The Evil Plot - Revealed!

Today the whys and wherefore’s of the current classes’ plot to keep my Academic Writing Class small bubbled up. My two favorite students are attempting the near impossible.

They want to become elementary school teachers (maybe primary, I got the names confused all night). Sounds quite achievable, but that’s to Western ears. Tonight, with all the papers done, we had nothing to do so we sat and talked for the class. I told them I still didn’t have a complete idea what they wanted out of the next class and, slowly, they told me.

It started by telling me they want to be elementary teachers (maybe primary, I got the names confused all night). To be an elementary teacher you need to have a college degree (from any college) and pass the TEST. The TEST is a bear. It is a three level test and when you apply at the first level you have to tell the government what city you want to teach in. That test is a multiple choice one, and in one fell swoop it winnows thousands of applicants down to …… ……….30!

The top thirty scores advance, the rest are not thanked for playing but are sent home. After that it gets easy. The next test is an essay test – about 5 essays of 300-500 words each – and this cuts the field to 15. The final test is a teaching test and (for Daejeon) of the 15, 10 are chosen.

These tests are taken after you attain your BA or BS.

I asked why only 10 teachers were chosen as that seemed a ludicrous annual figure for a city as big as Daejon. The ringleader (who had diagrammed all this on the board) explained that the remaining positions are filled by “contract” teachers who have contracts of one-year maximum. Like being adjunct at the college level, but worse. They have to resign a contract each year and apparently don’t get benefits or regular raises.

The ringleader stepped back from drawing all this on the board and pointed to the circle on the board that said ‘first test.’ She said, “that is our job.” She jabbed the marker into the middle of the circle that said ‘second test’ and said, “and that is your job!” Her attitude was somewhere between passing along information and a threat. The ajumma is strong in this one!

After this was clear we talked about ways this could work in the class if there were “strangers” with competing agendas. That seemed an issue of scheduling properly, so we worked on that for a bit.

Then I asked, rather rudely I suppose, if either student had a fallback plan and they basically said they can’t have one.

They are still living with their parents two years out of college and the ringleader has already failed the test twice, her partner in crime once. I delicately (for me) asked how the families were taking this (knowing a little bit about the ‘schedule’ for college, career, marriage, and babies that they ‘should’ be on) and they both said the families were taking it pretty terribly.

This makes sense, at 24-6 your Korean daughter isn’t supposed to be hanging around at a shabby Uni explaining to the Waeguk what she needs to learn to pass the nearly impassable test. This also brought clarity to some things these two had resisted. I talked again and again about how small EFL mistakes (articles, prepositions, single/plural) weren’t important because they can always be caught in second-party editing, or at leisure when the writing is done. I also talked about global restructuring and all the good shite I do when I’m sitting at home writing.

They were hearing “blah, blah, blah.” Because at the test, they will have to write their grammar correctly as they go and they will not be globally restructuring anything, because they will be writing mini-essays.

So we have a scheme for next session, which is good. I’ll actually write a syllabus for this one and away we go. Also, this helped me understand that the sense I had that they wanted something (undefined) more was real, and know I knew what it was.

I told them that if I were to be replaced, they needed to tell this to the new teacher on the very first day so he wouldn’t have to poke around to find it out.

At this point Ms. Ringleader, just seated from her lecture to me on the structure of Korean education, hiring, and my role in helping her get a job, giggled and claimed, “I’m shy!”

Man, you gotta love Korean women.

The other tragicomic thing I learned was that the “other” level of education (primary or secondary, as I said, I still have them confused) is accessible if you take a 4-year degree from one of 12 particular colleges. Ms. Ringleader had been accepted to one of these colleges (and would be teaching today) but her high-school teacher told her that she should go the other route and that it would be “easy.” She said she hated him.

When I also learned that this path meant that both women had studied in college (the average Korean college experience is one big party and then marriage hookup) the tragedy took on Belushian (oh, wait, that might be comic) proportions. Still, they are both determined to make it work (though surely doomed?) and I’ll do as much in the classroom as I can figure out.

My prediction is that in 3 years these two are going to be in the United States (or Australia, etc.) going some version of the BKF & JAE route, because they will have slowly wandered out of their own demographic and Korea won’t know what to do with them.

They be un-homogenized.