Here are a some pictures with which I'll attempt to illustrate my school experience. Over time, school turned out to mean more and more to me, and I began to take teaching seriously, and not as just as work. The respect given to the teacher in Korea is something to be repected, and I tried to live up to the role.

A note on the Korean classroom in general. Teachers all stay in the teachers' room, and the students stay in the same classroom all day. So they really get settled into their place. There is a clear sense of identity within the particular class, and students are pretty tight. Everyone wears slippers in the classroom areas, and things are kept very clean. When the teacher enters the room, there is definitely the sense that one is entering their space. There is a homeroom teacher who manages the class and its activities, from decorations to social functions.

Some days it's hard to like your job. The kids can be hard to control, and teaching becomes more of an exercise in discipline than anything else. After gym class is an especially hard time - I think issuing tranquilizer guns to the teachers might be a good idea, especially with the boys. Girls are never a problem. I'm not playing favorites, that's the just the way it is. However, you have to be careful about the (rare) choice to harshly discpline a girl student. They hold grudges, and I'm not kidding. Boys, on the other hand, need more discipline, but they only possess short-term memory. However, the kids are really responsive when they are ready to be, and no matter how much they may be antsy/bored/inattentive, they are almost never malicious or directly disrespectful of the teacher.

Here's another picture of the Korean classroom, taken of a particularly good class. Those kids really have a sense of humor and zest that is really refreshing. This was the only job in which I would sometimes leave the school with more energy than when I came, although I must say that teaching is physically exhausting at times. I particularly like middles schoolers because they seem to have more personality than high school students. I think that this is simply because high school students are busy, stressed, and worried in general all the time; I like second-year middle school students, as first-years are still coming out of the elementary school stage, while 3rd years are sort of like high schoolers, since they are preparing for the test to get into a good high school. Also notice that this is a school that is co-ed BY CLASS. Even as the co-ed school is somewhat of a rarity in a country dominated by Confucian society which has traditionally segregated schools by sex, they are usually still taught in separate classrooms. So a 100% so-ed environment is very rare. The vice-principal of the school was the architect of this more liberal policy.

Behavior is socially-determined, I say. In the Korean classroom, there are usually four rows, with two chairs in each. You can see this in the pictures. Many of the teachers still like to keep the boys and girls in separate rows, boy, girl, boy, girl. Some teachers go a bit further by mixing the pairs within the row, boy, girl, boy, girl pairs going back down the row. This is very clear in the second picture. However, there was one teacher who actively tried to break down barriers by mixing the seat partners. This is the only situation in which girls and boys sat directly next to each other. The differences between each of these levels are quite stark. I'd often play games requiring teams to interact with each other across rows (each team being a row - 4 teams). In the case of the separate-row classes, when asked to interact with one another, the boy and girl teams/rows acted like the other was in the last stages of Ebola hemorrhagic fever. In the intermediate mixed-pairs case, they were a little better, but not much. However, when they had opposite sex seat partners, this wasn't an issue at all. I was surprised at how different and more mature the students behaved in this environment. Not only were the more able to interact with the opposite sex, they were in general better behaved and better students. There's a lot to be said for the co-ed classroom.

Here's a picture of four favorite students. Actually, you might notice the girl second from the left in the picture in the group picture (the bench) on the previous page.

Not to neglect the teachers. As you might notice, most of the teachers are female. This is typical of the gender segregation (discrimination?) in middle and high schools. The majority of high school teachers are male. I've heard many explanations and justifications for this (as well as for other types of gender discrimination related to the treatment of boy and girl students), but they are all unconvincing to me. In the end, they seem mere rationalizations for maintenance of the status quo. Anyway, enough tangenting. This is a picture of some cool teachers in my school after a school function - a banquet given by parents. This is a whole 'nother issue, one I won't go into here.