Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Ya-ta Boy]

A synchronicity happened today that gave me a revelation. Here it is:

Last year I was home for a few months and kind of draggin' around the house feeling low. I decided to take a walk and try to improve my spirits. Walked around for a while and found myself down by the river. As luck would have it, I happened to hear someone screaming and saw a guy out in the water 20 or so feet from the river bank. He was in serious trouble. Being a licensed teacher, I took out my library card and tossed it to him. "Here. If you get out of this alive, check out some books on how to swim." Then I went home feeling much better. I really like it when I can use my professional training to help out people who don't know what I know.

Today, I was giving a spelling test. There was one kid who just doesn't have a clue. So I decided to help him. I wrote out "You are a really lousy student, you know? You should have studied more" in runes (a hobby of mine). [A side hobby of mine is saying unhelpful things in ways that I know the target audience won't understand or be able to use. It makes me feel good.]

Just an idle, rhetorical question: Do any of you do this kind of thing when you read a post from someone who is struggling in their job?

[rothkowitz]

I flipped the bird to a mini-bus full of Korean students after they called me a bald western guy.The wife flipped them the bird too.

Felt surprisingly good to make people angry

We all have ways of telling Korean students "you suck"

[Satin]

Great post!

I try to assist with words I think will help. Your analogy of the library card is similar to "throw a drowning man a rope." Empty and meaningless words to someone struggling with a problem does nothing. The action and the words have to mean something to the receiver.

P.S.

See what I mean about how we perceive meanings. I took your post one way, and the person before me, took it another.

Aw --- ain't English wonderful!

[archer904]

[poet13]

Yup. When I first started teaching haggie in 2004, I taught a boy to say, "I will be a good wife someday.". This is the kid who flipped me off whenever he didnt like something, and spit in a girls face cause she gave him crap for interrupting the class.

[mindmetoo]

There's this one kid that is always begging for "talent cards" (our reward system for giving good answers) even though he thinks words like "the" and "with" are verbs. He's hatched this clever plan that he doesn't have to do the work to get the reward. If he just begs and whines, he'll get something for nothing. I just tell him to shut up. "William, just shut up."

I like that the kids know it is a VERY rude way of telling someone to be quiet.

Anyone else find this? Any reward system works well initially but a large portion of the kids eventually attempt to game the system or decide it's just easier to cheat or spend every moment in class begging then to do the actual work?

[dog_disco]

...I've got this class that has been driving me mad for the past five months. It's older kids- grade six, seven. No homework done, Korea talking all the class, things thrown across the room.
...There is this one kid who usually drives me nuts. He throws the erasers all the time + then gives me grief when I confront him about it. He talks all class + is a distraction to the others. I asked him the other day point blank: "Are you stupid?" He didn't know how to respond. Then I pointed out how everybody else had their books open, but how he didn't. I said that maybe there was a reason for that.
...I don't recommend calling kids stupid, but this kid jumped to work. For the rest of the class he kept asking questions and volunteering. This kid is something of a leader in the class, so all the rest of them followed suit. At the end of the class they were begging to write sentences + play vocabulary games.

[kermo]

One. One person read the original post and wrote an appropriate response.

[Col.Brandon]

At my elementary school, a whole new generation of spoiled, useless adjosshis is being created; only good for drinking, hocking and smoking.

These little buggers come from wealthy families, and (I suspect) have had everything handed to them, and get everything done for them. They do nothing in class, except waste my time.

I enjoy mocking them by making a "bus driver" driving action with my hands ("Can you do this? You don't need English to drive a bus"), and sometimes I bow to them and say, "Welcome to E-Mart", as if I'm the professional greeter at the entrance earning 2,000 won per hour.

JAFUA - Just Another Freaken Useless Adjosshi. I thought I might coin that phrase, then print some T-shirts and hand them out every time I see a likely-looking candidate.

The female students on the other hand, are an absolute delight to teach. Sometimes I feel like the world would be a much better place if the women were running everything.

[Dan The Chainsawman]

Chinga tu madre gets uttered from me on occasion in class when a kid curses me in Korean.


well that and, "Drop and give me 20!"

but yeah sometimes you can't really flat out say you are a useless waste of space. However, you can show it. Rather than physically say it I put the really dumb*beep* kids in the corner with a chair and no desk. The sorta sit the whole class looking confused and wondering why they have to use their hands to balance their books etc. Afterwards I tell them the desks are for students who want to learn. Tends to cheese them off right proper it does!

[khyber]

I once told a kid "I will help you once you start to help yourself". I knew he wouldn't understand. That was my way of helping him.

[mateomiguel]

man, i'd really love to be students in your classes. You really know how to motivate them to learn and change their behavior. In fact, you're all a bunch of goddamn inspirations.

This makes me a little bit pissed off because for some crazy reason I seem to care about my students, and to think that one of them may be in one of your classes getting a piss poor education from someone who can't control their classroom makes me angry.

[rothkowitz]

Lots of students are twerps and they waste people's time and the teacher's time for them(which is after all the students primary resource).

Same old problem.I see students once a week or once every two weeks and some student/s ends up frittering away that time for everybody else.

Can't recover that time.That's that opportunity gone.I'd love for the parents tosecretly come and see how their brats behave.

[jajdude]

I think Ya ta did something that is common enough. It's reassuring in a way, to know we all experience this. We have all had frustrations and nowhere for them to go. A foreign co-worker from the past told me she found herself doing this kind of thing a lot. Actually I think most foreign teachers do it sometimes. You're trying to teach something but you know the students have no idea what you are talking about. They could be perfectly nice kids, all happy and smiling, but you are frustrated their 10 year old heads cannot grasp something you think they should. Maybe you forgot for a minute they are 10 years old. So, you say something completely out of their range, like, "You have absolutely no idea what I'm saying, do you?" And they look at you smiling, look at each other like this because they are still working on "This is a book, that is a tree."

One teacher told me she'd sometimes switch into mock Indian Apu style speak. "Oh no, I am not understanding what you are saying," or something like.

Best to laugh it off and keep working on "This is a book."

[jajdude]