It wasn’t long ago that I talked about interacting with my students being a pleasant experience, but obviously, there are still things they do that rub me up the wrong way. Some of them are fine, but here are 5 things that annoy me about Korean school children.
01 Entering the Teacher’s Room
Around the beginning of this year, the Boss turned the first writing classroom into an office for the teachers. Previously, we each had our own room and each of our classes moved between them depending on the time. This meant that there was no place for the teachers to go that wasn’t populated by students, so when the Teacher’s Room was created, I was very pleased.
Now, all children are nosy – especially when they’re younger. This means that there is constantly a group of students waiting at the door, wanting to talk to the teachers or enjoy our plentiful air conditioning. It was getting to the point where students were ignoring the sign on the door and just wandering in as if it was any other room, so more recently, the Boss has started cracking down on it.
It may not see like much, but around dinner time when the academy is at it’s busiest, a semi quiet place to sit down and collect your thoughts is a blessing.
02 What’s Yours is Mine
This links into the point above because when students are able to walk into the Teacher’s Room and do as they please, they inevitably poke around your desk. This means that anything I have lying around, such as my phone and MP3 player are easy targets for their grubby mits. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve come in and one of the students has been trying to unlock my phone, or trying to find the snooker game on my iPod touch.
There are some students that I don’t necessarily mind having a look at my things, but there are some that don’t care if it gets dirty or broken and throw it back on the desk like it was a piece of paper. Thankfully, this is happening less and less, simply because I’m keeping things in my bag rather than leaving them on top of my books. It feels like a backward step to the times before the teachers had their own room.
03 Talking Over Other People
In the UK, if you want to speak to a teacher and they’re having a conversation with another person, you wait patiently. I imagine this is true of most Western countries, but it seems not to apply in Korea. Now I know that younger children, even in the UK can be impatient and try to butt in to a conversation, but I find high school students doing the same in the academy here.
I find it incredibly rude and have to force myself not to tell them to shut up and wait their turn. What confuses me still further is that the Korean teachers don’t seem to care.
04 We are not Friends
You might have seen me talking about certain students being over friendly in the past and it’s definitely one of the disadvantages to interacting so readily with your students. Other students see you having fun with the good ones and then think it acceptable to interact in their own way.
I’ve lost four shirts to grubby hand marks and being stretched because of the pulling. Most of them aren’t too bad, but there are some students who think it’s funny to hit me like they are trying to hurt me. Just this morning, one of the students swung his arm as I was walking past and caught me in the gut. The Boss sorted him out, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it happening again next week.
05 “You’re not a teacher.”
This attitude is the reason for all of the above. I know for a fact that the other teachers don’t have to deal with as much crap as I do and it’s not just because they’re females. Students seem to think that because I’m foreign that I’m just a guest here as opposed to an actual teacher. I’ve had numerous conversations with students on the subject and they don’t ever seem to accept it.
The Boss has done his best to eradicate this thinking in the students and for the most part, I get the respect I deserve, but there are always those times when I’m telling them to do one thing and they’re just ignoring me.
Sufficed to say, Alex is constantly thinking about how he could hide a body.
Don’t Let This Put You Off
This article was never intended to put people off teaching in Korea. I work in a particularly small academy and this is a large part of the reason why I have these problems. Furthermore, I know for a fact that this district isn’t so hot on studying and the parents aren’t as motivated as perhaps the stereotypical Asian parents would be for their children to perform. If you worked in Seoul for example, this would be less likely to happen. Don’t be put off.
What things do you find the hardest to deal with when teaching? What’s the worst situation you’ve been in? Let me know in the comments.
