The Old Razzle Dazzle

Today I was reminded of that scene in "Chicago" when Billy Flynn sings "give em the old razzle dazzle," referring to the courtroom as a big three-ring circus that can be manipulated and fooled with the right amount of smoke, mirrors, and trickery.  That is totally the high school education system in Korea.  It is one giant dog-and-pony show that gives the illusion of learning but really produces anything but.

I am writing this blog post from a cafe in Bucheon, two and a half hours by bus from Haseong.  I had to come here today to attend an open demo class at Bucheon High School, minus my co-teacher, who is supposed to accompany me, but I'm ok with this considering he gave me his tacit approval to just take the whole day off (of course, the vice-principal doesn't know that).  Open demo classes are a requirement of the GEPIK program (GEPIK = Gyeonggi English Program In Korea, the educational department which brings English teachers like me to Gyeonggi province).  Every GEPIK teacher must attend and perform at least one demo class each year they teach in Korea.  Mr. Lee and I are performing our demo class in October, but he wants me to have a full lesson plan put together by the end of August, so I attended one today to get an idea of what to expect.  And what a total joke it was!




First of all, it's obvious from the fact that Mr. Lee wants to have this thing planned and down pat 2 months in advance that these demo classes are a huge source of stress and anxiety for our Korean co-teachers.  It is the one time each year when people from other schools come and see how you do things, passing judgment not only on the native English speaker but also the Korean co-teacher, the student body, and the entire school itself.  Considering how old and run-down our school is and how poor even our best students are at English, Mr. Lee sees our teaching performance as the only variable over which we have any control.  And he'll be damned if it's not perfect.  I understand this, honestly I do.  It just sucks to attend a demo class like I just did and see such a planned production on display.  I guarantee the lesson I witnessed today is nothing like what happens on an ordinary day in class.  It all rings terribly false and only serves to emphasize the dire state of the learning process in high school English classes here.

I know that rote memorization is the order of the day in high school (everything is all about that freaking university entrance exam) but that didn't make me any less discouraged on Tuesday when I played a review game in my three best classes and witnessed just how little the students have learned in the 3 months since I got here.  Final exams were last week but due to the absurdities of Korean school scheduling, there are two more weeks of school after finals are over.  Why?  Who knows, honestly.  As you can imagine, the students could give a flying rat's ass about doing anything at this point (would you???) and so I have to resort to movies and games and even those barely hold their attention.  On Tuesday, my second grade classes played a game where I put 36 vocabulary words on the board, with various point values underneath.  Each student had to give me a grammatically correct sentence using a word of their choice and if it was correct, they earned their team the points under that word card.  Some cards covered Typhoons, which wipe out everyone's points and always gets them excited, especially if one team is really far ahead of the other.

Well, imagine my shock and disappointment when the students barely knew a single word on the board.  I didn't just pull these out of my ass either.  Every single word was a vocabulary word that they have had in a lesson or in their textbook in the past 2 months.  Even the smartest students, the ones I depend on to make my day a little brighter, had to ask what "PSA" was.  I kid you not, we had an entire day's lesson on PSAs.  I showed them videos, one a Best Buddies PSA and the other the classic "this is your brain on drugs" egg-frying ad.  I showed them Power Point slides with magazine ad examples of PSAs.  I explained what PSA stands for, we talked about them together, and they read textbook dialogue about... you guessed it, PSAs.  All in all, Mr. Lee and I must have spoken those three stupid, easy letters, PSA, about 25 times in one class period, only about 3-4 weeks ago.  No one remembered.  No one knew.  No one.


That freaking game, in addition to that farce of a demo class, really drove home to me that  these students are not learning or processing almost anything we say to them.  They focus solely on what needs to be regurgitated for the exams and that is it.  It is horribly depressing and disillusioning.  I mean, what are we here for, honestly, if not to impart knowledge?  Apparently, we're here to create the illusion of imparting knowledge, so that parents and the government can pay lip service to the idea that English is a crucial, integral part of every Korean student's education.  It really, really isn't.  At least not in the way everyone acts like it is.  My god, the teachers even frequently reinforce this complacency themselves!  By the time my third class was playing the vocab game on Tuesday, Mrs. Hwang (another co-teacher) wasn't even allowing the students the time or opportunity to think and create sentences on their own, or at least make an effort.  She was quite literally feeding them sentences to say out loud.  That defeats the whole purpose of the game, lady!!!  Don't you understand???  (This is also the reason I hate playing games in Mrs. Hwang's classes, which is the only thing she ever wants me to do.  She is really slow to pick up the rules of a new game, but by the second or third time we play it, she has definitely caught on and constantly provides the answers to students rather than allowing them to exercise independent thought.  Gaaarrrrrr!!!!)

I know I've commented at length on the education system before, but it's like the longer I'm here, the more aware I am that the entire high school system is just one big joke.  I can't speak to the efficacy of teachers in elementary school or at hagwons, but I have to imagine it's at least somewhat better since younger students have the luxury of actually learning something rather than stuffing their brains full of tidbits in order to do well on some life-altering exam.  And don't even get me started on the leveling of classes, which groups all the "smart" kids together and all the "stupid" kids together, so that you end up with a bunch of classes (like my 2-4, 2-5, 3-4, and 3-5 classes) that are out of control because they have been told for years that they aren't as good and have finally checked out of school altogether.  Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies.

Oy.  What a rant.  I am definitely looking forward to summer vacation.  I am also quite nervous about what school will be like now that Kristen and Wu Sik have finished their contracts, since they were two of my only friends at school.  Yes, as of yesterday, they no longer work at Haseong High School.  Talk about surprised, I only found out last week that they are in fact short-term contract employees and both finished on July 7!!  Wu Sik will return in September if the school can retain the funding for his position but Kristen is gone for good.  My only other two (not as close) friends are Abigail, the middle school teacher, and Chang Yuan, the Chinese teacher, and both of their contracts end on August 31.  So things are looking to be pretty lonely next semester.  Hopefully the new middle school teacher will be someone cool, or at least tolerable, and not a total LBH.  Oh please please please.

All I can say is... thank goodness for the weekends!