How to Be a Middle School Student in Korea

Invention:

“Sausage in glue case. If you hungry at class time, you can eat quietly.” – Stephanie, Alice, G-Dragon, 1st Grade Students, Seokjeon Middle School

When my job recruiter asked me where in Korea I wanted to live, I replied, “No preference.” When he asked me what age I wanted to teach, I again replied, “No preference.” But then my mind flashed to the merciless days of middle school and I immediately wished that I had requested either elementary or high school. However, starting from about a week into my job, whenever someone has asked me what I like best about Korea, my answer has been, without falter, “My students.”

Here are a few rules of thumb should you ever decide to join this extremely loveable class of people.

1. Get bangs.

The old American stereotype that all Asians look the same is completely false except when applied to Korean celebrities, who all have plastic surgery to achieve exactly the same face. There is a famous K-pop group called Girl’s Generation made up of nine young singers that might or might not be identical neptuplets. For the most part, though, I often stopped thinking that Koreans looked Asian at all when there weren’t other foreigners around to compare them with.

My students came in all shapes and sizes with all different faces and personalities, and I never had any difficulty differentiating them. Still, there is definitely a certain look to a Korean middle school student. A large portion of this can be blamed on the school dress code. All Korean students begin wearing school uniforms their first year of middle school, which are white button up shirts, pants for the boys, and skirts for the girls, although I had a handful of tomboys who cut their hair short and wore pants, which I always admired. Students are not allowed to wear makeup, pierce their ears, perm or dye their hair, and hair longer than shoulder-length must be worn in a ponytail. In addition to the look mandated by the school, some popular fads run rampant in the middle school classroom. In the winter, vinyl sleeve protectors are very trendy. They cover the forearm of the uniform to keep it clean and are often adorned with cartoon characters or smiling fruit or ice cream cones. Big glasses with thick, black rims are also very stylish. And bangs are a must.

2. Build up a high tolerance for pain.

Korean teachers are issued with a stick. In many cases, it is actually a wooden flute that is cracked and so now serves instead as more of a drumstick. Some teachers are more musically inclined than others. During my first semester, my desk in the teacher’s lounge was beside the P.E. teacher, a notorious bully. The first time she brought a student in, she wailed on him so hard I thought she might break the stick. Even with my headphones on, it was impossible to ignore the screaming teacher, the crying student, and the thunderous crack of the stick, and I felt sick to my stomach. Although beating is a common occurrence, I never got used to it. For lesser crimes, students have to kneel on the floor with their arms raised in the air, hold the push-up position, or go down on their hands and knees, nicknamed “OTL” because the letters resemble the position.

After introducing myself the first week, I asked the students to come up with questions for me. Usually they asked my age, my blood type, and if I had a boyfriend. One clever boy asked a much more relevant question. “Do you have a stick?” The most disciplining I ever did, though, was yell to quiet them down or ask them to change seats, and several students thanked me at the end of the year for being patient with them. I prefer to use a positive reinforcement system, which succeeded both in encouraging participation in the classroom and in encouraging students to follow me through the hallways yelling, “Give me the chocolate!”

3. Study like it’s your job.

When I think about my middle school days, I think of going to football games on Friday nights and hanging around the pool all summer and extremely awkward school dances. I worry that when my students look back on middle school, they will mainly remember studying. Korea is a very competitive country and parents put a lot of pressure on their children to succeed. Most of my students attend private academies called “hagwons” after they leave school, meaning that some students are in class until 10 or 11 o’ clock at night. During vacations, instead of going to the beach or watching TV all day, many attend educational camps. Perhaps their hard work will pay off, and when they are older they will be thankful that they studied as much as they did. But as middle school students, many feel like Monica, one of my hardest working students who, when asked to write questions for President Obama, wrote this:

“(Not very much like question) I read from a newspaper that you’ll make American kids more study. Please don’t. You don’t know how hard Korean kids studies hard. They goes to school at dawn, and come back home at almost midnight! And…well, you know, etc., etc…”

