I'd managed a minor or major in foreign language education, for example, instead of just several courses on TESOL taken in late 80's, and the one intensive course in teaching-Spanish-as-a-foreign-language at Penn in the mid 90's. But, compared to my colleagues here, my theoretical range is deep and vast – which is not to say that such theoretical background is necessarily relevant, meaningful, or even helpful in the trenches. But it cannot help but influence how I look at things.
Korean EFL education is, for the most part, in the grammar-translation dark ages. Students are taught plenty of English grammar, and infinite lists of utterly de-contextualized vocabulary, but even after several years are frequently unable to construct more than basic sentences for conversation. Of course there are exceptions, and plenty of parents have managed to send their kids off to relatives in an English speaking country, or to expensive vacation-time language camps. But the hagwons (after-school academies) are almost exclusively in the Japanese "cram-school" model, and focus on rote instruction and test preparation.
Further, as far as I can tell, no one in my "chain of command" up to, at the least, the regional director of the schools I work for, has any evident training whatsoever in foreign language pedagogy, second language acquisition theory, and even seem to lack background in general linguistics and general elementary or adolescent pedagogy.
Efforts to apply curricula designed around more progressive ideas, such as a more communicative-based instruction (my personal preference), founder against a double resistance: staff members who are uncomfortable with it, and parents who are convinced that if little Iseul doesn't have a list of 50 words to memorize each night, she's being neglected by her teachers. The ill-fated "debate program" I've been involved in test-flying has had exactly this happen to it, as it keeps being "cut back" and reduced in scope.
But my most significant frustration boils down to a single core issue: L2 versus L1. In academic discussion of foreign language teaching methodology, L1 stands for the students' native language, and L2 stands for the "target" language. For me, here, L1 = Korean, and L2 = English. And the problem is that I remain deeply and philosophically committed to the idea that "good" foreign language instruction requires an unwavering dedication to L2-only classrooms. And the fact is, that L1 is so dominant in the school where I teach, now, it's downright depressing.
Some of my colleagues seem to believe that my frustration with the predominance of Korean as the language of instruction and administration in the school is related to my own inability to speak it. I wish they could have been present at the heated departmental meetings at Moorestown, New Jersey where I taught Spanish in 97-98. I argued there, too, that a Spanish classroom should be a SPANISH classroom, even at the lowest levels. And certainly my argument there wasn't influenced by the fact that I was weak in L1 (which there, and then, was obviously English).
There are reasons related to the nature of the job market here, however, that explain the predominance of L1 at least in part. The fact is, truly qualified English speakers are difficult to come by, here. At least several of my coworkers speak English at a level of competence and/or confidence that is inferior to some of their best students. I in no way mean this as a criticism of them as human beings, nor even as concerned, dedicated teachers. But when it is taxing work for ME to understand them and be understood by them, it is no wonder that in-classroom language devolves rapidly into Korean.
The Korean government seems to exacerbate the problem to some degree by, on the one hand squeezing supply through the injudicious creation and application of temporary worker laws, and on the other hand squeezing demand through mis-regulation of the private school markets.
I think that's enough, on theory. Onto practice, where the shortcomings are more definitely my own.
Most notably (and depressingly), there is an emerging consensus that I'm not a very good teacher. All the theory doesn't help much, in front of a bunch of unmotivated teenagers. Coming from one or two people, I can dismiss such concerns as originating in either a misunderstanding or a lack of empathy, or perhaps in poorly understood cultural differences. But not only have several people independently seemed to reach the conclusion here, but such feedback is not totally out of line with similar feedback I received in 97-98.
The core problem is: 1) I'm fundamentally too cerebral (which makes me "boring"), and 2) I'm too laid-back and too prone to attempt to interact with the kids as if they were adults (which means I have "classroom control issues"). I tend to try to tie the two problems together as both being features of my fundamental pedagogical philosophy, which is that I'm not supposed to be there to "motivate" students, but rather to "mentor" them – which is to say, I do great with self-motivated students who eagerly want to learn, but not so well with those whose own commitment to learning is limited. All of which boils down to: I'm only good at teaching students who are more or less the same type of student that I, myself, am.
No matter how much I enjoy the company of the kids in class, and no matter how much I try to be more entertaining or "interesting," my essentially introverted personality causes me to disappoint my peers, my students, and myself.
