Progress Report 23.1

Anyong hasseyo, palooka,

Good to see you.

Did you eat breakfast?

[a beat]

"Buh?" you exclaim internally, as you weigh up the question. "Did I eat breakfast?!" you echo. "Mind your own friggin' beeswax!" you most likely continue, after a sufficient period of assessment.

You would, however, be mistaking my intention. I'm not laying the groundwork for dietary interference but rather making enquiries as to your wellbeing.

See, it's a Korean thing. Some Koreans, when they want to know how you are, ask you the above question rather than approaching the matter directly (substituting breakfast for lunch when made apt by the time of the day). It's a non sequitur how-are-you?. The thing is, I'm not really sure how to courteously respond to this line of questioning. I don't think they actually want to hear that I started the day with three heaping bowlfuls of Coco Pops and a mug of Yorkshire tea, but responding with an assurance of my rude health seems to be rushing the logic of the dialogue. I shall understand then if you find yourself at a similar impasse and respond, like I do, with an uncertain: 'Yes. Er, thanks... You?'

Me? Erm... Yes. Thanks. I had some ricey/bran-flakey things that Kellogs manufacture just for the Korean market. They're called Kellog's Hyeon-mi. They're quite nice.

Anyway, enough of that.

I don't know if you noticed, but it was January last month. Maybe you didn't, maybe you did. Maybe January pulled you by the prick through its cold, sterile days, twisting extra hard with every thought of pleasure or excess so that you might never forget its forced post-Xmas penury. Perhaps you went out on New Year's Eve, woke up in a car park on January 5th and spent the rest of the month living on soup, nursing your kidneys and picking at various scabs. It could even be that things reached a head in an illicit and highly questionable 'love' affair and you spent the month moving daily from Travelodge to Travelodge with your dubious paramour before finally presenting yourself at a police station in a town just outside of Aberdeen on the evening of the 26th after it had all gotten too much. Whatever you did, I bet your January wasn't as busy as mine. This is because on top of my usual schedule, I had to teach an extra three hours a day of junior classes, as part of my school's winter English 'camp'.

Now, humour me a moment: Think back to your school days. You most likely had two weeks off at Christmas, didn't you? Ah, the Christmas Holidays! As that marvellous fortnight approached, you'll recall a daily building giddiness as the rigours of dull school work gave way to increasing extra-curricular merrymaking and each newly-turned door of the advent calendar on those dark December mornings marked a build towards the crescendo of excitement that erupted when the last day of term finally, finally arrived. It was great, wasn't it? From there on in, it was two full weeks of studying the double edition Christmas Radio Times by the multi-coloured lights of the Christmas tree, guts full of Quality Street and wondering at how much frantic pleasure the human body could possibly endure.

Now imagine you have a whole month off at Christmas. It would seem like a dream-come-true-only-to-turn-out-to-be-a-dream-only-to-then-turn-out-to-be-true-after-all, wouldn't it? Four whole weeks without education, leaving you free to play computer games, watch mid-to-high quality films and eat biscuits that come in unnecessarily large selection tins. If that's not what heaven's like, I'm going to be inviting God to step into the car park.

But hold on... There's something creeping into the periphery of this dream-vision - and it's not nice. As you contemplate your month of euphoric diversion, a slither of unpleasantness begins to take shape, pulling at gossamer fibres of your paradise. As you measure the potential of your pleasure, it forms a thought that rips through your month of happiness like a child rips through the wrapping paper on his main present. It whispers into your juvenile ear: 'You're Korean.'

And now how the party is wrecked! Wrecked more than Christmas morning is wrecked by spoiled and/or ungrateful behaviour!

