English schools everywhere. This one's in Mandeok-dong.
Kevin Maher taught in Busan in 1996-97. He wrote about his time here in No Couches in Korea:
We were left to fend for ourselves—we had no program, few resources, an owner who couldn’t speak English, and a director who didn’t care. We taught however we wanted. If a teacher was sex-minded, he steered his respective classes into sexual topics. Students that liked that, would take their course. If a teacher were politicized or religious, they would gear their lessons in that direction. Years later, I would see every kind of teacher in all sorts of different situations. They used the classroom as a venue to teach and argue for their personal values or causes. Other teachers always brought board games to every class. Their discussion would be generated around that game.
I stuck with my method of ‘Topic Discussions.’ I did everything from gay rights, gun rights, abortion, Middle East issues, Japan issues, smoking in public, and anything else I thought I wanted to know the Korean perspective on. My general assessment was that most Korean students hadn’t considered much on any of these topics. But, sure things would later prove to be immense winners, for example, Japan topics, which created passionate hatreds to come out of my students. I didn’t find this appealing to hear, as I was equally interested in Japan as I was with Korea, but it became a guaranteed winner to generate student speaking.
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What other teachers did in their classroom, I had no idea. We never talked about it socially. We worked too much; we wanted to get to know each other, we desired to get to know Korea and we hoped to forget about teaching during the few hours of the day that we weren’t doing so. I would later become aware that certain teachers were game people, but it was very clear that no one knew how to teach English. We did the best we could, with the limited resources and support that we had.
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2 comments:
similar enough to my experience teaching for three years in seoul, at a 'hagwon' like the one pictured. few had done a tefl course. i hadn't. i was for a good two of my years considered perhaps the top teacher because i was friendly, energetic, creative and tried really hard--qualities it seems i've now more or less lost, grumpy old git that i am. i often did a steve martin routine to begin the mornings with my littlest ones, all for the benefit of an american co worker who thought it was funny--'little girls (with their little girl parts), yeah!' yes, we weren't a terribly pc gang. one guy got almost everyone to mainly do coloring with the kids. i would also spend whole afternoons in the hallway playing 'wari gari' with a tennis ball, with my class and another teachers combined and running back and forth between two pillars. i'm probably still going to write it all up, i'm just getting started. but i was once featured on tv--i thought it was because of my stellar teaching--and found out much later that it was a very critical piece, essentially asking, 'is this good for our children?'
Back in the late 1970's when I lived by teaching in Korean English schools, I had trouble getting paid. Out of 4 schools I taught at, only the American run school actually paid me. One American told me the secret to getting paid at Korean run schools. You should go to the students and say, I am very sorry, but I must quit because the school won't pay me. The students would then riot and lock the staff in their offices, besieging them. They would not let the staff out to use the restroom, eat, or go home to sleep. Eventually the staff would give up and pay the teacher. This seemed like a lot of work, eventually I returned to Japan.
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