More than one of my friends and family have responded to these self-criticisms with the observation that I don't really belong as a teacher in a grade-school or high-school environment. That I'm meant to be, and should be, a college teacher. Easy to see, and to agree with. But not an easy path to take, since the research-driven academic career clearly hasn't been my forte, so far. I'm too unfocused, too much the dilettante or generalist.
There are other criticisms, which I may have a better chance of conquering. Most notably, people often complain that, more than other English speakers, I am "difficult to understand" and especially, that I speak "fast." I get defensive about this, and return to the L2 acquisition theory I learned, pointing out that an unfamiliar language (and an unfamiliar accent within a given language) will always sound "faster" to the naive listener – this is a demonstrated "fact" of perceptual psychology, and exhaustive studies of speakers of different languages and different speakers of individual languages show a far smaller variation in "rate of speech" than what we perceive subjectively. It is only familiarity and/or lack of familiarity that mostly impacts subjective perceived rate of speech.
Yet… surely to the extent it is objectively true, that must impact my ability to be an effective English teacher. And in conclusion I have to admit that there are real reasons for this understandability problem that I have, that I can clearly identify, if I listen to myself with some objective introspection (is that a paradox?).
Firstly, I tend to use an overly large vocabulary, and I'm actually pretty bad at "dumbing down." But part of the problem here comes back to the lack of a programmatic methodology to back me up. If the curricula being applied in the school were sufficiently developed and sophisticated as to be able to provide clear lists of level-appropriate vocabulary (e.g. at level X, these words should be used… at level Y, these additional words should be known), I could use such lists to police my vocabulary fairly effectively, just as was done when I taught Spanish at the University of Pennsylvania, where each textbook had a teacher's guide with exhaustive lists of level-appropriate active and passive vocabulary, and all the texts were integrated into a broader curricular program.
The other side of the "understandability" problem is more difficult – I also tend to use too much "fringe" grammar – that is to say, I get creative with things like word order and sentence structure, and experiment with the many regionalisms I've been exposed to over the years. English "allows" this, but it is definitely not appropriate in an L2 universe. And this issue does not recapitulate any issue I ever had with Spanish, which, despite my fairly high level of fluency, was still nevertheless always an L2 for me. I do this "playing with grammar" almost unconsciously, and when I catch myself doing it, it's discouraging how pervasive I see it to be.
Perhaps, not all the news on the "boring teacher" front is bad news, however. My colleague Grace sighed the other afternoon, "I'm becoming a boring teacher!" Paradoxically, this complaint gave me hope – let me explain why.
First of all, Grace is the person at work whom I most respect. She's not only the only person on the staff who is truly (i.e. "natively") bilingual, she's also a talented teacher who is clearly beloved and admired by her students. If you ask our students who their favorite teacher is, the only answer I have ever seen in writing or in heard in speech is "Grace." And their answers are well-reasoned – it's not just a matter of her being "easy" or "entertaining," which are sometimes features of popular teachers. Instead, they will explain that she is demanding but fair, serious but kind, etc. She's whom I would wish to emulate, if only I could figure out how.
And so, the fact that she was bemoaning the problem of becoming boring gave me hope, because it meant that perhaps I could blame the curriculum for at least some of my problem. You see, this de-evolution of our curriculum toward the stone ages is in part the consequence of my original employer's having sold out to a large and expanding chain hagwon business. Under its previous proprietors, the school was much less rigid in terms of curriculum, which had both advantages (such as the ability to be more creative in the classroom), but also disadvantages (such as a serious lack of guidance in terms of expectations).
The depressing side of the above is that if the big hagwon chains are being successful by pitching brutalist combinations of grammar-translation-style ESL instruction and Japan-style cram-school test prep, that doesn't send a very promising message about the current Korean ESL market. And, as much as it pains me to say it, I believe very wholeheartedly in markets. People really want this stuff. So what does that say about the potential for enlightened ESL methodology?
None of which solves the underlying dilemma – am I going to keep trying to be a teacher? Or go off on yet another tangent in life? I've gotten some extremely discouraging feedback from my more candid (or perhaps less deluded) acquaintances: something to the effect of, "if your blog is any reflection of your classroom personality, you really ARE boring." And yet the bad news is, this is REALLY me. This is how I write when I edit myself least, and these are the things I think about.
