A Review of 전남 제일 고등학교

This past year I was an English Native Speaker at 전남 제일 고등학교 (aka Jeonnam Jeil Godeung Hakkyo). The school is one of Mokpo's language school and specializes in English, Chinese and Japanese. Funny enough the Japanese course is taught by a Japanese native speaker although since she administers the exam (let alone creates it) I suspect that she is more qualified than a native speaker like me.

Contract
My contract looks similar to this one. I didn't post it but feel free to compare it to other contracts.

Staff
The staff is at the school is friendly and professional and it's safer to have my care packages delivered to the main secretary than to my apartment. I would even use the word warm despite the fact that my only communication consisted of brief nods and 안녕하세요's as I pass each member in the hall. Even the principal is a kind and friendly man (I am allowed to skip teacher meetings) but smart enough to use the vice principal as his enforcer. The English department consist of eight English teachers placed at two per grade level. Despite the horror stories from other schools, the English teachers here have a decent understanding of English. They all have various degrees of proficiency but decent English is the rule not the exception at Jeonnam Jeil; if you were to dropped the entire English department in Big City America most if them would thrive while only one or two of them would die of starvation.

Lunch
For ₩50,000 per month you can purchase meal tickets redeemable at the school cafeteria. The food is unfortunately not very vegetarian or vegan friendly and sometimes you really lose out with the only edible things being rice and kimchi. The past native speakers was also a vegan so I know that the school understands the concept but the cafeteria has never offered me a vegan alternative, even if it was rice without the sprinkled chunks of ham. My predecessor soon opted to go home for lunch but I've kept going since it works with my schedule. In protest I've supplemented my lunch from the local Kimbap Nara place just beside the school and stopped paying for meal tickets. Cashing in the meal tickets is done so on the honor system so surprisingly nobody really noticed or really cared when I pick up a tray without putting a ticket into the bowl. I'm not really proud of this fact, it's just the system that evolved over the year.

Accommodations
My school did not pay for my apartment so there's nothing really to review about it.

Schedule
I was a supplementary teacher and taught, according to the confusion between my contract and my main co-teacher, either English culture or conversational English. Regardless, each week I taught 50 minutes of something to 8 classes of Grade 1 and 8 classes of Grade 2. I used an online calendar to manage my teaching schedule and vacation times.
Since the only one who really looked at the calendar was me there may be some mistakes, but for the curious it gives you an idea as to what my schedule was and how my year was structured.
There are some notes to my schedule:

• My predecessor and I never taught any winter or summer camps.
• You will be required to supervise English exams with the co-teacher.
  
• The high school semester is different than elementary and middle school semesters; the starting and end dates of the summer vacation was slightly off by a week so vacationing with a friend may cause some problems.
• The principal requires that you be at school at 8:30. If you don't you will be invited into his office for a discussion about your problems. So I have interpreted this to mean that I leave when I am finished my classes, even if that means at 2pm. Since I have yet to be brought before him for a second time I gather that this is not a problem. Actually as long as you walk out with purpose and greet all teachers in the hall, they won't even think twice.
• You are required to be in school during 3 days in February for Graduation Week. You will not teach during these days so as along as you make announcement your arrival at 8:30 am you're free to vanish. Although I didn't, feel free to negotiate a removal from these days by way of a family wedding or two; nothing is going to happen during this week.

Lessons
As to what I taught I was given absolutely free reign, something that I think is a bad idea and have posted about it before. I was expected to make my own lesson from scratch with no connection to the students' actual proper English education; my work is stored at waygook.org and the lessons are indexed on the side bar.

I started (as do other native speakers) a few months into the school term. This means who ever is going to replace me in the upcoming month should know that I've basically gone through the entire lesson collection with the Grade 2's but since I've only had the grade 1's for a couple of months. I've only done:

• Introduction
• Classroom Rules
• Classroom English
• Konglish
• Adjectives
• Sports
  

Now people like using my lessons but if my replacements are better than me (i.e. know what they're doing) then they should probably do their own thing. The only things that I introduced to the students were the concepts of a themed lesson, powerpoint games, and South Park. This is an education program with no measurement or accountability; no one will care what you do.

Classroom Management
Classroom management is something that I learned on the spot while teaching in Korea. All native speakers have these problems and they vary according to school and teacher. For my replacement here are the class rules that each student should and does know:

• Students are required to bring their pen and dictionary to class. If they forget they are sent out of the class room to get them.
• I do not allow food or drink in my class room. If they are eating or drinking I tell them to go outside in hall with the garbage can and do not come back until they are finished. I continue the lesson without them.
  
• If students are misbehaving I kick them out in the hall where vice principal or co-teacher will deal with them privately. I continue on with my lesson trying not to skip a beat.
  
• Students do not touch the air condition or heating machine. If they are cold or hot they have one opportunity to ask me to turn the heater or air condition on during the ritual "Hello. How are you?' If they respond 'Fine thank you and you," they've lost it and they'll suffer. Usually one student will pipe up saying "Teacher! Cold!" I stop class to explain that when I asked 'how are you' they replied 'fine.' I'll repeat the exercise, writing down on the board what they should say to me, until I get a clear majority rule of what they want. Having spent summer and winter with me the the grade 2 students know this all too well and they'll usually ask the smart kids in the class to help them with the words.
• There are student mug shots files that list the students, their photos, and their student numbers, organized by class. I use these for attendance and have arrange the student's in-class sitting chart based on this list. I.e. in table 1, I have student 1 through 6, in team 2 I have 7 through 12, and so on.
• Volunteering is sometimes painful for my students but they know to expect it. My classes are usually full with 30 students so I'll never get to all of the kids. Instead I take advantage of the team tables and ask each team to choose a captain of the team. If they gang up and choose the quiet kid then I give the quiet kid captain the choice to choose the volunteer. If they squabble I give them the option of kai-bai-bo while I count down to five on my hand. If they're still squabbling at the end of five I randomly choose one kid and give him the option of front of the class or in the hall. Fortunately I have never had to give this option since my counting down to five, in conjunction with the rest of the class counting down to five, encourages one of the team members to step up.
  
• I keep cell phones and do not give them back after class. I don't pretend that I'm calling Canada or pretend that I'm calling their mothers, I just keep them, ignore whatever pleas the students have. I'll usually give them to co-teacher during the day and let them deal with it but I show no sympathy to the kids.
• I do not and have never done candy. I have started giving them titles of Genius Team and if the students themselves introduce this concept in class, Rock Head team.
  

While my rules maybe strict I can pull it off though my patented friendly way of mocking the students and feigning surprise when they say something intelligent. On my first class I got many "Teacher, smile?" But on my last class I got many "I love you, angry teacher."

Co-Teachers
Jeonnam Jeil has some great co-teachers but that doesn't mean that I've been free of problems. Co-teachers know and understand that they are required to supervise my class. And by know, I mean that I have no problem of making misbehaving kids the vice principal's problem; the vice principal in turn will openly wonder why I am dumping misbehaving kids in his office by way of yelling at the English department. I had eight co-teachers who were responsible for co-teaching 2 classes with me this year. That sums up to two hours out of their week and, in comparison, lunch took up five hours out of their week.

But on average most of the teachers were excellent, arriving and even participating as a co-teacher in my class. The process to get the problematic co-teachers to come to class evolved through the year and ended up in this format: Before each class I would fire off an instant message (my school has an in-house instant messenger system, aptly name School Messenger) to the specific co-teacher, reminding them to come to class through a "Could you help me teach this class?" This was the best Korean way of handling this since I was explicitly asking for help in a documented way (school messenger keeps chat histories) that would be readily available come the next meeting of the vice-principal and the English department. Now in exchange for coming to my class, if they came to me and asked me to be excused from this lesson because of work, then I granted immediately. Or if I knew I was having a easy lesson I told them to not worry about coming to class.