4. Treat the school like it’s your home.

I remember thinking of school almost as a prison, so this was an interesting concept to me. The role of Korean teachers is much more parenting than that of Western teachers, and students are often coming in and out of the teachers’ lounge to pester them. The teachers act as school nurses, guidance counselors, and are even concerned with the students’ love lives. I once had a student cry in my class because she didn’t know the answer to a question and felt ashamed, so I thought it would be best to move on and draw the attention away from her. Meanwhile, the Korean teacher stayed beside her and rubbed her back until she felt better. Rather than change classes every period, students stay with a single class and the teachers move around to the different classrooms. This way, the class is more like a family and their classroom more like a home. Just like in a Korean home, students and teachers are expected to remove their shoes in the school. They wear special indoor slippers in order to keep the school clean. No custodians are employed at the schools, as students clean the building after class each day, pushing around mops, wiping down windows, and even washing coffee mugs for the teachers. Students also serve food in the school cafeteria alongside the cooks. Whether this system is meant to foster a sense of responsibility in the students or to save money, I am not sure, but it is very effective at both.

5. Be extraordinarily sweet.

These kids are hilarious, clever, motivated, and sweet. When I labeled my students ‘sweet’ in an e-mail, my mom replied, “Wow, I would never use that word to describe a middle school student.” In the glimpse of them that she got during her visit to Korea, though, she agreed that it was the perfect word for these kids. Of course, they can be as ruthlessly mean as any middle schoolers, throwing things at each other, laughing at others’ mistakes, and outcasting students for whatever reason. The worst torture device, equivalent to the American ‘wedgie,’ is the ‘ddong chim,’ in which one puts his or her pointer fingers together and thrusts them into the seat of another student’s pants, right between the cheeks. Because touch is a much more acceptable form of affection in Korea, though, it is much more common for me to see students – boys and girls alike – holding hands or laying their heads in each other’s laps around the school.

Equally, although they had their moments, students were usually unbelievably sweet to me. Even though I thought that I would prefer elementary or high school, middle schoolers turned out to be the best of both worlds. They still had the energy and excitement of youth, but they were starting to acquire the intelligence and maturity to carry on interesting conversations. When I was floundering to get on my feet as a teacher, the students were patient with me. They would help me clean up or carry things without being asked, and if I was ever in a bad mood, I would simply walk through town knowing that I would run into students who would cheer me up. Some of my favorite students were the troublemakers in class who would drop their act and wave ecstatically to me outside of school. On the sidewalk, if I saw my students eating food, they would inevitably offer me some, at times even feeding it to me with their chopsticks. On my birthday, I was showered with small gifts and sweet, diligently written notes. My English class is not worth any credit and they receive no grade, so they are not brown-nosers or teacher’s pets. They are just genuinely great kids.

How to Be an Alien

Questions for a letter to Obama:

"How much is the White House? Can you give me a pentagon?" - 3rd grade student, Yangmok Middle School

"Will you give me your daughter, Malia?" - 3rd grade student, Seokjeon Middle School

I am an alien. A registered alien, in fact. But I certainly do not need my alien registration card to remind me that I am an outsider. Whether strangers glare me down in the subway or approach me and stroke my arm as they call me “beautiful,” it is a rare and precious occasion to find myself amidst a group of Koreans who forget, for a brief moment, my alien status.

For some, becoming an alien is not an easy thing to do. Here are three rules to simplify the process.

1. Be prepared to make mistakes, be confused, and feel like an idiot.

As an alien in Korea, you will not always know what is going on or how things work. There is no way to combat this problem other than accepting it. For example, my apartment has an intercom on the wall, and at times a voice spouts off a string of very serious sounding Korean. My apartment has a floor to ceiling sliding glass door leading to the balcony, a window to my hallway, and a sliding glass door to the bathroom through which I can see the window to my hallway as I sit on the toilet, so before investing in curtains I already had a small paranoia that I was constantly being watched. It was not too big a leap, then, to suspect that the voice from this speaker was scolding me for doing something wrong, such as running my washing machine at an inappropriate hour or playing music too loudly. My co-teacher, Okhee, assured me that they were only announcements and not to worry about them. Soon after, the speaker came on in the middle of the night repeating what sounded to me something along the lines of “Da-da-da taygoimnida.” There was no way that this could just be another announcement, so I looked out the window expecting to see people evacuation. No one else was stirring. Upon investigating the situation, I found that the phone mounted on the wall below the intercom had three colored circles. The red circle had a picture of fire, the yellow circle had a picture of a gas faucet, and the green circle had a picture of an angry boy. The yellow circle was lit up. I first checked my gas to make sure that I hadn’t left it on, and then pulled on some jeans and went to the security office. Very distressed, I tried to imitate the voice from the speaker and drew the picture of the gas faucet on a scrap of newspaper, but the guard just waved me off as though nothing were the matter. When I returned to my apartment, the sound had stopped, but it recurred several times, always in the middle of the night. When it finally happened on a Sunday afternoon, I called my Okhee to translate to the security guard over the phone. He led me to a power box in my hallway and showed me how to flip a switch to turn my power off and on again, which did put an end to the voice from the speaker. I wasn’t sure how this would help if there was a carbon monoxide leak in my apartment, but I slept with my window cracked and made use of the power box until eventually the problem ceased.

