Why I Love My Job, Part 2

Last week, my students and I tried not to panic as we spent two very long evenings bringing their science project presentation up to scratch in order to prepare for an impending international competition. They worked really hard, but we just didn't have enough time. When they left for Houston, I wished them luck, honestly thinking that they would be lucky to scrape an Honorable Mention.

This morning, I entered my office and my co-teacher said to me, "Have you heard? They got bronze!"

YJ and DH had returned from the I-SWEEEP Olympiad triumphant, with a bronze medal! It felt like the room suddenly became ten times brighter. All our efforts really paid off, and do you know what the best part was?

The best part wasn't when my other co-teacher, the one who really grilled them during their Q&A session prep, walked into the office beaming with the good news that I already knew.

The best part wasn't when their chemistry teacher and project adviser caught my eye from another table during lunch and flashed me a thumbs-up with a huge grin.

The best part wasn't when I discovered that my students had bought the English department a gift of chocolate from the US in thanks. (I love chocolate, but still.)

The best part was when YJ and DH came by my office in the afternoon to chat with me personally. They were as awkward and shy as ever, but I gave them the biggest high-fives I could muster and told them again and again how happy and proud of them I was. They told me that the competition was a lot more fun than they'd expected, that the Turkish contestants were really enamored by the Korean contestants for some reason, and that the grand prize winner, a Korean-American from Texas, could speak a little bit of Korean. They also got to visit NASA on their day off! All in all, this was a fantastic experience for these two students, especially since they're not students I'd have expected to succeed in an English-language competition. This bronze medal* is really going to give them a boost in their competitiveness for university admissions this fall.

축하해!

- - -

*The first thing I did when I heard "bronze medal" was check what that actually means. The olympiad had 385 projects, of which 234 were awarded medals (40 gold, 81 silver, 113 bronze) and 86 were awarded Honorable Mention. This means that 83% of participating teams won at least something. There were 7 teams from South Korea.

P.S. Here are some news articles featuring my students (here, here, here, and here) that I will get around to reading/translating maybe over the weekend.

A Small Story That Illustrates Why I Love My Job

Flexibility is a must when you teach in South Korea. Schedules change as the wind blows, and random responsibilities are dropped into your lap as often as random snacks and gifts from the main gyomushil are. Today I was gifted a package of rice cakes in celebration of a co-worker's new baby boy (yay!) and an entire unexpected evening of English presentation coaching (boo!).

On the bright side, the nearly three hours I spent with just two students turned out to be some of my most productive hours so far this semester. In fact, I didn't regret a single minute.

Here's what happened. After my last class ended at 4:30 today, I was chilling at my desk, doing mindless computer things until 5pm rolled around so I could hit the gym. But at about a quarter 'til, my two co-workers stood up and said, "It's time to go." They told me that two students were going to participate in an international science competition and needed to practice the ten-minute presentation they were going to give in English. It was assumed that I would drop into rehearsal to give feedback. I nodded and joined them. See you later, treadmill; hello, science seminar room.

To make a long story short, my students' presentation was a mess. Poor YJ and DH had hardly caught up on work after last week's midterms; it was obvious that they hadn't prepared very well. Their script had quite a few grammatical errors -- for not having ever given it to me to proofread, it was passable, but still -- and DH hadn't memorized his part completely. Even worse, their presentation style had nothing going for it: butchered pronunciation, no eye contact, no gestures, no intonation whatsoever. It was like two robots reciting a Google translated research paper. And they droned like this for a minute over the time limit about a new kind of anode material for lithium ion batteries. Not the most scintillating subject, to boot.

I felt bad for my students because it was obvious even to their research adviser, who hardly understands English, that they had a lot of fixing to do. My co-teachers excoriated them as kindly as they could: you should have given us your script to proofread weeks ago, you should have practiced making eye contact, you should have added some sort of interesting introduction, but it's pretty late for that. Why? It was then that I learned that the competition is this weekend, and my students are leaving the day after tomorrow for Houston, Texas!

As excited as I was that they were going to visit the US, I realized to my sudden dismay that they had less than 48 hours to get their beached whale of a presentation back into the ocean. We all realized time was short, and my co-teachers turned to me to ask the inevitable: "Could you stay a bit later tonight?"