The most productive way that my class ran was when the co-teachers acknowledged me as the dominant teacher but supplemented my explanations (on games, vocabulary, etc.) with Korean while keeping the kids in the back row from misbehaving. Again I've talked about this before, but a good example of this relationship happened when a student stood up in class one day. I stopped whatever I was doing and watched, along with the other students, as she walked over to the co-teacher and asked her something in Korea. The whole class looked on as the co-teacher gestured towards me and replied 'Did you ask Native Speaker?' She sulked back to her seat and we all waited while she said in broken English 'Teacher may I go to the bathroom?" I did and class resumed. Going back to classroom management, I have a rule that I will let students do whatever they want, provided they ask me in English. They're not allowed to open the window or go to the bathroom without first asking me first; nobody has realized that if they asked me 'Teacher, I am feeling sick, may I go home," I wouldn't hesitate.

Teacher X.
While I can safely say that I had a perfectly professional relationships with all of my co-teachers my only real negative opinion of working at Jeonam Jeil came from working with the one teacher who was assigned to be my handler. On paperwork each native speaker has one co-teacher and Teacher X was mine; in addition to being one of my eight co-teachers the teacher also had to file the paper work for my airplane ticket reimbursement, etc. Looking back on the year I realized that X was a classic example of a person with the largest ego with the least ability. Now it would be unfair to paint the teacher as a one dimensional cartoon character but at certain times X acted like something lifted out of TV.

The teacher had applied for and received the job of handler not because of X's experience, but explicitly for her lack of experience. X (and I guess the school agreed) that this would be an excellent attempt for the teacher's English to improve by way of a personal tutor. Any consideration for my well being was obviously not a part of the decision process.

In the classroom Teacher X was my worst teacher. X would try to come across as an English expert in front of the kids but both the students and I could see that X wasn't. For example X was the only teacher who was afraid to ask me a question about English in front of the class. All of the other teachers both male and female, older and younger, would never hesitate to ask me the difference between two words or ask me to explain or the clarify something I had said in class. Instead X would vanish into the back office and research the word on Naver. This process took five minutes so that when X decided to return both I and the class had moved on to another part of the lesson. And this happened many times during a class.

Another example of this teacher disrupting my class was the way X helped the students. Most teachers understood that when I asked a question to the students I expected the students to respond in English. If they didn't know the answer the students knew full well how to say 'I don't know' so that I could re-ask the question and I could keep the class going. The most annoying thing that a teacher could do was to tell the students the answer. Teacher X would do this and usually it was the wrong answer. This infuriated me to the point that when I saw this in class I pointed to the whispering teacher and scolded X in front of the whole with 'Cheater! Cunning!' The students laughed and so did Teacher X, unaware whom the students who laughing at. I've talked to X many times about this counterproductive behavior but the teacher refused to see it as such, under the belief that the students needed the opportunity to practice English. It was through these experiences with Teacher X I've learned that for some Koreans age caries more weight than anything, including common sense.

Now if the problem with Teacher X was limited to just the classroom I could deal with since I would only have this particular teacher twice every week. But outside of the classroom it was worse and I should have recognized it immediately but assumed that it was the culture shock that everybody was telling me about. For instance on my first day X told me that I must write an introduction, memorize it and give back to the teacher. I did learned that the X's real intention was to memorize whatever I wrote and present Xself as translating 'on the fly' to the rest of the staff while I introduced myself during the morning meeting. I have had so many of these moments that I'm going to limit them to my top five incidents with Teacher X.

Incident 1
Last year all native speakers had to deal with the new security requirements. This included a verification of our university transcripts and our criminal background check; however since many of us had submitted them through the provincial office they had already been verified and processed and we were exempt from process, as told by our liaison at the provincial office of education.

Despite my insistence that X should call the office of education for clarification Teacher X refused to believe me when I said that I was exempt from this process. We danced around this issue for a couple of weeks and in the end I had to get the provincial office to call the teacher. To Teacher X this was an act of rudeness since I was bypassing the school's authority and embarrassing my co-teacher and the school. I know this because X felt like giving me a lecture afterwards. The incident launched a couple of rants performed in front of friends but the important point to learn is that this kind of thinking is detrimental to the well being of a native speaker or the image of the Jeollanam-do Education Program; basically if the native speakers are not allowed to phone the board of education during matters like these then they are isolated and open to abuse. I tried to argue my case but again you do not win arguments with Teacher X.

Incident 2
X was sent to a teacher camp for a month and I thought that I would receive a little time off from dealing with her. Unfortunately X telephoned me constantly with English questions and sent me essays to correct. I wouldn't have minded except for X's special instructions that I should not tell anybody and it should be secret. Well, naturally I did tell somebody, one of my friends who had been a native speaker at a workshop before she told me that this kind of thing is all too common. So I politely refused citing my fears about it being illegal, and while this was something that X denied, X did stop sending me request for corrections.

Incident 3
I was constantly used as a novelty (and this sums up X's view of our relationship) pet. This is one of the most insulting aspects working at Jeonnam Jeil. X would introduce me to Koreans who were X's friends but couldn't speak English, in effect making me wait a hour or so while X sat and gossiped. The awkwardness was compounded when X, in X's most perfect example of uncomfortable vainness would ask, 'how do you think about figure?" implying the friend, acquaintance, or whoever's appearance. X expected me to say 'she is beautiful' or 'he is handsome' or something like so that X would laugh and clap her hands as if I had just yipped and yapped for a treat. It was a suffocating relationship. In the school I had to eat my cafeteria meals with this teacher, alway sit beside X in meetings and assemblies, and always include X when I talked to the other teachers. Somewhere along the lines of 'taking care of me' X automatically assumed a relationship level of intimacy that stepped over many professional boundaries. The other co-teachers labeled X as my 'mother.'

Incident 4
One week X happened to overhear a student asking me about teaching extra English classes. X immediately jumped into this and told the student something to the effect of no, it is illegal. That same week X asked me to help the gym teacher (who was also the coach for the national gymnastic team -- well, maybe, I couldn't understand what X was trying to convey). The students were so busy training that they were unable to attend school and they needed an English teacher and my co-teacher volunteered me. I didn't quite understand this situation but it was completely outside of my contract and I politely refused. X kept on countering my refusal with words like 'duty as native speaker in this country' by this time I had become wise to X's ways and the insistence of reinforced my refusal. X left visibly disappointed.

Incident 5
Early on in the term X came to me and asked me a favor and feeling sorry for her, I ended up loaning X ₩2,000,000. X wouldn't tell me what the money was for and to this day I still don't know. This was the most stupid thing that I would ever do in Korea, but I was still under the impression that X was in control of my winter and summer camps, those little bits of extra work in your summer and winter breaks that stop you from month long vacations. Two weeks later I got the money back and everything was fine. But as a note to my replacements it is important that you do not do this and do not feel pressured into doing this--even if X tells you that he or she knows how much money you have.

(Incidentally I have heard many stories about Koreans lending money that they do not have. In Korean society it seems that people have yet to learn financial responsibility and will go into debt to preserve the image that they are visibly affluent.)

Bonus Incident
X made me 'correct' my comments during the exit interview (i.e. teacher feedback form) and I was not allowed to see what other teachers wrote about my performance.

So after these incidents (and more) I developed a unfortunate habit of immediately being filled with dread every time X wanted to talk to me in private. These incidents do create a harsh impression of X and some part of me wants to believe that there are some redeeming qualities about this teacher. After all it would be unfair to describe X as evil, but X's way of thinking is so far removed from my own--and my other Korean teachers--that working with the teacher proved to be one of the challenging aspect of my time here. I don't know what kind of paperwork X has to deal with concerning me (X will not let me know, informing me that I should not worry about it) but during my term with X I learned to become as independent as I could. The result is this blog and the information that is gathered by learning Korean, asking questions to other Koreans and other native speakers in Mokpo.

