America, the Superpower of the Present Age

I sound like a Tea Partier, don't I? Ha.

My co-teacher spent seven weeks in Austin, Texas this past winter break. She participated in a Fulbright-sponsored teacher training program that brought Korean English teachers -- most, but not all, associated with Fulbright schools -- to the US for cultural immersion and educational exchange. She stayed with a Texan homestay, visited cultural landmarks in Austin, and taught classes on Korean culture to students at a low-performing high school.

I've been very eager to talk to her about her experiences in the United States, as this was her first time there, and it was for such a long time, too! Seven weeks is longer than my orientation training for Fulbright.

So, I asked her over lunch what her most enduring impression of America was. Surprisingly, she said that although seven weeks was not enough time to draw any strong conclusions, she saw enough during her time there to understand why America is the strongest nation in the world. I raised an eyebrow. She explained, "the sheer number of garbage cans on the streets was so impressive. You know, having garbage cans everywhere means that the government can afford them. Even though it's a seemingly small thing, it kind of represents how much abundance there is in America."

I commented offhand about how I would have interpreted the profusion of garbage cans as a sign that Americans produce far too much garbage. "Well," she replied, "maybe it's both."

She also spoke in slight awe of the enormous bathrooms ("Necessary for all of those fat Americans?" I asked.), the impressive museums and art galleries ("Well, compared to D.C...."), and the fact that they would turn on the air conditioning when it was 75°F outside. The wastefulness of this behavior notwithstanding, all of it pointed to abundance, and my co-teacher went on and on. Austin is only the 11th-largest city in America, but it has airports, museums, and beautiful buildings to rival Seoul and Incheon. It's as if the United States has at least eleven Seouls -- the magnitude was overwhelming.

Obviously, Seoul is inimitable and there's no comparing it with Austin or any other American city for that matter, but the point is that she came away from her experience in the US thinking that Japan, France, and even England now seemed like superpowers of the past, while America is the superpower of today.

So that was interesting.

On a different note, my co-teacher also talked about the thing that surprised her most about American schools: she and all of the other Korean participants in the program agreed that the American students they encountered in every classroom situation were on the whole far better behaved than their own country's students. They were extremely polite and extremely PC: one class hushed an ESL student when he asked my co-teacher how long she'd been studying English, but she smiled and simply asked him to guess. The Korean teachers came away with glowing reviews of American high schoolers. I had a hard time believing this, but I guess there's something in the lunches in Texas...

Also, she was extremely shocked to find the extent to which America's "melting pot" was actually more like a 3.79 million square-mile pizza with 314 million toppings on it, all squished together but never mixing. Case in point: Spanish-speaking students who had been living in the States for two years who could still only manage, "Me no speak English." She described it as students learning EFL (English as a Foreign Language) instead of ESL (English as a Second Language), since they were living in a completely Hispanic community and weren't even encountering English in their daily lives, not even at school.

We chatted about immigration and how it forms a dynamic society, the deal with the over-achieving Asian immigrant stereotype, and some of her other experiences with places she visited and the Americans she met. I've been thoroughly enjoying all of these conversations, as my casual cynicism is being given a run for its money by my co-teacher's rave review. And the best part is that I find I'm learning a lot about my country.

My country? Every time my co-teacher shared her stories about the United States with me, she would call it "your country". To be honest, that sounded strange to my ears. It's because she went to Texas and experienced Southern/Southwestern culture. I'm from California, and I've never been to Texas. Although I introduce myself as American or Taiwanese-American, I consider myself culturally Californian, not simply American (Since "American culture" can mean so many things, it tends not to mean anything at all.), and I certainly can't identify with any part of Texan culture. All I know about it are stereotypes. So the foreign experiences my co-teacher had had sounded somewhat foreign to me, too. This has gotten me thinking about how the United States of America really are united states, discrete and different but all trying their darnedest to get along.

Ah, USA... you are a bottomless well of culture and cultural issues that make every conversation about you utterly fascinating. Keep it up, home country. Keep on being the beautiful mess that currently controls the rest of the planet. I'll be back soon.

