School Yard Days

Life in Korea is fabulous, frightening, smelly, bizarre, and tasteful.

Every moment longer that i'm here i'm beginning to realize that there is so much more to life than what first meets the eye. A simple example is parking, I needed to go to the hospital to get my test results so I can get my alien workers card, to my American eye there was no parking spaces available, to Eunyeong's (my Korean co-teacher and everyday Korean guide) there were plenty. She parked her car face to face with another car, with the back-end sticking a door lengths out diagonally into the road. She put her blinkers on and we exited the vehicle...Who'dathunk that was acceptable?! Was my first question, my second was, Why doesn't everyone park like that? Why do we confine ourselves to a life of ordered simplicity, a life where everyone and everything has a set ordered place, a dusty circle on a long-forgotten bookshelf of rules?

I believe that the thing I find most fascinating about Korea is punishments for disobedient students. My first day in Korea, first day in my new school, I walked up the stairs with my co-teacher, and there, on my left, were about 10 boys, hands and feet planted firmly on the wood floor, back ends raised in the air. I asked Eunyeong what they were doing and her simple reply: "They are being punished." I wrote it off as a misunderstanding, but 10 minutes later when we returned through the hallway there were the same boys, except this time there was a male teacher with a wooden stick spanking them! Not hard enough to leave welts, but physical pain, and emotional duress nonetheless. Today I saw one of my fellow teachers dragging a disobedient male student through the halls by his ear! I thought that punishment only existed in books from the early 1900's!! When I questioned some of my fellow foreign english teachers about their methods of punishment they all enlisted differing responses, but a recurring theme was lines...pages and pages of lines in English. Wow. Just wow.

On a funnier note, an English teacher from England informed me that he tries to wear his students out both emotionally and physically so he has them stand in front of the class and do the "dig and dance" which is essentially mimicking someone shovelling but dancing...hahaha! That one did make me giggle.

It's moments like these that I realize just how far away from home I am, if my cousin Emily, who is a teacher in Connecticut, were to strike one of her students with a wooden rod, have them perform downward facing dog in the hallways, or drag them about the school by their ear she would not only be fired immediately, but probably face countless lawsuits!

It gets me wondering, "Which method is best?" The pacifist, no-touch policy of the Americans, or the rougher, physical respect earned through tough-love of the Koreans? I wonder if perhaps Americans have become so overly concerned with personal rights that they have forgotten that in order to have personal rights to the fullest you have to achieve and maintain the initial respect and action that earned you that respect? I don't personally think i'll be smacking a child about, that just seems too contrary to my personal beliefs, but I do enjoy the thought of manipulating the students through their peers. Aqcuisence through personal humiliation at their own hand. I would like to think that I can compile a method of allowing the students to keep one another in check without forcing me to step in and take action...ah the joys of wishful thinking!

In the meantime I suppose i'll keep trying to eat kimchi everyday in the hope that someday it will taste good...
Anyang!