And it has to be noted that I was the first foreigner that X had to deal with and I hope that X has mellowed a little thanks our interactions. But, again, I found X to be the kind of person who is insulting without intention and unable to recognize discomfort in other people. While crazy is a word that may be better on the flip side, lack of patience may be equally applied to me. Throughout this year correcting Teacher X's social faux-pas all the time became too exhausting and in the end I gave up and started to avoid the teacher as much as possible, wishing that X magically would 'get a clue.' This is not the best way to handle this situation, but I lacked the drive and ambition; the effort involved in proper mediation was too much for me and my one year in Mokpo.

Out of Five Stars
While Teacher X was the main problem at 전남 제일 고등학교 it would be unfair to the other members of the school, most notable the other members of English department, to simply say 'avoid this school.' The English department and it's members keep the school from failing my (one and only) school review.

Working at 전남 제일 고등학교 gets a 3.5/5 rating. It's an acceptable rating that acknowledges the staff, the students, the teaching resources and even the teaching environment while noting that there are still some areas in need of major improvement. Of course there are schools worse than mine, schools that are more strict and are more antagonistic towards their native speakers. And of course then there are those schools that will make you join the volleyball team.

The Generation Gap

From a paper on high tech worker stagnation I found this little chart on tertiary education that probably helps explain some aspects of the Korean generation gap.
Similar data is presented here, albeit in individual graphs. The various shapes represent age demographics within the country and the line length is a measurement of the difference. The delta (the largest one there) between the generations in Korea is a good measure of the education divide. Of course 55-64 years ago Korea wasn't the same as it is now:

33% of primary schools destroyed, 60% of classrooms unusable, 80% of books and equipment lost, 38% of teachers missing, 25% of upper secondary schools demolished, 20% teaching staff missing. Such was the situation of Korea’s education system in 1952.

The E-2 Interview

The mandatory E-2 interview is a new part of the Korean E-2 (i.e Teaching English) visa process. The new regulations came into effect shortly after the great pedophile scandal of 2007 in which Christopher Paul Neil, a Canadian national and target of a international pedophile manhunt, was arrested for sexually assaulting a nine-year-old boy in Thailand. Shockingly enough, before living in Thailand, Neil was working as an English teacher Gwangju at the Gwangju Foreign School.

But after roughly 3 months in to the process, it's still fair to say that the regulations have done nothing but increase criticism of Korea's TEFL hiring process and many ex-pat commentators view this a classic case of a knee jerk reaction leading to poor policing making. The new rules are doing more harm than good to Korea's ESL industry; the simple matter is they simultaneously fail to stop more Christopher Paul Neils and deter qualified teachers from considering Korea.

The thing that I'm finding the most useless about the process is the interview. From the initial stories coming in it seems like they are beyond wasteful and border on insulting. Even way back in November, a Korea Herald article voiced some initial concerns:

There are concerns about the logistics of the consulate interview part of the plan. "It's about time they had criminal record checks, and the health check is a good idea," says Tricia Elliot, a teacher at a private institute in Seoul. "But this interview at the consulate is a bit overboard because it cuts out a lot of people from smaller areas of large countries.

"A lot of the Canadians who work as teachers are from the East coast and the nearest consulate is in Montreal," she explained. "That's really far away, and impossible for most people to get to on short notice for an interview that doesn't guarantee a job."

So at first it seems like nobody really thought of mandatory interviews in a country that has 3 consulate and 6 timezones. But is the Korea government that short-cited to force mandatory travel on distances that are five times the journey from Mokpo to Seoul? This wouldn't be the first time that I've come across this phenomenon. I've talk to friends and family from Japan, England, and other small countries and they don't quite grasp the shear magnitude of Canada's landmass. Of course they all think that Canada is mainly a permafrost country where we eat baby seal eyes for breakfast, live in igloos, and our policemen have yet to discover car technology. But I digress; consider this quick map mock-up:

View Larger Map
Basically the distances involved for some people are equivalent to asking people to travel to and from Japan, China, Russian and even Taiwan. And it seems like still there's a lot of confusion about these interviews; for example you can submit an Introductory CD if you're in the jurisdiction of the Vancouver Consulate (but live outside of BC) and a rumored telephone interview if you're in Montreal Consulate's jurisdiction. But if you're in Northern Manitoba it looks like you're out of luck; I couldn't find anything about a compromise on the Toronto Consulate's website.

Geographical and logistic ignorance aside, the actual interview itself comes across as shear stupidity. At first it seemed normal:

1) Where will you be employed?
2) Do you enjoy working with children?
3) What is your educational background?, transcripts were reviewed and discussed with interviewer.
4) Why do you want to work in Korea?
5) What is your teaching philosophy?
6) If you weren't going to teach in Korea, what would you be doing?
7) Do you smoke?
8) Cool Have you done drugs in the past?
9) Have you ever broken the law?
10) How long do you want to stay in Korea?

But then there's the other stories, like in a comment over at the Marmot's Hole:

I just spoke with two Canadians who arrived in Korea this evening, fresh off the boat. They’d done the whole rigmarole: Degree double-checking, background checking and even an interview at the Korean Embassy in Montreal. Apparently, the interview involved a guy who “barely spoke English” asking them where they went to school, then checking on the school’s existence. Then it got weird. One girl was asked how many high schools there were on Prince Edward Island. She was also asked if she’d heard anything about teachers working in China and Japan, and what her feelings about Japan were. The other, who’s got a degree in Psychology, was asked to “Please psychoanalyze me [the Korean interviewer].”

I don't know if you can put that much weight with one comment but there's more, like over at Cows by the Fence

My name was written Zauhory, good times. The diplomat asked me my name, where I was from, my educational background, and my opinion of the Spitzer affair. The whole process took less than five minutes to do. Then I had to hop the bus home which was another four hours out of my day. Eight hours on a bus for a five minute interview?

And at ESL Daily:

"The interview was HILARIOUS. He asked: 1) Where my last name came from 2) About my experience in my two years in Daejeon 3) My possible long-term plans in Korea and 4) Was surprised and delightedly commented on the little Hangul I wrote on my visa application. It was less than 10 minutes. [After] a $45 fee, another week [delay] and today I FINALLY HAVE MY PASSPORT WITH MY E2 VISA IN IT."

And at Tree Top Chatter:

A few minutes later, probably an hour ahead of my 3 PM appointment time, I was called back for my interview. Behind a tiny table wedged into a corner of some forgotten area of the office was a Korean man in a bad gray suit. He seemed pleasant enough. He asked me a few questions about why I wanted to come to Korea, what I knew about Korea, and what I had studied in school. He made a few notes on the visa form I filled out, and I mentioned that I had left some things blank, but he said, “Don’t worry about it.” I’m pretty sure I would've flunked the interview if I was being scored on it. It lasted five minutes, and he said, “Thank you, there is the door.” I stood, bowed slightly, thanked him, and left.

Then I drove home in inclement, snowy weather, another 3 hours. My total time spent in Chicago was probably an hour and a half. Thankfully I know the city pretty well so it wasn't as big a deal as it could've been if I was unfamiliar with driving around in Chicago.

And at Alia in Korea:

I was forced to drive to my "local" Korean consulate where I had mailed the application materials to complete an interview with the consul to determine my eligbility. This meant taking three hours to drive to Newton, Mass. for a ten-minute interview and driving all the way back. Had I known this (and they could have told me when I called and asked a bunch of questions about the visa process), I would have scheduled the interview and brought in my application at that time, instead of paying FedEx to overnight the docs. What a hassle. I went, though, and got even more angry that all the consul asked me was already written on my application, plus the question about why I want to teach in Korea, all of which could have been done over the phone (they refused a phone interview).

And one more, at Uncertainty can be happiness, just for good measure:

I wasn't sure what kind of questions to expect when I went there, and the interview was more of a getting to know you type conversation then a formal interview. I did the get ones I expected, such as: How long do you want to stay in Korea? If given a situation A as a teacher, what would you do? Where do you want to be in Korea? What subjects have you taught?

