Korean Job Discussion Forums

[ajgeddes]

Today, we are having our sports festival day and I have been sitting in my classroom watching the kids do the running events. Each turn, 5 kids start running around the track. Of those 5 at least 2 fall over just running and at least one other trips over the 15 inch hurdle they have to jump over. It is hilarious. I have never seen so many kids just fall over running. At my school last year it wasn't this bad. I would say 1 out of 5 kids can even run without looking weird. This is the funniest morning ever, I love sports festival day.

[cdninkorea]

I wonder if that generation will improve when they get older and become hardcore hiking advocates like their elders (if they don't they won't have much well being in their "Golden Years")

[ajgeddes]

A little update. The grandmas are going at it now and I am quite impressed with them. Little old hunchbacked ladies are able to run out pushing a gigantic ball and manoeuver it around a pylon and run back without falling over, yet students can't.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

I'm sure that no one has students more unathletic than mine. Anytime I think I'm making slow progress with English I need only look outside to observe a PE class. The PE teacher had been teaching basketball for weeks and they were trying to do lay-up. I counted twelve of them in a row attempt to do a lay-up and only one of them managed a legal lay-up (she still missed). Many of them can't even dribble a basketball, and look like four-year-olds trying to bounce a ball for the first time.

On the other hand some of them are pretty good at jump-rope. Since about every second PE lesson seems to be jump-rope I guess a few of them have to be.

[ajgeddes]

[rothkowitz]

Not surprised.....very few play sport.Some at lunchtime,but interschool/organised sport.Very few.

However, my old middle/high school had students who basically only did a little study in the morning(School soccer team that lived at the school.There was a taekwando training facility too which attracted some westerners,a Scotsman and a couple of Brazilians)

How many even do taekwando,kumdo et al these days?

PE isn't a big priority in schools.They keep a note on how fat and/or feeble kids are getting and thats about it.

I gues they figure they'll get stronger when they go into the army.Girls aren't exactly encouraged to get much muscle.

[ilovebdt]

I couldn't quite believe it the other day when I passed a group of students sitting around in theri PE kit doing nothing.
I asked them which sport they were doing and they said they were having a rest.

A rest? In P.E classes at my school you never got a rest break. We were moving the whole time.

ilovebdt

[Yu_Bum_suk]

[laogaiguk]

My kids are the same as everywhere else. Some very (one I think could become a professional soccer player, he is really good), some not, some I can't believe can walk by themselves. Atleast they aren't all fat pigs like back home (well, atleast not yet).

[Yu_Bum_suk]

[riley]

Wow, my elementary kids must be geniuses or something. Even the little 1st graders are able to run without tripping in our Field Day events today.

[khyber]

strange...
everyday at our elementary school there are kids (boys and girls) running around playing soccer...EVERYWHERE....2 games on one pitch and then then another four going length wise. Also at least three sets of games going on in other nooks and crannies. Kids at my school are getting pretty dang good exercise.

When we had our sports day (which'll be hard with 1300 kids) the kids did fine. They ran like demons. Frankly, it was their mothers who fell. But I'm pretty sure that two of them tripped (most likely from not running often enough). A couple of them were quite fast, but, in 4 different races, 3 of them BIT it hard..one even face down...rough.

Sports day at my school COULD have been one of the most intense spectacles I have EVER seen. It LOOKED so slap 'n' dash. But in the end, it was perfect and everything ended RIGHT on schedule with all of the events completed.

weird.

[Doogie]

I think that world wide, more and more kids are living in front of the computer. On top top of that, Korea has got to be the computer game capital of the world. I know my kids live in front of their computers. Koreans are a pretty slim people right now, but I can definitely see an obesity problem 10 or 15 years down the road.

[Snowmeow]

I can see what you mean about unfit kids, but then I also have groups of students that only want to talk about soccer, and they have soccer nucknames. Soccer, soccer, soccer..... Let's play World Cup hangman, yay!

I only work in a hagwon so I suspect my perception of the average Korean kid is skewed. I'd love to meet some Korean kids who don't give a crap about English and don't study all the time. But then I'd have no way to communicate. I know a few kids like that, who are involved in amateur sports (weightlifting). There are girls there that squat double their bodyweight.

Going off on a tangent a bit, I saw some teenage girls waiting for a bus a couple Fridays ago, they had pink hair and were smoking out in the open. I would have been really interesting to be able to talk to them and get some insight into the more rebellious side of Korea. They probably didn't care too much about PE though.

[Yu_Bum_suk]