How is this so? Well, if you're Korean, your Christmas holiday is a holiday in name only. For, when your school doesn't want you, that's when you come to me. That's right - whilst your school might be willing to excuse you from the grindstone, your parents aren't quite so magnanimous. They send you to me for me to do as I will. And it so happened that throughout the duration of your Christmas holiday, I willed nothing more than to spend three hours a day improving your English. [evil laugh goes here]

Well, that's not quite right. Should I have had any choice in the matter, I wouldn't have taught you at all, but as it was sprung on me as soon as I got back from 'Nam and a day before the 'camp' started, I had scant time to wriggle out of it. And so it came to be that I found myself on my first day back at work spending three hours in the company of a dozen of Korea's least enthusiastic adolescents, and tasked with learning them some we-speak.

Although it presented a boulder into the path of their instruction, my class's lack of zeal for learning was totally comprehensible.

These kids are worked hard throughout their school days in a way that would most likely kill your standard British 'yoot', and progressively more so as they mature. When they're in high school, their day begins at eight thirty in the morning and can finish any time as late as midnight. The standard curriculum is boosted with private academy schooling, paid for by parents who are desperate that their kids should have the competitive edge. Homework is plentiful, free time sparse. The routine is regulated and well disciplined (Korean teachers can hit their students if they want to), and it continues up until they're eighteen years old.

So you'd think that such an intensive educational system would be producing genius like billy-ho, wouldn't you?

Well, unfortunately not...

You see, Korean high school education is focused on one goal only: lofty achievement in the nationalized university entrance exam. This monolithic audition of brain-power is the scholastic Armageddon - the culmination of each child's academic career-to-date. It determines of which university each student is worthy, and therefore, in Korea's brand- and status-obsessed culture, it determines all future success and happiness. If you can only make the grade at one of the lesser institutions, then you can lower your expectations for the rest of your life exponentially.

Unless you're on the roll at one of so-called 'Ivy League' institutions (in tribute to the equally woeful and repulsive American system on which it is seemingly based), then an upper position in one of Korea's conglomerates is out of your grasp. And seeing as there are a but handful of these leviathan organisations (LG, Samsung, Daewoo, Hyundai) that seem to manufacture, assemble and service everything in this country (and I mean everything), you are, in other words, fucked.

And so parents and educators place a weighty importance on the entrance exam, with the trajectory of all high school learning concluding in its prescriptive maws. Hence the long hours, hence the extra lessons, hence the learning by rote and emphasis on facts. As you can imagine, within this system, creativity and individuality are not held in high esteem. As far as I can assay, the only expressive outlet encouraged in the young is playing the piano or the violin, and even then, only when it's hulled of a student's imaginative input. It's Mozart or Beethoven or nowt.

The lot of the school child on this peninsula is not, then, a happy one - or so you might assume. But these youngsters seem to bear their portion with remarkable fortitude. Although I'm unfamiliar with their behaviour within their schools, out on the street, they are polite and friendly and respectful, and even in roaming mobs, would fail to intimidate so much as a field vole. Whilst their Western counterparts are smoking crack and stabbing teachers, Korean high school students are tussling good-naturedly and letting cyclists pass. If the constant academic pressures and punishing schedules of study are riving their delicate psyches, they keep it well hidden beneath a thickened veneer of decency, gentle horseplay and good manners.

But still it pains them to spend three hours of every weekday of their winter vacation learning English from me, and quite understandably so. If I were honest about it, I had no more desire to waste a January of afternoons teaching them either. The prospect of a dozen lolling heads and moaning voices didn't exactly put me in rapture, and it was this reprehensibly negative attitude that I took to my first session, on my first day back from my holidays.

Accordingly, we didn't get off on the right foot. I was playing the nice teacher act, but it just wasn't ringing true. When my warm-up exercise was greeted with sedated enthusing, I tossed it aside after barely a standard measure of cajoling, and got down to some no-nonsense book work. However, after a perfunctory flick-through of what was to be our textbook for the following four weeks (the sort of preparation that stuffy pedagogical authorities would no doubt prescribe be done before starting the class), I realised that the lesson plans for the next twenty days were going to need some serious revision. You see, the textbook I'd be given to teach from was indeed a book of English instruction, but rather than being aimed at Korean adolescents, was in fact written with adult immigrants to the United States in mind. To this end, its chapters covered such impertinences as buying a used car on credit or dealing with discrimination by landlords, which sadly hold little relevance to even the most forward-thinking Korean thirteen-year-old. A cold month of junior classes was getting to be an even more treacherous prospect.