The last one was amusing; the interviewer stopped me in the middle of my answer to say that this question was more for his own sake than as a part of the interview, as his son needed help in AP Chemistry (which is one of the subjects I am currently tutoring). And no, he didn't offer me a tutoring job for his son.

At the end of the interview, he also mentioned that being a Korean-American will work in my favor in the decision making and more than offset my lack of any teaching certifications.

I've probably copied and pasted enough examples to make my point but I really appreciate this last example. If I'm reading this right, then a member of the Korean consulate just said that ethnic origins also play a factor in the visa application process. Does that mean that belonging to some other demographic will be detrimental? That's a policy that hasn't backfire:

South Korean police have arrested a Korean-American man wanted by the FBI for first-degree murder. The suspect had fled the U.S. to South Korea 10 years ago and had been teaching English in private language institutes until he was captured.

The Gyeonggi Provincial Police Agency on Wednesday said it had arrested a 31-year-old Korean-American man identified as Nam on charges of killing a retired American policeman in the U.S.

...

Nam was finally arrested on Tuesday. He had been teaching at a private English-language institute in Toechon, Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province for two months.

Over the past decade, Nam had moved from one English-language crammer to another in Seoul, and Gyeonggi, Jeolla and Gyeongsang provinces, working two or three months at each institute. A South Korean court will rule on his extradition.

Now I doubt that was the true intention of the comment; I would vote for properly trained Korean-anything as a teacher but the consulate interview by the government's own admission is about security, not teaching qualifications.

So the policies, the logic, and even the implementation behind these interviews belongs to some understanding that eludes most westerners. Maybe the real reason behind the mandatory interviews is to physically examine the candidates and somehow spot the eugenically bad seed since its obvious that the questions do nothing to filter out the potential Christopher Paul Neil, or, to finish on a big rhetorical twist, the next Seung Hui Choi.

Cultural Context

After my Translation Bot discovery I poked around the Google pages again and rediscovered the Dictionary. Google's dictionary has been out since last year but since then it has switched over its local translation engine from Systran to an in-house model (and gone through a facelift too) so it gave me pause for another examination. Would it sway me from Naver? After some mucking around I would say that I would like it to but it doesn't introduce anything new.

Another thing that I found was the blog translation widget, or the Google Translation Gadget. It's a neat toy to allow people to apply Google's translation magic on your page without the extra step of navigating back to Google. While this is nifty any translation that you get is going to be rather poor and render the functionality useless. Maybe not useless but at least substandard compared to a manual translation:

So why do online translations fail so humourously? One reason is that we can recognize the grammatical errors and understand how the algorithm made the incorrect choice. For an easy example we have the confusion over Renard and The Fox in the movie. In the translation process the two somehow become synonymous and, thanks to Alliance Francaise, Mokpo, I know that this happened because the algorithm failed to recognize Renard as a French proper name. The computer couldn't identify the cultural context in which the lexical item 'Renard' was being presented. So in this case (and many others) the cultural context is everything; maybe if the film was about the 1940's French Resistance, using 'Le Fox' could be passable as correct.

Looking at this problem in another situation, I would say that a failure to recognize cultural context belongs to the plethora of reasons behind Korea's EFL difficulties. I'm not the first to suggest this idea and the problem of how to use foreign culture when teaching a foreign language has been around since the 1960s. Dimitrios Thanasoulas, in his paper The Importance Of Teaching Culture In The Foreign Language Classroom, gives a good argument illustrating this problem and, funny enough, his examples on incorrectness seem to be lifted straight out of Korean education system:

One of the misconceptions that have permeated foreign language teaching is the conviction that language is merely a code and, once mastered—mainly by dint of steeping oneself into grammatical rules and some aspects of the social context in which it is embedded—‘one language is essentially (albeit not easily) translatable into another’ (Kramsch, 1993: 1). To a certain extent, this belief has been instrumental in promoting various approaches to foreign language teaching—pragmatic, sociolinguistic, and communicative—which have certainly endowed the study of language with a social “hue”; nevertheless, paying lip service to the social dynamics that undergird language without trying to identify and gain insights into the very fabric of society and culture that have come to charge language in many and varied ways can only cause misunderstanding and lead to cross-cultural miscommunication.

So would we fix both problems by the simple matter of plugging a 'culturalizer' into Google's dictionary and Korea's EFL curriculum? Well, yes, but unfortunately a culturalizer is one of those mythical devices that hasn't been developed past brainstorm scribbles on a whiteboard. I chose the example of Renard because it's an easily explainable and easily isolated part of French culture. But on a larger scale teaching culture with language isn't quite as simple; too little cultural instruction results in miscommunication and too much results in linguistic imperialism. As Sherene Ariffin points out, in Culture in EFL Teaching: Issues and Solutions,

For instance, in a reading passage about pets, Alptekin (1993) illustrated that Middle Eastern students, especially the Muslims, would feel utterly confused about the American ideology of “a dog as ‘man’s’ best friend” (p. 137). This is because Muslims are brought up to regard them as animals that should not be touched because they are considered “unclean.” Therefore, in reading the passage, the students not only have to overcome unfamiliar words, but they would also have to figure out the context of the culture that the passage is referring to. This could lead to a serious impediment in their understanding of the passage. Marckwardt (1978) also argued against the use of American literature in teaching EFL. This is because American literature presents predominantly America culture and values—positive and negative—and does not take into consideration learners’ backgrounds.

Now we could simply write off American textbooks as American propaganda but not every instance of linguistic imperialism is going to be as easily recognizable; a subtle linguistic imperialism can also be found in the absence of cultural education. Paul Stapleton notes effect in his Culture’s Role in TEFL: An Attitude Survey in Japan:

The perils of teaching culture or making broad cultural statements about language usage was brought home to me recently when a British colleague chastised me for telling students a common response to a compliment in English was ‘Thank you’. My colleague claimed that such a response in Britain would be regarded as arrogant. Whether or not his claim is accurate is not the point here. Such an exchange of views only underlines the difficulties language teachers face when approaching cultural issues.

While there is a general lack of research in teacher attitudes on culture learning, some studies have been carried out to better understand the extent to which teachers are familiar with the role of culture in language education and how it affects their pedagogy. Lessard-Clouston’s survey (1996) in which 16 Chinese EFL teachers were interviewed on their views about teaching culture found support among teachers for teaching culture, but cited a need for more understanding of how to bring culture into the classroom context. Adamowski’s survey of teachers’ views on teaching culture in the ESL context (cited in Lessard-Clouston, 1996) suggested that teachers feel culture has an important role to play, yet no systematic ways of approaching how to teach it were uncovered. Prodromou (1992), in a questionnaire study of 300 Greek students, found over half of the students believed that native speaker teachers should have some knowledge about the students’ native tongue and culture. Duff and Uchida’s study (1997) of four EFL teachers in Japan revealed considerable complexity in teachers’ sociocultural identities and a lack of awareness that they were implicitly transmitting cultural messages to their students. Despite the findings of these studies, there is still a general lack of information about how teachers view the teaching of culture and how these views are reflected in their teaching.

It seems like I'm revisiting the same point that I've made in previous rants. As a high school native speaker it looks like the government sees me as the culturalizer but (again) I would say that I'm not the solution (i.e trained teacher) that they're looking for. So I'm stuck with the same problem involving Renard, the Fox and automatic translations; I can easily point out what's wrong with the system but I'm about as useless as the Google Translation Gadget when it comes around to fixing it.

Educational Nomads

The previously mentioned Indian Wave is in Korea, although in a slightly different form from what's going on in Japan:

An increasing number of Korean children now study in India, where they can learn English more cheaply than in the U.S. or the U.K. Parents are also impressed by the reputed strengths of Indian education in math and science, making the country an affordable alternative to the traditional destinations for Korea’s “educational refugees.”