Learning in Fear

"Life is going to present to you a series of transformations. And the point of education should be to transform you. To teach you how to be transformed so you can ride the waves as they come. But today, the point of education is not education. It’s accreditation. The more accreditation you have, the more money you make. That’s the instrumental logic of neoliberalism. And this instrumental logic comes wrapped in an envelope of fear. And my Ivy League, my MIT students are the same. All I feel coming off of my students is fear. That if you slip up in school, if you get one bad grade, if you make one fucking mistake, the great train of wealth will leave you behind. And that’s the logic of accreditation. If you’re at Yale, you’re in the smartest 1% in the world. […] And the brightest students in the world are learning in fear. I feel it rolling off of you in waves. But you can’t learn when you’re afraid. You cannot be transformed when you are afraid." - Author Junot Díaz, speaking at Yale

These are some incredible words! I've never read any of this man's books, but there are a few in my school's library, and I'll get to them once I've finished my applications. (One month to go!)

I want my students to know this. Their education is not (should not be) for the end goal of a stable and high-paying job. They should not be turned into numbers for national high school rankings, which are based on how many graduates go to Seoul National University. They should be learning in order to change and be changed.

The Guest Teacher

Hae-in and me at Yongji Lake.

I had a special treat today, and I just had to share it with my students: my friend Hae-in came to visit! Hae-in and I met at Swarthmore our freshman year; we were in the same Chinese class. She and the other Korean international students were the first South Korean nationals that I'd ever met, and they also taught me how to read the Korean alphabet, hangul. I guess you could say Hae-in was one of the first people who helped spark my interest in Korea so many years ago, so I am here now partly thanks to her influence.

Hae-in is back in Busan for summer vacation after finishing her first year of law school in the U.S. When I heard that she'd be in my neck of the woods while the Korean school year was still in session, I asked if she'd like to come visit my school and chat with my students. Although my high schoolers apply exclusively to Korean schools and don't really have plans to study abroad -- unless it's for their Ph.D. many years down the road -- I was sure that they'd find Hae-in and her story really interesting.

She came to talk to two of my third-year classes. They were quite surprised and excited about having a guest, and they were impressed that a Korean national (who wasn't an English teacher) could speak English so well. This realization also seemed to make them very shy, even when giving basic self-introductions, but they all did well. A few students in each class were actually incredibly enthused and asked question after question during our informal Q&A: What kinds of culture shock did you experience when you went to the U.S.? What do Americans know about Korea besides PSY and "Gangnam Style"? How much do American university students study? Do they party a lot? Are American universities ranked in the same way Korean universities are ranked? What do you think of the different educational systems? Can you tell us about Andrew's past?

Although Hae-in's experience was in economics and law, and my students study nothing but math and science, they connected well over the fact that their high school education was similarly rigorous and competitive. But I'm glad that Hae-in also strove to give my students the message that rather than study all the time simply for the sake of getting into the best college, they should find what their passion is -- what makes them excited to get up in the morning? -- and focus on that. We've all been blessed with an excellent education; my students have such overwhelming privilege already and they're essentially guaranteed academic success. With this in mind, why worry so much about your next test? Take the time instead to build relationships that will last. Do some extracurricular activities that you enjoy; they'll give you the added benefit of a more well-rounded application. And relax.

These are all things that I want to tell my students, but since they heard it from the mouth of a fellow Korean, I'm hoping that it'll stick better, even though it was in English. After each class, I'm sure my students left feeling encouraged.

Also, they were so cute when they talked to her, calling her "Hae-in Teacher" and generally giving off airs of awe or confusion or both. My co-teachers were excited to have her around, as well.

After school, Hae-in and I hung out at Yongji Lake, where the roses are in full bloom and the ducks and fish are lazing around as if it's already summer. We caught up on old times and then had 닭갈비 for dinner. It was such a wonderful day. 고마워요, 해인 티처!

