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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.

• 12) Teachers should have fixed classrooms. In every hagwon I’ve worked at, except the first one under some circumstances, the student cohorts have fixed classrooms and the teachers pass from classroom to classroom. This is perhaps convenient in some ways, administratively, and there’s less confusion and bustle from the problematic of having the students change classes between teaching periods. However, I think it has a lot of disadvantages. One of the foremost is that the teachers don’t have any incentive to personalize their classrooms, and very little impetus or motivation to keep their classrooms clean and well-maintained, etc. The kids write grafitti, things get broken, etc. This doesn’t happen in public schools where teachers “own” their classrooms. Besides, I’d so very much love to have a space I could call my own, to decorate, to personalize. You can put posters, bulletin boards, maps… anything you need or want for teaching.

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.