Caveat: Test-Driven Curriculum
I'd like to talk a little bit about the infamous TOEFL. This test is an international standard "test of English as a second language," created and administered by the same people who bring us the SAT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT and many others: the Educational Testing Service of beautiful New Jersey, USA. Despite its generic-sounding name, this is a for-profit corporation that essentially holds a global monopoly on certain sectors of the placement examination market.
The test that is all the rage here in Korea, even for students as young as middle-schools, is what is called the iBT – a clever little acronym that stands for internet-based TOEFL (see? it's one of those acronyms that embeds another acronym; and further, it plays unnecessary games with case – i.e. capital vs lower case letters).
This internet-based exam includes a speaking section, where the test-takers have to speak into a microphone, and the recording of what they say is uploaded to the test's website and farmed out to some presumably (hopefully?) competent evaluator of spoken English. I imagine some poorly-paid sod in India or the Philippines, sitting in a cubicle and listening to a minute-long speech every two minutes, and entering a score of 0-4 (that's it, that's the basis) for each one.
Each iBT speaking test requires 6 speeches, each about a minute long. Each of the 6 speeches is in response to a slightly different type of question. So, in my speaking class for my medium-advanced 7th and 8th graders (TP cohorts), we've abandoned the "Debate Program" (which, despite its shortcomings, I enjoyed teaching and at least some of the students seemed to get something out of), we have now adopted a textbook very specifically focused on nothing more than preparing students for the iBT speaking section.
I'll withhold my already rather extensive list of complaints about the text. What I really wanted to talk about was "artificiality and spontaneous speech acts." These iBT speeches are not "natural" or spontaneous speech acts. But… I nevertheless think they are a huge improvement over what there was before this test came along (e.g. the traditional TOEFL) – since at least it tries to test actual speaking competence.
Above and beyond the annoying textbook, each class period I try to have each student respond to a randomly selected iBT-style question – I've put 49 questions of the "personal preference" type (the name of the first question "type" of the 6 on each iBT test) onto little folded-up pieces of paper, and placed them into a paper dixie cup for the students to draw one out and respond to. In this way I simulate the feel of the actual exam, where you get a question, have at most 15-20 seconds to prepare a response (really only enough time to take a few breaths and fully read the question), and then have to talk for 45-60 seconds into the microphone.
Of course, finding real iBT "personal preference" questions online is unlikely. And, there's the matter of the fact that my students ability level really isn't close to what's required for a successful assay of the real iBT. So I've created a list of my own questions that have the same feel and style as the personal preference questions on the iBT, but maybe a little bit easier. Because of the difficulty I had finding good sample questions online, I decided to post these questions I made – maybe someone will discover them thru google find them useful. Here is the list:
1.Describe your best friend and tell why he or she is your best friend. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
2.Describe your favorite holiday spot and why it is your favorite. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
3.Describe your favorite hobby and why it is your favorite. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
4.What is an organization that you think benefits humanity and how does it do so? Please include specific details and examples in your response.
5.Describe your favorite school subject and why it is your favorite. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
6.What do you prefer to do between study time, to take a break or to relax?
7.Describe your favorite teacher and why he or she is your favorite. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
8.Describe the household chore that you dislike the most and explain why you dislike it. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
9.Describe your favorite animal or pet, and why it is your favorite. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
10.Describe your favorite icon or famous person, and why he or she is your favorite. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
11.What is your favorite type of movie and why? Please include specific details and examples in your response.
12.Describe your favorite sport and why it is your favorite. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
13.Describe an event in the last ten years that you think changed the world in an important way, and explain how you think it changed the world. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
14.Describe your favorite food and why it is your favorite. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
15.Describe the kind of person you think would be an ideal neighbor and explain why you think so. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
16.Describe your favorite movie and why it is your favorite. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
17.What do you think will be the most important issue facing humanity in the next 20 years? Why do you think so? Please include specific details and examples in your response.
18.Describe your favorite television program and why it is your favorite. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
19.Given one-month time to do whatever you like to do, what would you like to do?
20.What was your most cherished moment at school? Please include specific details and examples in your response.
21.Which of your parents do you think you most resemble? Why? Please include specific details and examples in your response.
22.Which country/city would you like to visit? Please include specific details and examples in your response.
23.What was the toughest challenge you have faced? Please include specific details and examples in your response.