Now, I routinely stay at school for dinner and work late, sometimes until 8pm or later. This is for a variety of reasons: I don't like to take work home, so if I'm correcting a big batch of student journals, I don't mind staying at my desk to finish them even after everyone else has left the office. Also, during the winter, my office was much warmer than my apartment... But tonight, I was planning to get home early, maybe catch up on some TV, take care of miscellaneous chores... Nope. I calculated how much my students needed my help, weighed it against how much I needed to watch the next episode of Glee, and chose to stay.

I spent the first hour giving feedback on their first presentation and editing their script. After dinner, I met with YJ and DH in my classroom and coached them for another hour on pronunciation and intonation. It was especially funny trying to get YJ, who is naturally extremely quiet, to exaggerate the stress and enunciation in phrases like, "in other words" (in UHHH-ther worrRRDS!) or "as a result" (AS a reSUL-lll-LT!).

I also made them use their hands to indicate relevant charts and graphs on their poster, remembering how their adviser had berated them: "What's the point of having a poster if you never give your audience a reason to look at it?" They had to move their heads with their eyes while making eye contact, keep their bodies pointed toward the audience, and, most of all, smile! Smile at the audience! Smile at their partner! Smiling makes you calmer and more confident, but I don't think they realized how true that really is until I forced them to smile until they laughed.

After an hour and a half, my co-teacher came back to evaluate their progress. They were visibly nervous, and I was nervous for them. (And also for my own sake, I'll admit: what if my coaching hadn't been helpful?) But as my students presented for the third or fourth time that day, a wondrous change took place. YJ smiled. DH looked calm and composed. Both of them were miles more interesting this time around. And best of all, my co-teacher clapped enthusiastically for them as soon as they'd finished, exclaiming with genuine surprise that their presentation had improved dramatically. She praised YJ and DH; I think the solid ninety minutes they spent focused 100% on their goal paid off tremendously. I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Now, YJ and DH still have quite a bit of work to do, particularly preparing for the Q&A and maybe tightening up the speech so that it falls under the allotted time frame, just to be safe. But I'm relieved. I'm happy that even though my evening was unexpectedly snatched away from me, I was productive and helped two students make visible progress in their language skills. I love coaching presentations; it's fun to work with small, focused groups and gratifying to be the cheerleader tossing confetti when all the other teachers hurl criticism.

I'm wishing YJ and DH the best of luck when they go to Houston. It'll be the first time in the States for both of them. During tonight's coaching session, I stopped for a bit to ask DH if he was excited about his trip. "Not really," he said, "because this -- because English is so difficult!" Sympathy for the kid whose nervousness about language is clouding the awesomeness that is international travel, please! I told him that no matter how well or how badly he does in the competition, he should relax and try his best to enjoy being in the US, since even just going there is an opportunity most people his age don't get.

Cheating

Okay, not gonna lie, it's been a tough week. The good news is that I'm not sick anymore, and my body is getting used to the cold that's settled in for this early winter. On the other hand, taekgyeon has been kind of a drag, because an ahjussi who is in my class turns into this vicious beast whenever we spar, and I'm close to losing my temper at him. I've been too busy to get groceries or work on my grad school apps since Sunday, because school. My schedule was changed (for hopefully the last time!) on Monday, and my class load increased so that I would see the third-years four times a week instead of zero. I was excited about this, until I (foolishly? brilliantly?) decided to create a documentary film project out of thin air to keep them occupied for the last four weeks of school. That took some time.

The real 고민 (trouble), though, is coming from my first-years. Next week, they have their speech tests, so this week and last, they've had to turn in drafts of their work. It's now the time of the semester when I normally post funny tidbits and excerpts from my students' writing, because it's comedy gold. This week I'm posting nothing funny, only something that made me angry and upset.

Two students' second drafts. The pink sentences are the same in both papers. There is some delicious irony here, given the subject of these students' research project.

Cheating. 컨닝. 기만. These two students are in the same research group, so their speech topics are the same. Yet what makes them think they can submit drafts that are over 50% identical? Last night, I went through the first student's draft in its entirety and made notes. Later, when I read the second student's draft, I was shocked to find myself reading the exact same sentences. I highlighted every one that was the same.

