Korean Job Discussion Forums

[malandlu]

Hi
I am a fairly new teacher and have no training in this area so would appreciate some advice from anyone who may have some professional ideas or experience with this problem..

Basically I have a teenage (14) student who I teach one hour a week, along with her friend. She does not know the other teachers at my school.
She has a lot of problems generally with friends, normal teenage stuff, but today she was very upset and said she had failed an exam (first one at middle school) and that her mother kept hitting her because of it, and she didn't want to go home etc.
Her mother has said she will be angry (and the girl says keep hitting her) until she does better in the next exam, but this is in June!
She says her father is OK, he controls her mother, but if her father hadnt been around this weekend it would have been terrible.

The girl didn't want to leave the class and looked like she was going to cry and was unusually quiet. She mentioned wanting to die which of course has worried me, but then I remember talking about that a lot when I was younger, along with all the other teenage girls I knew. Obviously some kids do.

I'm sure there is an element of teenage dramatisation here, but I want to check if there are any help lines for kids in Korea for this stuff (like childline in the UK), or any official lines that I should have said in reply?

This is my first experience of the potential additional responsibility involved in teaching kids and I'm a bit worried about whether I said the right things.

Thanks for any help.

[OculisOrbis]

sounds like it could be 100% accurate.....not an uncommon description here.

don't have any advice other than there isnt much you can do without opening yourself up for problems. nobodys going to take what ou have to say seriously anyway. i would just be supportive as i could to the kid and hope for the best.

[Straphanger]

[Kikomom]

Good idea... teach to the test.

Not ever being a teacher, I don't like to butt in on what you all are actually doing in the classroom. But it always made a kind of sense to me that hagwons could be doing double duty by using the students regular class material as a way to open up dialogue and reinforce their studies by using their homework for vocab words. Put the homework material to work for you, if only for a portion of your regular lesson plan.

This may not be so practical with larger classes, but for smaller ones where students are struggling in certain areas, it might even make the mothers happier?

[oldfatfarang]

Beating children for 'bad' test results is common Confucian practice. It's normal here, no matter what we think. A bad grade will get a beating from the mother - and, in many cases, the teacher as well. I've had students say they were beaten for getting 90% on a test.

It's not uncommon to have a student tell you: "My mother broke the stick on me."

The saddest thing I've ever heard, in any country, was from a Korean teenage boy who'd got a bad test grade: "I'm lucky, my mother only hit 30-40 times."

Don't get involved. You can't win it - you can't stop it. However, you can show the kids a calmer non-violent way to resolve 'bad grades,' e.g., discussing it calmly and rationaly and with compassion.
Good luck.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

Was her poor mark in English? One thing you can do is give her an assignment and write lots of praise on it along with some stickers that she can take home to show her mother. You could also give her weekly assignments with a numeric grade that you keep increasing so her mum sees some improvement.

[Straphanger]