Of course somebody beat me to breaking (well, blogging about) the story; Seoul Buffoon has already weighed in with his experience and has noted this amusing side effect:

At half the cost, the kids can get a decent education conducted in the English language. But of course, there is a caveat. They will end up speaking with Indian accents!

In fact my partner was there for two years (thats where I met her and followed her to Korea) and she speaks English with an Indian accent! Infact if she speaks in English on the phone, the person at the other end may actually think that she is an Indian!! Joking ofcourse, but the point I am trying to make is that if Korean parents can “tolerate the Indian accent” it works to their advantage.

I find this interesting since I'm now forced to reconcile the contradiction between the parents who send the kids off to India and the parents who are blind to acknowledging anything other than American English. I spell colour with a U even though I'm told that it's wrong.

But there's something else about this article that caught my eye: Educational Refugees. It's the first time that I've heard that term but to me the word refugee is loaded with so much tragedy and suffering that to use it to describe children of affluent parents and their personal education choices is very questionable. I'll grant that there maybe some validity when used as a commentary on Korean education but this goes too far and turns the affair into a sad hyperbole. For one, I'm sure that the Chosun isn't being hipster ironic and for another these Korean children are not being left behind:

As a high school teacher and guidance counselor, I am currently dealing with the fallout of [The No Child Left Behind Act] as I try to find schools for students who are not doing well in our school. We are a "failing school" that is "in need of improvement" and heading toward "corrective action." Yes, our test scores are low. But they are low because we are a transfer high school, meaning that we take in students who are being pushed out of other schools that need to meet AYP and these "weak" students will prevent them from doing so by scoring abysmally on the tests. The mission of our school is to educate these second chance kids, NCLB be damned. However, on occasion we do have students that need to tranfer to another school. And this is what happens: nobody wants these students. There are hundreds, probably thousands of students that no school will take in because those students are a "liability." The schools that have been educating these second chance kids for decades and trying to open up other possibilities for them are now being punished for doing so. NCLB hangs over schools like ours menacingly. We have been educating students that no other school wants for 25 years. When schools like ours disappear or are "restructured," what alternatives will kids have?

In this comment the Educational Refugee label has some merit since these children have no other alternative in the mainstream education culture. In another example, I found this website that uses the same metaphor albeit entrenched in a Christian motif:

Quite often, they start their homeschooling because of some negative causes, such as their children getting bullied in public schools. They are always in need of various kinds of help and encouragement from outside. Sad to say, many Japanese churches are not cooperative to the homeschoolers in Japan Homeschoolers often do not receive cooperative or positive reactions from other church members, and this can be detrimental for their Christian life. Even some of them are "persecuted" by other church members.

Even though I don't agree with subject matter, this contemporary use of Educational Refugee seems appropriately well placed, reinforcing the notion that Educational Refugees are members of society targeted for exclusion. This then poses the question: Are the Korean Kids being alienated by the national educational policies? I would say no. It seems like they (or their parents) are instead opting out of the educational system to gain that extra educational edge:

The OECD recently released the results of its Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). In the survey, Korean students finished first in reading skills, fourth in mathematics, and 11th in science. When the report was released, Koreans made a fuss about the science ranking plummeting to 11th from top place six years earlier. But the foreign press still regards Korea as a nation of excellent students. Despite the students' outstanding performance, Korean parents are uneasy about the country's education system. They covet an "advanced education," setting their eyes on overseas schools. They are aware that high scores don't necessarily reflect real abilities or skills. Nonetheless, they are so worried that they send their children to private crammers and continually push them for higher and higher scores.

So it looks like it's safe to say that the Chosun's usage of Educational Refugee is a good example of mediocre journalism that's thankfully outside of the current emotionally charge atmosphere. Except that I found Rieko Fry's PhD thesis Japanese children abroad: Politics of education for kaigaishijo and kikokushijo with this breif history in it's introduction:

Business expansion in the 1960s and its associated international strategies have meant that many Japanese company employees and their families were sent abroad on long-term assignments. The children who accompanied their parents on such assignments and then returned to Japan were first described as 'educational refugees' and were regarded as culturally ambiguous, socially marginalized and academically disadvantaged. The Japanese government considered that special measures were needed for these children, as they had missed out on the standard education that they would otherwise have received. Consequently, it introduced various educational options so that they could reintegrate smoothly into Japanese society and its educational system. Later, in the 1980s, when 'globalization' became vital to Japan, the attributes associated with such children were recast and they began to be regarded as 'valuable national assets' for their supposed rich cross-cultural awareness and bilingual abilities, the very qualities the government sought in the new generations of Japanese.

Interestingly enough the term was at first referencing an internal demographic, much like the left behind of No Child Left Behind, but soon became a fashionable (i.e marketable) quality. I can only guess that this is the same logic behind the Chosun's usage; the term has mutated within the Korean monoculture to a point of direct contradiction with it's dictionary definition. Simply put, Education Refugee is now Konglish.

But then I find this story and learn what it means to be a true Korean Educational Refugee:

The educational exodus from Korea has created not just success stories. The number of students who give up on their studies overseas and return to Korea is increasing, from 8,019 in 2001 to 13,586 in 2005. Some soon pack their bags again because they can no longer adapt to their home country either.

So it seems clear enough: the Konglish definition of Educational Refugees is an umbrella covering all Korean nationals who acquire education outside of Korea. This is a mislabeling since these students don't become Educational Refugees (by measure of the rest of the word) until they return home and experience the alienation brought upon by their foreign education -- much like Seoul Buffon's Partner but of course to a larger and less humorous degree -- and acquire a new designation in the Korean monoculture: The Educational Nomad.

First Day of Korean High School

The new term has started at my school and everywhere else in Mokpo's public education system. The first thing that I noticed was the subtle shuffle of my previous year; I've swapped one English teacher for another from a neighbouring high school, I've lost some of my memorable students, and I've gain a completely new crop of freshmen and women. And my first day didn't really involve any teaching since it was dominated by a welcoming ceremony and orientations but it was chock full of Koreanism that went unexplained:

• The class schedule is not finished; the real timetable is TBA
  
• The classroom lists (my crucial mug shot sheets) are not finished. Again, TBA.
  
• New school equipment like class room computers have not been delivered. Unfortunately we had to ship the old computers out before we left. When will classroom get a computer? TBA.
  
• My Internet connection has not be fixed since I reported it broken a couple of weeks ago and I cannot get a definite answer of when it will be working again.
• My classroom average classroom temperature is 7C
  

On the positive note I get to start over with the confidence of a battle-hardened veteran. They know that this is my house now:

• I have made the new freshmen stare at me in awe. They tell me I am handsome.
  
• I have made the new freshwomen fall in love with me. They too tell me I am handsome.

And on some other notes:

• Grade 1 classes are now sex-segregated; it keeps the hormones at bay (I guess) but my worst memories involve the same-sex cliques.
• I can reuse all of my lessons on the Grade 1s.
• Since I do my blogging at school, updates will be sporadic until I get my Internet fixed.

Korean High School Graduation

The middle week in February (for Mokpo schools and I'm guessing everywhere else in Korea) is Graduation Week. And the pinnacle of that week is Graduation Day and the pinnacle of that day is the Graduation Ceremony, celebrating the 3 years that students have spent in high school. It's also the last requirement in my 4 days of work in February. I won't be back online until March 3rd.

I brought my little point and shoot video camera with me to document what turned out to be no more than an hour of high school pageantry. Here's what I learned:

Location
The ceremony took place during the day, around mid-morning in the gymnasium, a fairly recent building with no heating. The floor was covered in tarp and the Grade 3 students were given the seat of honors on the main floor while the school band played the equivalent to pomp and circumstance. Grade 1 and Grade 2 students sitting in the bleachers were forced to attend, although their numbers were suspiciously low. And in select areas portable heaters were trotted out, giving places for the standing parents (and teachers) to congregate in the back of the gym. Everybody was cold.