Today, I handed back edited second drafts and gave my students time to work on their final drafts. But I took these two students aside, showed them their papers just as you see them, and said, "Can you explain this?" The first student immediately went into a stammering ramble of an explanation. First, it was that they were in the same project group. Second, they had the same information. "We have the same chart," she kept saying, but I didn't understand what she meant. The second student didn't say a word. I told them that it was not and never okay to copy homework, that I wanted them to rewrite their drafts, that I would take away ten points (wildly lenient, but that's my department's policy), and that their main English teacher already knew what they had done. The first student began to try to explain that it was her fault, that she had asked him for help translating hers. The second student was still completely silent; it was actually unnerving.

(Another student in the class was eavesdropping, but when I saw him, I said, "DH. You did not even give me an outline. You did not give me a Draft 1. You did not give me a Draft 2. You must turn around and work. NOW.")

This wasn't the first time I caught students cheating, and it also wasn't even the last time today. Last week, one of my highest-level students wrote the first draft for a lower-level student. I knew it couldn't have been his, since it was written in impeccable English with a neat blue pen. He always uses a pencil; he confessed right away, but she tried to excuse her way out of it.

"Did you write this?"
"No!"
"Really?"
"... I helped him write it, but I didn't write it!"
"This isn't even his handwriting."
"..."

When I realized that a student had just lied to me -- directly to my face, and with complete conviction -- I was floored. Both of those students also got ten points taken away and a severe scolding from my co-teacher. She made them write apology letters.

The policy is that I take away ten points (out of one hundred) from a student if I catch them cheating. So far, I have taken away over 100 points from the first-year students collectively. I have 82 first-year students. That means over 10% of my students have cheated on their homework! For the only assignment I give them that counts toward their grade! What the heck is the problem?

Seven students copied each other's work. Three swiped entire paragraphs from articles online (one of them used an image-to-text program to copy text from a PDF, but the result was dozens of computer-generated typos that she didn't even bother to fix). After I called these three students into my office today, lectured them, and sent them away, I slumped down in my chair and nearly felt like crying. I honestly never expected to have a cheating problem this insidious. Has anyone ever told these students that plagiarism is a serious offense? Especially for students who are going to go to prestigious research universities -- many of them will become scientists. If they think they can get away with copying other people's work now, they need to be taught otherwise, and taught in a way they won't forget.

Indeed, I'll admit I was sorely tempted to advocate automatic zeroes to my co-teacher. But this speech test is worth 10% of their grade, and it's the only grade I give each semester. 10% zilched would be a serious blow. But 10% of 10%? It's a slap on the wrist and a lukewarm, I'm-trying-to-sound-tough-but-really-I'm-just-severely-disappointed lecture that they'll forget when the door closes behind them.

Although I still smile and fist-bump my students when I pass them in the halls, I feel like they've broken my trust. The very fact that I broke my rule against taking work home yesterday and stayed up past midnight to check all eighty drafts for evidence of cheating says something. I still have two classes' worth of drafts to actually edit, but I don't even want to look at them right now. A lot of it is shoddy work; even the students who didn't cheat seem not to have worked much on improving their initial rough drafts. "Advanced students", right...

I'm going to sleep, and I'll get to the drafts tomorrow before my afternoon classes. Lest I go to bed angry, though, I think it's important that I try to look at the other side of the story. My students have been extremely busy the past few weeks in preparation for the annual science fair. In fact, they had to present their research projects (in Korean) in front of their peers, teachers, and some judges, so it's reasonable that their little English test got pushed to the side. I stopped by the science fair briefly yesterday, and it was just as impressive as last year. Word is that the first-years' projects are less "successful" overall (whatever that means) than last year's, but who cares? I was content just to see their posters and awesome displays.

JH explains his project on testing a plant's resistance to various pollutants.

YM explains the algorithm he worked out that can solve any 2x2 or 3x3 Korean "Hexagonal Tortoise Puzzle".

And besides simply making up excuses for my students, I should also remember that everyone makes mistakes. Maybe a lot of students happened to make their mistakes at the same unfortunate time this semester, but that doesn't actually make it worse (or better). So, just as I would quickly forgive one student for a misstep, I can forgive ten, twenty, maybe even more. How many times in my life have I been forgiven for doing terrible things and trying to get away with them? More than I care to remember.

Here's to my first-years, wishing them the best of luck on their speech tests next week! 화이팅!

The Science Fair

Today, I was reminded why my students are the cream of the crop when it comes to smart kids bound for greatness. It sounds like an exaggeration, but it's not just the personal bias speaking when I say they totally impressed me. I might even say that I see them in a different light now.