24.Describe your favorite season of the year and explain why it is your favorite. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
25.If you could know your future, what would you like to know? Please include specific details and examples in your response.
26.If you could have one wish, what would you wish for and why? Please include specific details and examples in your response.
27.What would you send to an international exhibition? Your object should represent your country.
28.What has been your strangest dream. Describe the details and why you think it was strange, and what you think it might mean.
29.What do you miss when you are away from your home? Please include specific details and examples in your response.
30.Some people prefer to wake up early in the morning, while others prefer to sleep late. Which do you prefer and why? Please include specific details and examples in your response.
31.Describe one thing you regret not doing in your life and explain why you regret not doing it. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
32.Describe a major health problem that affects humans globally and explain why the disease or illness is so problematic. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
33.Describe a goal you have for your future and explain why this goal is important to you. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
34.Describe the person you usually go to when asking for advice and explain why you go to that person. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
35.Describe a learning experience which you feel was particularly valuable and explain why you found it valuable. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
36.Some students prefer university in the home region while others prefer studying abroad. What would you prefer?
37.Some only go to the movies if they know about the film, whereas others like to go to get surprised and watch movies they know nothing about. What do you prefer and why?
38.What are important considerations in choosing a job/career in your opinion? Please include specific details and examples in your response.
39.Describe a favorite spot to visit in your neighborhood (a park, shopping mall, museum, etc.), and explain why it is your favorite. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
40.Describe the most interesting place you have visited and explain why you found it interesting. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
41.Describe your family and the differences and similarities between the people in it. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
42.Some prefer traveling independently, whereas others prefer traveling in a pre-arranged package tour. Which do you prefer and why?
43.Which mode of transport (car, bus, train, boat, airplane, hiking, bicycle, etc.) do you prefer when traveling, and why?
44.Describe a particularly memorable or unusual experience you have had while traveling, and why it was memorable or unusual. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
45.Who is your role model? Describe this person and why he or she is your role model. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
46.Describe your ideal job and explain why you like it. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
47.Describe your favorite item of clothing and why it is your favorite. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
48.Describe your most difficult subject in school and explain why you think it is your most difficult. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
49.Describe your favorite novel or story and explain why it is your favorite. Please include specific details and examples in your response.
Caveat: Inconvenience is the mother of invention
Thus writes my student Ella, in a brilliant little essay on inventions. She's perhaps the most linguistically talented of my students – not necessarily the most academically inclined, but she has what we sometimes call an "ear" for language – she is an excellent mimic of sounds, and has a great aural memory. We'd learned the phrase "necessity is the mother of invention" in class, and she adopted it and made it her own aphorism very cleverly, and with a native-speaker's grace. I was impressed – such linguistic insightfulness and creativity is pretty rare.
Caveat: This Is A Blog
I found out today that at least one person at RingGuAPoReomEoHagWon has been reading my blog, or has seen it, anyway. If I understood correctly.
I have always been aware that writing my thoughts and experiences in this most public of places, the internet, could lead to this – that is why I have often kept things much more "bland" and generic than some of my audience (as small as it is) might expect. However, the actual knowledge is still something I have to adjust to, a bit. And it leaves me feeling compelled to reiterate, in more explicit terms, what this "blog" is supposed to be.
Mostly, this is just a sort of extended letter to my friends and family – at least, so far, that's what it's been. A way to avoid writing the same thing in 5 or 10 different emails each week. Secondly, it's a sort of discipline – a way to keep myself writing, if only a little bit.
It is most definitely NOT an effort at journalism (in which I have little interest), nor will I even guarantee truthfulness – I have dabbled in poetry and fiction a great deal over the years, and I reserve both novelistic and poetic license with respect to my writing here, even if I have, to date, rarely exercised it.
Back when I first started writing this, in 2004, I was actually quite careful to fictionalize e.g. my employer, but since then I've been much less careful, and I wonder if perhaps that has been a mistake. But on the whole, I don't actually write that often about work or about my employers – still, I should try to make clear that if I say something negative about my job, mostly I'm discussing my personal experiences and feelings.
Caveat: Doom and Gloom
I guess you could say I had a depressing day at work. Never any clear, targeted, constructive criticism – just vague allusions to shifting priorities and changed class assignments. Am I just overreacting, being insecure? I don't know. But I left work today feeling strongly that under no circumstances would I renew my contract – and it seems pretty clear to me today that they had no plans to seek such, either.