Flowers
Flowers are apparently mandatory gifts during graduation. Flowers are suitable for both boys and girls (and even teachers) but must be as Koreanly ornate as possible. Bouquets stylized along the lines of Disney Princess Prom are perfectly acceptable for all genders and ages. I couldn't figure if there's some timing involved with the presenting of flowers, some students seem to have them right from the start whereas other produced them after returning from the back of the gym and taking the snapshots of parents, students and smiling diplomas. By the end of the ceremony everybody seemed to had flowers and were proudly displaying them in the numerous camera friendship photos.

Hair
Hair is the big thing for the graduating student. Like flowers, hair is another area of great cross-gender investment. Some girls had gone the extra pretty distance, but for the guys, perm, waves, coloring, etc was all the norm and done according the current Korean trends, something I am utterly clueless about. One of my favorite students became the poster child for Korean Perm today. I'm going to make a English-Korean dictionary and put his photo under the word awesome. Okay?

The Ceremony
The ceremony itself is what you expect: classes come up on stage, get their piece of paper, and go back to their chairs. But the way that they did it is completely different from North American. I guess ceremoniously is an adjective that does not translate well from English to Korean:

And it's easy to see that same je ne sais quoi here, during the principal's speech:
This is during the principals address to the students but it's clear that the students are done. Done with school and done with him since they're all chatting about their upcoming two weeks of vacation before back to university.

Flour and Eggs
Unfortunately I missed the flour and eggs:

What was comical however was the Korean tradition (from what has been explained to me) of what the students do once they've graduated. Because theirs no offical ceremony of passing the certificate to the students, the students just show up in their uniforms....and at this point, they're "itching" to rip it off for good. So after all of the formalities are over, and the parents have gone back to the work, the students whip out......flour and eggs; Lots and LOTS of eggs. What happens next is hard to witness, as the flour somewhat blocks a clear view. However, when the "dust" settles, what you have are students covered head to toe in egg yolk, shells, and tonnes of flour everywhere - most importantly, all over their uniform.

It was only when I was in the car heading to the retiring teacher's farewell lunch that I saw the students walking along the streets with flour all over their uniform. I guess they're done with the uniforms too.

Indian Education: The New New Thing

I just happen to be in India when I caught this headline over breakfast: Losing an Edge, Japanese Envy Indian Schools. The article describes the emerging Japanese opinion of India as an educational superpower to the point where Indian practices are favored over the current Japanese system.

Given that the story came out a month ago I'm surprised that I can't find any feedback about the move. There's another article from an Indian internet portal and a commentary from college newspaper site but that's about as much as Google gives me. The basic situation is something like this:

Japan, an Asian powerhouse, is losing its international engineering and math prestige to the likes of China and India. The Japanese can write off China as being that wacky idea communist military country across the sea, but India is a unknown maverick and harder to excuse. A former colony turned democratic power that has surpassed Japan in crucial (i.e. lucrative) knowledge industries is in sharp contrast with Japan's image of India being stuck on the short bus and it's only now that Japanese are recognizing the discrepancy. The solution is to use the ancient India teaching ways to help Japan regain it's edge in the Asian world.

There are some finer details in the article though that are worth examining. The education in questions is only engineering and math and the magical education systems seems to differ only slightly from previous systems that focused on memorization. In fact the ancient Indian secret is to just start the kids younger, faster, and harder--and Japan is doing it, albeit at a specific school in some suburb:

Most annoying for many Japanese is that the aspects of Indian education they now praise are similar to those that once made Japan famous for its work ethic and discipline: learning more at an earlier age, an emphasis on memorization and cramming, and a focus on the basics, particularly in math and science.

India’s more demanding education standards are apparent at the Little Angels Kindergarten, and are its main selling point. Its 2-year-old pupils are taught to count to 20, 3-year-olds are introduced to computers, and 5-year-olds learn to multiply, solve math word problems and write one-page essays in English, tasks most Japanese schools do not teach until at least second grade.

Anther point is the erosion of Japan's nationalism, almost as if the international pressures are forcing it to acknowledge systems outside of the itself:

But in the last few years, Japan has grown increasingly insecure, gripped by fear that it is being overshadowed by India and China, which are rapidly gaining in economic weight and sophistication. The government here has tried to preserve Japan’s technological lead and strengthen its military. But the Japanese have been forced to shed their traditional indifference to the region.

Grudgingly, Japan is starting to respect its neighbors.

“Until now, Japanese saw China and India as backwards and poor,” said Yoshinori Murai, a professor of Asian cultures at Sophia University in Tokyo. “As Japan loses confidence in itself, its attitudes toward Asia are changing. It has started seeing India and China as nations with something to offer.”

Notebook has an interesting take on the matter:

The up shot to this scare is the realization that maybe Japan was too arrogant, too full of national pride, to recognize that their close-mindedness shut out new ideas from other cultures. This could push Japan into opening its immigration program to include incentives for other ethnics to come in and contribute.

Now where have I heard of external pressures challenging a nation's (maybe) racist and xenophobic policies? But really, after re-examining this article it seems that Japan is just 'Riding the Indian Wave' or more precisely, some Japanese people who do like to ride waves are now riding an Indian one. I suspect that a Japanese take on Indian education will not find solid ground in mainstream Japanese education and won't be the magical cure-all for Japan's lagging test results.

My up shot to this article is that, like the circumstance behind Korean's influx of foreign brides, this article does describe another facet of a monocultural society dealing with an economically forced multiculturalism. So while importing Indian education techniques may be written off as a fad, the fad's simple existence creates an interesting footnote in some larger study on emerging multiculturalism in monocultural societies. Maybe I'll get around to writing that someday.

Candy in the Classroom

Given that we're glorified babysitters each English teacher is going to reach a point in their teaching career where they want to reward (or need to bribe) student participation in class. This method of classroom management is controversial in itself, but a Geek in Korea has noted how this can backfire in a Korean context:

My Canadian coworker has gotten himself in a bit of a pickle. Ever since he returned from Canada, he has been giving out candy to younger students before their classes start to earn their favor. This has, of course, blown up in his face, as the students walk into the room, demand candy, then call him a cheap man if he doesn’t have anything to give them. I get left alone as a surly curmudgeon that hates candy, gum, and all things sweet most of the time. Lucky me.

I enjoy being the surly curmudgeon too, especially when you realise how it could really backfire.

The Korean SATs

Today is the day all high school students take nation wide university entrance exams, the equivalent to the American SATs; Michael Hurt's Seoul Glow has a nice report of what this means for the students, the schools, and even the nation of Korea itself:

Corporal Punishment

Despite the legality of corporal punishment, it is still used in schools. A couple of weeks ago the Digital Chosunilbo ran a piece on one case that went too far and was captured on video:

The video and accompanying news article has made it's way around the Korean internet; waygook.org has a nice thread on the incident, but Gust of Popular Feeling (which also gave us the brilliant A brief history of scapegoating English teachers in Korea) has a nice history of Kamera Kaptured Korean Korporal Kunishment.

Review of the October workshop

I previously mentioned that there would be a provincial wide meeting amongst all of the EFL teachers on the Jeollanam-do province's payroll. The meeting was split into two parts with half of the teachers participating the week earlier to avoid overcrowding. Smee (over at waygook.org) was in the early session and started a post with his comments on the whole affair.

The Teaching Demonstrations
The main items on the agenda were two simultaneous teaching demonstrations of a native speaker and a co-teacher. The first presentation was on stage in the main auditorium where the native speaker taught a mixed middle school class while the Korean co-teacher participated with minimal interference. The second was a live video feed presented in a small theater on a lower level where the roles were reversed and the Korean co-teacher actively taught the class while the native speaker was metaphorically warming the bench. As a bonus the second one was also a demonstration of TEE (Teach English in English) a new concept to Jeollanam-do's English education policy where the Korean English teacher teaches English without out any Korean instruction.