Kvetch First, Ask Questions Later (Then Answer Said Questions, Then Do Something)

As I work for the Korean-American Educational Commission and am about to... air some grievances, in a sense, I'd like to remind my dear readers that: "This blog reflects my own experiences and viewpoints and should not be mistaken for an official Fulbright blog."

Toward the end of last semester, I began to feel like I had become the sounding board for my English co-teachers to voice all their woes about the Korean educational system and this country in general. At our twice-weekly teatime, which was officially a teachers' conversation class, we might have started with an interesting article to discuss, but the conversation always inevitably derailed into a discussion of politics, education, and societal issues. Well, actually, there was usually less discussion and more... allow-us-to-explain-why-everything-is-All-Wrong.

Some of those sore areas included the extremely rigid gender roles in Korean society and how women were expected to take care of childcare and all household duties, as well as remain in the kitchen all day during traditional holidays like Chuseok; the drawbacks of high-stakes testing, which cause high amounts of stress for all students, especially those who don't do well in an academic setting but must suffer through it anyway; the obliviousness of the government as far as how to properly manage its schools, as they reward well-performing schools financially when the money should actually go toward aid for the failing ones; not to mention the corruption of the government, in that its associations with administrative offices and educational boards rests securely on a network of money. My co-teachers especially had a bone to pick with the hyper-conservative superintendent of our province's educational department, who was apparently a substandard English teacher himself but now gets to dictate what is "best" for hundreds of schools. Whew.

I should probably give a concrete example lest you think I'm just parroting complaints sans evidence. My co-teachers confided in me their suspicions that some kind of shady deals were going on at a Certain Secret High School (name withheld) when its principal asked its English department to purchase a specific publisher's textbooks for the English classes. Now, both the principal and the teachers knew that the English teachers create their own teaching material. They don't directly use any textbooks, so their purchase is literally a formality and a way to use the school's budget. Hence, it didn't matter what publisher was chosen; maybe the one that created the best quality book or one with a good reputation.

That's why it raised some red flags when this principal strongly suggested -- or basically commanded -- his choice of English textbook. Who exactly would benefit from their sale, we wondered as we sipped our tea.

Another bit of dirty laundry aired during teatime was the pitiable state of teachers' unions in the country. The teachers' union, such a strong and belligerent presence in the United States, was in fact not legal in Korea until no more than two decades ago. During the dictatorship-like presidency of Park Chung-hee, teachers were commonly fired for belonging to unions and had no public support. My co-teacher believes that the previous generation of teachers made great sacrifices in order for unions to exist today, yet bemoans how union chapter meetings these days don't do much more than get together once a month for a 회식 (hweshik) and a long, Misery Poker-esque kvetch sesh. It's easy to list the myriad of problems with their professional field, but the impetus to actually do something about it has shriveled up sometime in the past twenty years.

Anyway.

I'm writing all of this now mostly because I've been trying to clear out the cluttered mess of drafts on this blog (there are some snippets of posts I started months ago but have never finished...). But in addition to that, yesterday, during this semester's iteration of the English teachers' conversation class, we brought up the subject of education again. And this time, everything was surprisingly very pleasant and personally satisfying. I'd say that in the past few weeks, there has been considerably less lamentation over our tea. (That in itself is neutral to me; contrary to what you might think from what I've already written, I enjoyed being the confidant and continue to hold a great interest in what seem to be the inner workings of the system in which I'm just another cog.)

So yesterday, in lieu of discussing an article, the English teachers watched Sir Ken Robinson's lecture on changing educational paradigms, which was brilliantly animated by RSA and which I will now share with you all:

Now wasn't that enlightening and quite inspiring? (Ten million views in two-and-a-half years... while PSY can rack up twenty-five times that amount in two-and-a-half weeks with a video that highlights the hilariousness of male chauvinism. Ugh.)