CSHS Science Fair 2012. In the foreground, a bunch of students play with some instant-foaming organic insulator they created.

The Changwon Science High School annual science fair took place today. The first-year students have been working on "Research and Education" projects all year, and this is the time for them to present their work thus far. But this isn't your average high school's science fair. My students have been doing some advanced projects in chemistry, engineering, physics, biology, and mathematics. One group, for example, developed a computer program for an alarm system that would tell you if there was a problem with your home's circuit box, and also where in the house the problem lay. Another group made a molecular film that mimicked the waterproofing ability of the lotus leaf. These projects weren't just lab experiments or textbook problems, they were actual research.

The biodegradable fish-based plastic project.

It was way more advanced than anything I'd ever done in high school, at least, and I took AP Biology. Most of the projects I didn't even understand, and it didn't help that the posters were all in Korean. But I had a few of my students try their best to explain what was going on to me in English.

As it so happens, their speaking test for my English class is a three-minute speech that introduces their R&E projects. Seeing as these tests begin next week, many of them have had a little bit of practice already. It helped that I've been reading first, second, and third drafts of their speeches for the past month, so I could recognize the group that made a biodegradable plastic out of fish scales and bones and the group that used 3D imaging programs to predict which geometric theorems of right triangles could be extended to tetrahedrons.

But the real Big Deal at the science fair was the judging portion. Unsurprisingly, the first-years are not just doing these projects for the educational experience, but it's also a competition. There were judges from the regional Office of Education (I assume) who listened to every group give their poster session spiel. (This is the part that my students have been freaking out about for the past few days.) The best groups will get prizes and also advance to a regional science fair. Then, the best of those will advance to the national fair, for their shot at eternal fame and glory. But the competition is fierce every step of the way. (How do I know this? Oh, right, I've seen it before.)

The sonoluminescence group captured light emitted from bubbles excited by sound waves. Okay, I don't know how sonolumniscence works. My students are smarter than I am. THEY BUILT THIS.

Besides R&E, lots of artistic odds and ends on display.
(stuff from their other classes, like environmental-sci)

So what's the ultimate motive for all of this is? You guessed it: university. My first-years have taken their first steps in a year-long frenzy to garner as many academic accolades as they possibly can in preparation for their early applications to university next fall. If they place in a regional or national science fair, that's a huge boon to their prospects. Last year's class (the school's first graduating class) had a handful of students advance to the national level, I believe, but I'm vague on the details.

But you know what? Wandering around the gym and marveling at all of these projects, you wouldn't be able to tell that the atmosphere was buzzing because of stress and anxiety. Unless you asked a student who hadn't met the judges yet. Otherwise, there was a buzz of excitement in the air.

Besides the students, teachers, and judges, lots of parents were there to see what their children had produced. This includes my host father, who came to take a look at my host sister's project on the effect of UV radiation on photosynthesis.

And then, when the second-year students -- all of whom had to go through this experience together last year -- descended upon the gym to check out this year's crop, there was this near-carnivalesque atmosphere that... well, that wasn't a carnival, obviously, but do you get what I'm saying? It was just so exciting. The students were naturally curious about their work, probably did a little bit of bonding over their shared experiences. Of course, the second-years also came for the free coffee and snacks, but most of it was gone before they'd arrived. Oh well!

Host sister and her group, with their irradiated lettuce plants.

I took tons of photos and chatted with all of my students, all of whom were very proud to show me their work and explain it to me -- to varying degrees of success. Later on, I hung out in the gym with the students who had finished their presentations and we chatted. I'm getting to know the first-years a lot better now (at the expense of the second-years, which is sad, but I don't teach most of them anymore...), and I think they appreciated that the only things I really said to them all day were, "Your project is awesome!", "You're so smart!", and "Good job!" Some of them looked like they needed the encouragement, anyway.

A student rehearses his presentation while snacking. His project tried to identify the mechanisms in bees and other small insects which allow them to survive being hit by drops of water (when it rains).

So I'm honest when I say my students really impressed me. I really hope the best for all of them in the rest of their high school careers, as I've realized how maddening and soul-crushing it can be for them. I've also seen how my students light up when they talk about science or math and, well, a part of me wishes that they could have the same enthusiasm for English. For the most part, though, I'm extremely happy for them, and I can only hope that they retain that passion for the field that is likely to become their lifelong pursuit.