Both of these demonstrations defined co-teaching in terms of a teacher-assistant model. A little bit of background reading on co-teaching led me to a book that uses the more official sounding name of supportive teaching. It seemed like the model was being presented as the de facto standard and I would have liked to see more discussion including other co-teaching theories especially when the teachers in attendance differed greatly in their teaching environments, education level, and even school support. Consequently (and after talking to some of other workshop participants) many participants felt like the demonstrations had no real educational value because of this great discrepancy.

And then there's the concept of TEE. While it was just being introduced to the teachers and native speakers (well, at least to me) at the workshop, the theory has actually be around for a couple of years. I am unsure why the province brought up the model in front of all of us since there's a large group of native speakers who can provide anecdotal evidence that most schools are not ready for it. I managed to develop a case of esprit de l'escalier after I did some research and found this paper by Peter S. Dash. Peter raises some valid points against TEE, like the near impossibility of implementing it:

Somewhat surprisingly, a number of papers related to research in Hong Kong appear to also underline the problems of many students learning English through only English. Ho (1985) states in reference to questionnaire findings from 28 schools' remedial English classes, "complete avoidance of the native language (L1) was not possible" (p. 1). Even in Hong Kong- "many pre-service English teacher trainees find it almost impossible to survive in primary and junior secondary classrooms without using the mother tongue" (Lai, 1996, p.173 ). More specifically, in relation to when L1 can best be applied, some researchers see it as particularly useful for concept development and the transfer of cognitive and academic proficiency, (Park and others, 1984, p.1). These conclusions relate to Asian minority students being observed by a variety of Illinois immersion, bilingual and ESL program teaching personnel.

Or the major obstacles from implementing TEE specifically in Korea:

It is also fair to point out that the differences between English and Korean, linguistically and culturally are so great at times that it is not possible to explain every grammar point or cultural difference in English from which a particular lesson might give benefit. ... Or it might sometimes be possible, but the inordinate amount of time to do so could take away from the imperative to cover a fairly lengthy curriculum in preparation for examinations or satisfying the concerns of principals and supervisors.

The fact that many TEE issues were not fully examined during the workshop also highlights another criticism I had with the demonstration: the unrealistic teaching environments. Both classes involved well disciplined children who were so hyper aware of the live studio audience behind their backs that the scene conjured various of images ranging from awkward Sunday school pageants to (my favorite) North Korea military cadets performing of Kim Jong-Il. Peter used quasi-researched feelings of students and teachers to justify his points but in both classes the lessons were so well rehearsed that any complications that could have arisen were simply written out of the script; it simply showed what TEE looks like in theory, not what it looks like in practice. Maybe we would have seen some of Peter's points addressed, even challenged and corrected, if the students had actually been allowed to ask questions.

There's another TEE conflict that Peter's paper highlights and that's the co-teacher. In our TEE demonstration he was useless. This isn't a criticism about his teaching abilities or his interaction with the children. Going back to my live studio audience metaphor, this would be like blaming an actor for a poorly written script. His talents were simply not put to use and from what I saw during the second half of the class he was marginalized to the role of the same cd-rom that is currently in use. Peter's version of TEE assumes that the classes are taught by a single teacher and from what I saw in the demonstration, TEE actually removed the need for a native speaker.

Samuel, the native speaker in question clarified his situation later on the waygook.org post:

I did a TEE last month. It was a "Conversation Lesson". I was used very little, perhaps about 20 percent. It is possible to watch these TEE on line.
On the 26th, I will do a "Reading Lesson". It is content heavy. I am used about 40 percent of the time. I have no say in the content of the lesson. The Korean makes up the lesson, and they must follow a strict lesson outline. In fact, my co-teacher already gave a solo presentation last month, but for some reason the education board asked her to do the same lesson with a native speaker, which is me. So the lesson was left unchanged, and we figured out what to divide between us. My co-teacher has no-time to make up a new lesson.

This sheds some light on my complaints, but learning about this outside of the workshop, on the waygook.org board undermines the validity of the entire presentation as well as the usage of a native speaker in a TEE class.

Conflict Resolution
Unfortunately any real workshoping was really at a minimum in the post demonstration discussion. These discussions were rather one sided since the talkative ones were all native speakers and the topics tended to go off on tangents to a point where outbreaks of off topic, but valid, discussion were cut short because of time constraints. Andrea King, the native speaker coordinator for Jeollanam-do and one of the hosts of the workshop kept the workshop moving along by apologetically resolving each situation with something like "well I guess each school will have to come up with it's own solution."

Placing the onus of this resolution on the school really placed the onus on to the shoulders of the native speaker since (at least in my case) the conflicts involves a principal, vice-principal, and 8 different English teachers of various gender, age, and level of Confucius ideology who were not in attendance. Returning the native speaker back to the school without any strategies or at least a notion of what works best was really detrimental and a counter-workshop aspect of the workshop.

Virginia Parker and Nicola Andrewes conducted a in-house poll during the early parts of the session and was going to present their findings (the highlight I was looking forward to) but unfortunately it was rushed and practically cut short for the 5pm deadline. Some of her questions were:

• What is working? What are some positive apsects of the teaching program you are involved with in Jeollanam-do?
• What can Korea English co-teacher do to improve their effectiveness in the ESL Team Teaching classroom?
• What can Native English Speakers do to improve their effectiveness in the ESL Team Teaching classroom?
  
• What can the Jeollanam-do Education Administration do to improve the effectiveness of the language program in place in Jeollanam-do?

It seemed like it was the only case where documented feedback could have been brought back to the Jeollanam-do Office of Education for thought in policy making, so it was unfortunate that effectively analyzing the results was pressured against the 5pm deadline.

My Workshop
Calling the afternoon gathering a workshop was really a misnomer. To me it seemed more like annual corporate rally, showcase, presentation, or even an awkward Sunday school pageant, where the point was to sit back and simply watch the the new direction of education in the Jeollanam-do province. Any attempt at a workshop, where the audience actually participates in exercises to better their own abilities, was really impossible since the problems and solutions were too varied. In the end it seemed like the only problem that had all of the staff and teachers unified was if the schedule would stick to the 5 o'clock deadline.

Playing the game of what I would do to make it better, I'd devise a two part workshop spread out over a number of days focusing on two main topics:

1. Co-teaching Workshops.
2. The Native Speaker and Co-Teacher Relationship.
   

The first part would be valid teaching workshops broken up by education level; elementary, middle and high school all have different education models and curriculum and need different workshops. The teaching workshop could focus on bad and good teaching by examining various realistic situations in the classroom (maybe submitted anonymously to avoid public criticism) and noting what went right and what went wrong. This would be also good forum to laboratory-test the feasibility of TEE.

The second half doesn't have the same nice split across the education levels, so it could reunite everybody to focus on the native speaker and co-teacher relationship. Apart from dealing with problematic children, this seems like the other source of frustration in the school environment and the goal here would be an attempt to solve co-teaching conflicts in a mediated fashion. Off the top of my head some topics could be:

• Young Female Native Speaker and Elderly Male Co-Teacher: How filial piety can be interpreted as a sexist insult.
• Okay Okay, Do Not Worry About It and other invalid answers used when answering question in English.
  
• Efficient use of a single native speaker and many English co-teachers.
• It's alright to have bad English: Examples of co-teaching that doesn't embarrass co-teachers with poor language skills.
  
• Dealing with school staff without a translator.
• The proper way to correct mistakes made by the other teacher.
  
• Co-Teacher Paper Work: What is it and how can we reduce it?
• When is a little brat a little shit? The various stages of punishment and when to apply them.
  