After watching the video, my co-teachers and I had a lengthy and spirited discussion about education in both Korea and the United States. I think that the way we shared what we knew about our own systems instead of just focusing on All of the Problems in Korea was a nice change. I think Robinson's ideas apply to both countries, anyway. (Actually, they probably apply everywhere except in the utopian Scandinavian countries.) We had a nice, long think about what we thought contributed to the problem and, more importantly, what we could do as teachers with not much power (I don't even have TEFL certification or belong to a union or anything) to motivate and encourage our students within the confines of this brutal education factory.

I decided that I am going to hammer into my students the idea that a test score, good or bad, does not determine their value as a human, and that there are others ways to be smart and/or successful outside of the path they're currently stuck to. I will also continue to try to make my classroom a bit different from the norm: less emphasis on knowing answers, and more on how to knowing how to get answers, or correct wrong answers, or see multiple answers. Maybe I alone can't change the educational paradigms, but at least I know I'm going to do a lot more than just kvetch.

Thoughts?

Fulbright Spring Conference 2013

This entire past week, I have barely had the time to process all the information thrown at us during Spring Conference. It was a lot to digest, and there was such a huge variety of lectures, workshops, and presentations, that it was hard to keep track of it all. Fortunately, I took notes! They started off as doodles, but as soon as I started jotting down points and ideas that interested me, I must confess I reverted straight back into student mode and started mad scribbling. Before I knew it, I had a page of fascinating information, provocative questions, and great new ideas for my classroom. I'll share just some tidbits:

Why is Korea "Real Life"?

Program Director Anthony Cho encouraged all of us teachers, especially the first-year grantees, to rid ourselves of the notion that our grant year was just a "break" between college and so-called real life (i.e. grad school or a job back in the US). Even if our stint in Korea is just a gap year, we shouldn't treat it as if it doesn't matter in the long run. Why not? Because our impact on our students is real and will have real consequences. Because we are discovering and will discover new and important things about ourselves while we're here that we will surely bring home with us, even if we don't pursue careers in education. Because, unfortunately, we're only young for so long, and to discount twelve months of our lives as merely "some time I spent dicking around in Korea" would be simply absurd. It may not seem like it, but what we as teachers are spending one year doing is real -- just as real as the lives of our friends who are already in med school or climbing up the corporate ladder -- and very, very important.

What are some strengths of the Fulbright ETA Program?

During a segment of the conference that was meant both to pat us teachers on the back and to prod us into reevaluating our successes as teachers and cultural ambassadors, the program director and executive assistant revealed that they had sent an assessment survey to our schools. The results of this survey were shared, albeit only in anonymous statistics, to our collective amusement and a bit of surprise. Fortunately, we ETAs earned fairly good grades all around: 85% of us received A's in class preparedness, and 86% received A's in "observing Korean courtesies". It seemed like the biggest strengths were that Fulbright teachers actively engaged their students, were well-prepared, taught quality lessons that catered to student needs, and were very polite and well-mannered. On the other hand, weaknesses included insufficient classroom management, insufficient cooperation with our co-teachers, and insufficient hours spent at school (which, factoring in our contract, is not actually our fault at all; but if a school doesn't like that Fulbrighters get three full months of vacation a year, they can take it to Mrs. Shim).

What are some new things I'd like to incorporate into my classroom?

Great teachers steal. I caught and held on to dozens of great ideas tossed around during conference, including, but not limited, to: encouraging art in my students, but not limiting this to drawing on scrap paper (make a video! write poetry!); playing games that emphasize speaking with emotion, not just speaking correctly; having students encourage one another in the classroom, as in applauding correct answers and learning encouraging phrases ("Good idea!", "Great job!"); and allowing more time for any activity, since it always feels longer for the teacher than it does for the students. I was also very charmed by the idea of considering one's fellow classmates as "learning allies", instead of as competitors, obstacles, or nameless, faceless Others. During the small group session for LGBTQ folk and allies, one common grievance aired was the inability to bring up queer issues in class in a constructive and educational manner. On the bright side, we shared some ideas on how to incorporate respect for sexual diversity in lessons such as family, dating culture, or current events.

How can US education and Korean English education learn from each other and improve?