The prospect was made even worse by the boys in the class. I know that the cusp of teen-agedness is a notoriously clammy and awkward age, and the male contingent of the group underlined with clarity that this is still so. Taciturn, listless, bolshy and shy, they refused to give up a single word of English without me first going through a catalogue of enjoinder, threat and encouragement each and every time. It was like trying to blow raindrops back up a windowpane. Diverting your attention from the pursuit of a one word answer or an affirmation of comprehension from a student for as little as a second would mean starting further back from where you left when you returned to it. I'm not saying that I don't understand, though. I have no fond memories of this period of my own life, and after meeting these lads, it's not hard to see why. They're tough times, and they're not made easier by pushy parents and a punishing nocturnal computer-gaming schedule. But when beginning the daily classes, my patience and understanding towards them might not have been so easy to read into my behaviour.

The girls, on the other hand, were another story. Though outnumbered, they were bright, confident and relatively enthused. They engaged immediately with whatever spur-of-the-moment task I assigned them and were unhesitating in expressing their failure to understand its method or see its worth. There really is no justice in nature's distribution of awkwardness. It was a blessed relief to have some human beings in the class though.

The combination of poor preparation, post-holiday exhaustion and the long-stay diarrhoea that I picked up in 'Nam led, as I say, to the programme of classes starting badly. The boys were frustrating and the girls underwhelmed. After a few days in such conditions, I found myself watching the clock more eagerly than the students did. Every request to the boys to participate was met with a hormonal sigh, and echoed by myself in irritation. Having exhausted a friendly approach by day three, I tried another tack, and blasted them all soundly for turning in sloppy homework. This resulted in an upturn in output quality but at the cost of a souring of relations. Never one to willingly forfeit popularity, I decided that this was not an appropriate stratagem.

Thankfully, things improved greatly in week two, when our mutual patience with each other began to pay off. An intersecting of our senses of humour provided an effective catalyst in this process. The first evidence of this was when two of the boys performed for the class a quickly-composed role play set in a doctor's surgery and concluded it with declarations of love between physician and patient. The closing adorations were mumbled with the same awkwardness as rest of the dialogue, which added such pathos to a silly schoolboy joke as to elevate it to the level of genius. I pissed myself laughing and the students knew they had done good.

And so making each other laugh became one of our primary objectives, and through this, our relationship came on in leaps and bounds. I even managed to get them working, which gave me a rightful sense of achievement. They proved themselves with the culminating task of the course, which was to write a speech on something they'd learnt during the camp. I had feared that this demand might prove their undoing, as it required them to work independently and for two hours straight. How wrong I was - they came up trumps, and in such fine style that I found myself praising them slowly and carefully for a full five minutes (of which they grew bored after only thirty seconds. 'Yes, teacher,' they moaned in response to my compliments. 'Okay, teacher...').

When the final day came and the speeches were made, I found myself bidding them farewell with honest emotion. I'd gone from snarling at the sight of them on day one to actually liking them and then to being sad to see them go. It was a remarkable turnaround, though not one that was tacitly acknowledged by the students, as when the final minute of the final day came to pass, they couldn't leave the room fast enough, and with the exception of one or two of the girls, paid only a cursory goodbye. It gave me a sad feeling, even though I know full well that when I was that age myself, I would have done exactly the same thing.

