School Life

Today has been the most stressful day of work so far and it's only 11:30 AM. This week is when my classes give their first English speech of the year. I finished the last 2 presentation classes yesterday and told the students their marks. The last student I told his mark was unhappy with his mark so we discussed it for a while and I agreed that he had worked hard on it so I did give him another point on his assignment. After that I suspect he told everyone because I had another 4 students come to my desk later in the day with sad eyes telling me why they should have higher grades. I told them all that I'd think about it.

I was quite upset by these meetings as the students were very persistent and one student even mentioned that she thought my marking was inconsistent. Although I try hard to be consistent, grading a speech is much less objective than giving a written test so I wanted to give the students the benefit of the doubt and let them argue for their cause. Unfortunately I didn't take thorough notes and had a difficult time remembering all 120 presentations, so when a student said, "My pronunciation was better than Jun-soo's," I didn't have a good counter argument.

Seeing my plight, a Korean teacher told me that teachers never change student marks in Korea. The teacher is always right and the ultimate authority, even when he/she is wrong. I should not be changing marks. So...today I had to tell the student who's mark I changed that his original mark would stand and that I would no longer listen to student complaints. I'm not sure if it's the right decision but it should stop the flow of whining students. I also told them that they could toss their worst score for the semester...that way if they are unhappy with this score, they can choose not to use it.

I find the obsession with marks among Korean students to be far too great. I am annoyed with my students for trying to pry more marks out of me instead of looking at their mistakes and learning from the experience. The problem is that it's not only students who are obsessed, but also their parents and universities and employers. Employers want students from the best universities, universities want the best high school students, and high schools want the best middle school students...and how are the best students measured? Grades.

There is a strong sense here that your whole life success depends on how hard you study in school. Unfortunately there are millions of university graduates competing for a few jobs and a degree from a regular university is nothing special. So the students at my school study for 16 hours each day, 12 days straight, only getting every 2nd weekend off. They are among the best students in the province and hope to go to the best universities. The marks they get here are very important for getting into a good university and from what I understand, that's the hard part as university life is a breeze compared to high school because universities don't like to fail students.

There's a huge responsibility for me to give accurate marks in my classes. At the same time my conversation class is only a fraction of their total English grade which includes grammar, writing and listening sections as well. So the difference between the best student and the worst student on this project will at most be 1% of their English score for the year but the students take every fraction of a percent very seriously.

Anyway, I'm very glad it's Friday today. We're planning to go to Daejeon tomorrow to Costco where we can buy all kinds of stuff we can't buy here like big blocks of cheese and salsa. Maybe we'll see a movie too or if the weather gets better, go for a walk during the cherry blossom festival.

Business Opportunity

Since we started to feel a little more settled a couple weeks ago, we decided to take up kumdo (Korean sword fighting sport) again. I had just finished my black belt and my wife was getting ready for her black belt test when we left last fall. We've been catching up after forgetting a lot of the forms that we had learned. Last Friday we had a short practice and then we went out with our master for something to eat along with a few of the other adult students. What was supposed to be a social event quickly turned into something of a business meeting. My master said that he wants to open a kumdo gym in Canada and would either like to help us open our own gym or have us help him open his own gym. He said that if we are willing, then he can give us extra training so that we can achieve 3rd or 4th dan within a year. Usually it takes about a year per dan so I expect that this would mean a lot of work. We were a bit shocked by his proposal and told him we'd think about it. We're still not sure but we have to decide soon so we can get started on our more intensive training. We're both excited by the idea but we're also cautious so we need to research it more but make a decision quickly.

We're very happy with our apartment so far but we didn't realize it would be so windy. We can see the ocean from our balcony, although it's far away and behind a row of smoke-spewing factories. The unfortunate part of having the sea so close is that it's almost always windy. In the summer it should be nice to have a breeze but for now it feels like winter still. The weather is slowly warming and next weekend is the cherry blossom festival so we're hoping it's warm enough for a walk around the lake at Oompah Park.