These notes were taken from a long and thorough workshop session on education. Now, I have never taken a course in Education, and the only experience I can claim is a month of job training and six months of teaching, but I'd like to offer what I can.

Korea has the lowest illiteracy rate in the world, and its overall educational quality, according to the Pearson index, is ranked second in the world, after Finland. 98% of Korean students graduate high school, supported (or pushed) by their families and societal pressure. A huge proportion of the adult population holds a bachelor's degree -- 98% of those in the 25-34 age bracket, according to a 2010 OECD report -- although many people are underemployed in an economy that can't support the ever-rising number of college graduates. Generally speaking, the stats are good, right? But Koreans students are among the world's unhappiest, and they have an alarmingly high suicide rate. Suicide is the leading cause of death of Koreans aged 10-19 (in fact, it's the leading cause of death of all Koreans up to age 40), and the infamously stressful academic environment does not help this.

With regard to this, I believe that the Korean education system needs to step up its game in mental health support and treatment at schools. If mental illness becomes less stigmatized, students with suicide potential will be able to freely get help. Also, there are lots of ways to keep students succeeding without being locked into a rigorous, constant-testing method of education. Especially for EFL education, the absolute dependency on test scores instead of any sort of holistic evaluation is misguided. To get into college or obtain any government job, you need to pass some sort of English aptitude test -- even if you won't use English at all in the post. Those who test well in English will often find more success than those who don't (even if their speaking skill is really quite good). I feel like the stakes are too high for arbitrary numbers to have so much sway over one's future!

While I love teaching English and I love my job, I feel like I could be more effective as a teacher if I taught leveled classes. That is to say, instead of teaching homeroom classes in which a handful of students are conversationally fluent, another handful don't understand me when I say, "How was your weekend?", and the rest are scattered somewhere in between, I would prefer a smaller class for the most advanced students, another class specifically for those who are behind, etc. Foreign language education in the US is leveled in this way with no exceptions; it helps every student learn at their own pace instead of being swept along beyond their ability to understand or feeling trapped and bored in a class that's too easy.

Another change I might implement to the classroom is to simply make classes smaller and meet them more often. Most of us Fulbright teachers only see one class once a week; sometimes only once every other week. This doesn't add up to enough opportunities to actually use English! I use every minute I can outside of class to chat with my students in English so that they can practice, but it would be awesome if I could just have more class time with them.

On the other hand, we have the mess that is the American education system, which I think could also take a few pointers from its Korean counterpart. One thing's for sure: American students and parents need to respect teachers and schools much more. While helicopter parents -- those who not only hover over their children but also descend upon schools to (verbally) attack teachers for failing them -- are on the rise in Korea, it's nothing compared to the levels of crazy you can find in the States. And students in Korea treat even their classrooms and hallways with respect, cleaning them weekly. They contribute so much to their own educational environment. I can't imagine American students keeping their campus clean unless it provided them with service learning hours.

Also, I believe that the US should implement higher standards for its teachers, as well as a better environment for them. Teachers are very highly regarded in Korea, and this is due in part to the difficult and intense process of becoming one. Education programs in the US don't always give fledgling teachers enough classroom experience before throwing them out of the nest, so to speak. Then, when they arrive at their schools, they find paltry institutional support, ridiculous demands from the administration, and not enough resources to invest properly in their students. (This op-ed by Randy Turner in the Huffpost illustrates expresses appropriate frustration at the current situation.) This is all to say nothing of the thousands of simply crappy teachers out there. I think teaching should be elevated in the US. Teachers ought to have the same respect and reputation of all those doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs, and in turn the quality of the teachers our education programs churn out must also improve. It'll take a while to get there from our current situation, but it can happen.

Doodle-notes from Spring Conference! (Click to enlarge)

Whew. That was a lot to write. If you're interested in more, I've posted a scan of my doodle-notes from the ETA portion of the conference. I have another whole page for the Fulbright researchers' portion of the conference, which I will post tomorrow. And, of course, I'd love to continue discussing any of these ideas. Feel free to leave a comment!