So I find myself asking: Is the relentless nature of the Korean education system really such a bad thing? My increased familiarity with contemporary adolescence makes my position on the matter harder to judge. It's easy to condemn the high pressure, over-competitive and over-disciplined aspects of Korean education, but it's hard to miss the fact that Korean kids are generally well-behaved, respectful and pleasant. It would be syllogistic, though, to credit the former with the latter. I would like to posit that Korean school kids are likeable and well-balanced despite their education, but this too would seem a specious surrender to my liberal urges. It may be that I'm confusing 'nice' with 'compliant', for it's certainly the case that I like my kids best when they're doing what I tell them, although I've certainly not sold my soul to 'the man' to the point that I don't encourage their creativity and even their open rebellion wherever and whenever I can.

It would be interesting to compare teaching Korean teens with their British equivalents (and I mean that purely as a rhetorical advancement rather than as an expression of professional ambition). The behaviour of my pupils is in sharp contrast to the tales of war in the classroom reported to us by the British press, but so too is spread of social profiles from which the two might come - whilst the British pupils might range dramatically along socio-economic and cultural axes, the Koreans will be Korean, and most likely from a classic nuclear family home (and so accordingly replete with the appropriate cultural connotations). Deference to immediate authority is similarly a greater constituent of Korean life than it is of British, and this too might play a great part in explaining any difference between the two groups. (This is not to say that British kids don't defer to authority, but they are maybe less likely to defer to obvious authority than their Korean brethren.) I would also mention that the position of teacher - even English teacher - is still held in esteem in this country (even though they let Canadians do it), and so the educator in Korea is a little less likely to find themselves assaulted by students and their parents and denigrated by low pay and poor conditions.

One similarity that unites both sides though is the pressing need to think of schoolchildren as individuals with individual needs, strengths and ambitions. This is not going to become a reality here until the sole focus of high school education is taken off achievement in the university entrance exam, and will be hard to actualize in Britain until the popular image of the schoolchild as hopeless, shiftless, drug-addled delinquent is replaced with a more positive archetype. In neither case shall I hold my breath. I would just add that though Korean schoolchildren appear to be happy, it was reported this week that this nation has the highest rate of suicide in the developed world, and most suicide victims fall into the teenage/20-something age range. But rather than delving into that kettle of fish right now, I should rather leave it for another report.

Anyway, I experienced another reality of teaching yesterday and one that made me feel very sad indeed: I had to say goodbye to my current class of kindergarten students as they left for a new start and a new life in elementary school. We've had some great times over the past eight months, and we all knew that this day was coming, but that didn't make bidding farewell any easier. Whilst they put a brave face on it and remained excited, noisy and uproarious throughout our parting, it gave me little solace, especially when I walked home alone with the thought of how I would most likely never see any of them ever again. This is, I suppose, just part of the job. The blow is been made easier by the fact that my schedule is considerably lighter for the rest of month. Also, I get a new batch of them in March. Hooray.

Right, this has turned into another mammoth, so if you're still reading, thanks for sticking it out. Two things I'd like to conclude with:

a) A hearty thank you to Christopher 'Ginger-as-the-day-is-long' Laity for sending me the following: 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', by Robert Pirsig; 'Tom Stoppard's Plays', by Jim Hunter; 'This Other Eden' by Ben 'smug twat' Elton; and 'Assertiveness at Work', by Ken and Kate Back. From this list, you may be able to deduce that i) Chris works at a university English department office and therefore happens into possession of books which he doesn't know what to do with, and ii) he is happy to abuse the university's outgoing mail system by sending such books to South Korea. Despite his making me party to this misappropriation of his institution's resources, I am grateful to him nevertheless.

b) Happy Lunar New Year. It's this weekend, in case you didn't know. I'll assume your card's in the post, and you can do the same, and we shall see who's the first to be disappointed.

By way of a farewell, I shall leave you with this picture of some of the happy juniors on our daytrip to the Everland theme park (minus most of the boys, who regarded Everland as beneath them). You will note a familiar sentiment being communicated by their teacher (second from top-left).

Anyonghi kasseyo,

S