What's going on? I wish I could say. I don't know. The only behavior-specific criticism I received today was that I had failed to avail myself of the computer-based instructional materials created for the Passage Memorization curricula. I had test-driven it in January, and dismissed it as cumbersome and uninspiring to students.
I hadn't realized the administration had had their hearts set on it – they certainly didn't seem to have invested in the appropriate material technology to support it. Had I been "ordered" to use it? I definitely remember a "strong suggestion," but I also recall making a strongly argued case against continuing with it, which was received with mild-mannered acceptance – which I read as a deferral to my opinion. Now I learn that they were displeased that I'd rejected their request.
Caveat: 미국인?
I was surprised to overhear someone I passed on the street uttering 미국인 (migugin – American) in reference to me. How can they tell? Do people just assume I'm an American? There are many foreigners in Ilsan, but I have come to believe Americans are not the most common sort: there are Canadians, Brits, Ozzies and Kiwis, Indians, Vietnamese, and others. So does 미국인 stand for any kind of westerner? It very specifically means "U.S.A.-person."
In other news… RingGuAPoReomEoHagWon's administrators are showing their inexperience. The curriculum is adrift, as complaints from parents, frustrations with student satisfaction, etc., drive them to experiment and change things around. It's quite frustrating to have to be on the "receiving end" of this – it seems like not a week goes by when there isn't some change in what text I should use, or what method I should use, or even what group I should teach or what I should focus on. There is still a consensus that they seem to want to use me for the "speaking skills" teacher (as opposed to e.g. writing, reading, listening skills).
But now I'm looking at this book they want me to use that seems only marginally connected with actual communicative speaking ability, and I just don't know how to explain any more clearly than I already have that if we use this book, we won't be improving speaking skills – it's all about grammar, parts of speech, periphrastic verbs and vocabulary building. Speaking skills grow only through practice, practice, practice. You can know all the grammar in the world, but you won't speak well without that.
Caveat: Spokesoegugin
The last two days, we've been having a sort of parent-teacher conference thing, in the hours before school (1-4 roughly). So, extra hours, as a consequence. And, of course, anytime the parents wanted to talk to me, it ends up having to be translated. Yesterday, only one parent wanted to talk to me, and I felt like I was just a token Foreign Teacher to sit there and look useful. Today, Keith was my translator, and I actually talked with quite a few mothers – it's all mothers, as the Korean family is still much more traditional than in North America.
It was entertaining to try to guess who was whose mother – I didn't always get it right. But now I feel very tired.
Caveat: … furiously
I continue to struggle with my alleged boringness. It's a common enough criticism that I cannot dismiss it. How do I become a less boring teacher? A less boring person. There were many things I didn't want to become, in life… and boring was one of them.
Mientras tanto, some (boring) quotes:
"We don't want to be swayed by superficial eloquence, by emotion and so on." – Noam Chomsky
"It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously." – C.M. Street
Caveat: I Love Alligator
This was something a student told me today: "I love alligator."
"Alligator" is a toy that I bought – Grace had bought one before, and I thought it was such a great idea, so I got my own. For 4 dollars, I got a plastic alligator: you open the mouth, and press down on his teeth one-by-one, and some random tooth causes the beast's mouth to close. Each time, the specific tooth that causes the mouth to close is a different one. It's useful in moments when you need to choose a "who goes first" person in class, for giving speeches or reciting memorizations or whatever – you pass the alligator around and the person whose finger gets chomped is the one who has to speak.
I should post a picture of it. Maybe I'll take one tomorrow.
Caveat: Kids Bouncing Off Walls
Yes. Literally, they were bouncing off the walls. Some walls were damaged. Some kids were damaged. The younger ones in all classes were wackier than troop of crack-smoking monkeys today. I think it had to do with the warm weather – at least 15C, breezy and springy. I'm not sure how much English they learned today – I focused on synonyms of "crazy."
Sophia tried to sell me some "magic shampoo" that would make me "look younger" – I'm wondering if this was some kind of hint regarding my appearance. She said it was $400 per bottle, but said it would also cause me to grow a handsome beard instantly. I told her it sounded kind of dangerous, and asked what sort of chemicals were in it. She didn't know about the chemicals, but said it was perfectly safe. I decided not to make an immediate purchase.