I'll admit that this list seems a little one sided and that most of this post has been thought up from the stand point of my native speaker's point of view. There are other native speaker here with actual teaching training and know way more about teaching than I do--enough that they could lead some of these workshops. And of course I would love to have opinions from the co-teachers side of the relationship, but whenever I ask I get a simple and polite everything is okay, thank you.

Review of the Education Policies involved with teaching ESL in Korea High Schools in the Jeollannamdo Province

The Jeollanam-do Provincial Education Office is holding a meeting in a couple of weeks to discuss the current state of the education system. All of the Native Speakers in the province, not just Mokpo, are obligated to attend along with their co-teacher. I teach at a high school so I'm going and before I go I'll try to organize my pre-meeting thoughts while trying to steer clear of digressing personal rants.

Curriculum
At the high school level there's a core English class but it's taught by a Korean English teacher. I teach the supplementary English class where whatever work the students do has no bearing on their academic career. In fact, I am so segregated from the other English parts a student's education that it seems like the other English parts are the considered the real English parts and I'm left to define my own existence. I don't even have a curriculum so when I teach I do so with no direction what so ever. This it drives me crazy.

During my orientation all of the new teachers visited a typical Korean school where we saw a typical Korean classroom. Our guide, the local (Korean) English teacher gave us the tour and took us through some typical Korean school activities. They were for middle school girls so I didn't pay attention and quietly enjoyed the free strawberries in the back. I perked up during the end when the teacher told us that the money that the Korean Government spends on Native Speakers takes away money used by other programs, like school provided lunches for the poorest of students. The teacher was super nice, sweet, polite, etc. so it sounded like more of a plea to take your job as serious as possible. Ie. You have a pretty sweet deal so don't be an ass.

If I take my job seriously and examine where I am within the context of taking money away from starving children I see serious problems. I am paid to teach 30 students one hour per week of whatever I want with no curriculum, no direction, and more importantly no valid measurement of their progress. That means that nobody in the Ministry of Education has anything to prove that my presence justifies allotting funds for Native Speakers instead for the supplementary food programs.

That's what gets me; I cannot understand how the public education system can simply throw a foreigner in front of a bunch of Korean students and hope for the best. If the public education system is going to promote English over food then at least it could do so effectively. How can the education system justify my job as a glorified babysitting?

I hear arguments that my mere presence is justification of the program, as if the students will learn English by osmosis. This is a valid theory (and given my experience with the system so far I can see the belief in that argument) but even then, at that level of logic (again from my own experience) I could simply be replaced with a high school version of Sesame Street. Let's counter my claim and continue that argument with the word interaction; I need to be Sesame Street Live and taking that into consideration I think I just upgraded myself from babysitter to English Camp Counselor.

If that's the case, if I'm supposed to play games with the students, then we're back at the original problem of a lack of curriculum: What should I be doing with the children that would help them the most? Including my roughly 6 months here in Korea I have roughly 6 months of experience teaching Korean high school students English; I am obviously not qualified to answer that question and I don't think that I should.


The Co-Teacher
As far as I can tell the co-teacher has two distinct roles. The first is co-teacher, literally standing next to you in the front of the class and both of you teach the class. And the second is cultural ambassador since Native Speakers are fresh off of the boat and need somebody to help them adapt to the Korean Way. While in theory the idea of a co-teacher is, in reality it's a a poorly implemented idea.

The Co-Teacher in the Classroom
Everybody has a different experience with their co-teacher. In my situation I teach multiple classes each day, going through the entire first and second grade each week. Each of the 8 English teachers is assigned to two of my English classes but in reality my English classes go without any teacher supervision.

In a Korean high school I'm dealing with the same teenage dramas that you would expect in a North American high school but without any real communication between me and the students. So having the class room supervision by a Korean teacher is absolutely crucial. If nothing else just quietly standing in the back of the class as an authority figure keeps trouble making students from disrupting the class. When I don't have a co-teacher the class is clearly less behaved; in the past I've had to kick entire gangs of students out of my class room.

When the co-teacher does establish a presence, it's crucial to have the correct presence. Otherwise the co-teacher ends up undermining your authority and does more harm than if he or she had just skipped your class. What's more frustrating is that there's no guideline issued that defines the roles of both co-teacher and native speaker, or to what the correct presence should be.

Since a high school native speaker is expected to create and execute the lessons, a correct presence for a co-teacher should be more about managing my class than actually teaching. Other levels of education require a different co-teacher model since they're dealing with different situations. For example, the native speakers in elementary schools teach in the actual English class and all elementary English teachers teach out of the same Ministry of Education issued text book, something that's completely different from my situation.

From my high school experience, managing the class room should involve watching for hidden cell-phones, dealing with secret gossip circles and (in a mixed high school...well maybe not) dealing with young hormonal love. Given that every teacher hates dealing with these issue (although I'm sure that some of the teachers at my school live for corporal punishment) adding the complication of a language barrier presents a even bigger challenge for the native speaker to handle these issues by himself.

Once a native speaker feels that his co-teacher is dependable enough to act as class room enforcer, then the next step for a co-teacher is to act as a mediator. This is a bonus step for some and is the most difficult to define, but it usually involves recognizing that the students should be doing the work as if the co-teacher wasn't there. Involving the co-teacher is the nuclear option that should only be use when all communication between the Native Speaker and students have failed.

Whispering answers to students, or just plain answering the question for students is one of the worst things that a co-teacher can do to undermine the native speakers authority for class, not to mention the entire rational for spending public money on flying and housing a foreigner with no actual teaching experience. That said, being a foreigner with no actual teaching experience and no understanding of the Korean language, I do recognize the need for something like a walking and talking Korean English dictionary in the classroom.

On the flip side, the dictionary part is something that most co-teachers loathe since they feel insecure about their own level of English in comparison to the students. But there's one English teacher here that's figured out how to bluff his way through this insecurity; he orders them to bring a dictionary to class and even if he knows the word he makes them look the word up in the dictionary. He also carries around a bamboo wand.

Of all my classes, the ones where I walk away feeling productive, I've had a co-teacher fulfill these steps:

• Show up to class.
• Act as enforcer.
• Act as mediator.

And it should be pointed out (again) that I am foreigner with no actual teaching experience working in within public education policies that I question, in a culture that I don't understand, in a country where I can't speaking the language. There's probably more qualified opinions floating on the Internet.

The Co-Teacher out of the Classroom
The co-teacher is also the main contact in charge of our living arrangement. That means that anything like paying bills, fixing leaking windows, etc, falls under their jurisdiction but from practice the co-teacher really does not want anything to do with you out of school. Like Tracy mentioned in the comments about my bank post, she obviously knew some information that I would have found useful if I had only talked to her before. That situation happens a lot and generally falls into the following pattern:

1. Foreigner faces a problem.
2. Foreigner stumbles around finding answer.
3. Foreigner applies answer to solve problem.
4. Foreigner leaves the country.
5. A new foreigner face the same problem.

I have to applaud my co-teacher going to distance and actually trying her best to help me with various living in Korea things, but there are gaps in her knowledge that I find frustrating. After a steady rotation of native speakers that have lived and worked in Mokpo, who have shared and accumulated their knowledge into sites like Waygook.org and Galbijim, I would expect to find an something like an official cultural ambassador within the same organization that payed for my plane ticket over here.

I don't want to appear to criticize the efforts Waygook and Galbijim. I love both sites but they're volunteer organizations and run the risk of "This server is costing me too much money" or "I just don't feel like doing this anymore." Like the curriculum problem I can't define the exact solution; I guess that I want the Jeollanam-do Provincial Education Office to have something like an dorm don, an experienced foreigner who knows about Korean culture and trying to adapt to it from a foreigner's perspective. Plus, I'd like to see that don preemptively solve problems. like listing the English speaking gynocologists in Mokpo; somebody who is on the provincial payroll and who keeps a F.A.Q. for the F.O.B.