Another incident occurred in the historic city of Gyeongju. My friends and I had spent a long weekend there touring the temples and tombs. It was our first outing long enough to be considered a trip, and we had heard that after going on a trip, it was typical to bring back food to share with the teachers at your school. We discovered a famous snack called “Gyeongju bread,” a sandwich of barley bread resembling sand dollar sized pancakes stuck together with sweet red bean paste, each individually wrapped in plastic. We loaded shopping bags full of them, and the next week I handed them out to all of the teachers, the principals and vice principals. Because I teach at two schools, I couldn’t distribute the second batch until a few days after returning from Gyeongju. As I sat down to share them, my co-teacher Jang sniffed the bread and asked if it was fresh. In the U.S., if something is individually wrapped in plastic, it generally means that it is loaded with preservatives, so I had never anticipated that the breads should require refrigeration. Surely enough, one of the teachers looked down at her half-eaten Gyeongju bread to find it spotted with mold.

You don’t even need to make mistakes like this, though, to feel a little self-conscious. Just as I think some things that Koreans do are ridiculous, some of my actions that I find perfectly ordinary, Koreans consider absurd. Going for a run on the path along the river, at least as a girl, chomping on an apple while walking down the sidewalk, or simply having a beer without buying a table-ful of food always take Koreans aback. During a school field trip, I picked a few flowers and tucked them behind my own and a few teachers’ ears only to be laughed at hysterically. I later learned that wearing flowers in your hair is considered a symbol of insanity.

2. Compromise

I know far too many Westerners who spend all of their free time drinking beer in foreigner bars. I don’t understand why they came to Korea to do that. There is much better beer available in the states. If you come to a foreign country, you should really try to learn about and experience the culture, even if it sometimes means compromising your usual behavior. My co-teacher boasts that I can eat spicy Korean food better than she can, and a group of elderly people clapped for me on the sidewalk in Seoul for speaking basic Korean. Even the smallest things are overwhelmingly appreciated.

That said, it is no better to abandon all of your beliefs and customs and become so immersed in the culture that you become resentful of other foreigners for detracting from your ‘Korean experience.’ I have been guilty of this phenomenon, and in the opposite vein, have been overly enthusiastic and friendly to foreign strangers. With this common confusion of how to react to other foreigners, my friends invented a game similar to “Slug Bug” or “Punch Buggy.” The first person to spot a foreigner when we are in public has a right to punch his or her friends, and bonus punches are rewarded if the foreigner sighted looks romantically involved with a Korean.

Really, though, it is often just as rewarding to share aspects of American culture with Koreans as it is to learn about Korean culture from them. Shockingly enough, Hollywood and the news do not always convey a full or accurate picture of Americans. Many Koreans outside of the cities have had limited contact with Westerners, and they are curious. As I was assisting one student with an assignment, she stopped me midsentence and said, “Oh! Your eyes are brown. I thought Americans had blue eyes.” They also marvel at my arm hair and, humblingly, snicker at my armpit sweat, which they don’t seem to have. On Thanksgiving, I “roasted” a chicken on my stove and baked sweet potato pies in my toaster oven for my co-teachers. On Halloween, my friend Megan wanted to make caramel apples with two Korean girls. She bought a big bag of candy caramels and we melted them on her stove before dipping in apples on chopsticks and rolling them in crushed peanuts. Unfortunately, the caramel on caramel apples is not the same as caramel candies. Instead, it was painfully chewy and became harder as it cooled until one of the girls asked, as politely as she could, “So… Americans like this?” Eventually, they ended up peeling off the caramel and holding it in their hands as they ate the apples. But after the caramel apple disaster, we taught them to carve a pumpkin while watching Edward Scissorhands, and they took to that much better than the apples. Chances are, they won’t forget either any time soon.

3. Don’t forget your ray blaster.

At a camp I once taught, the principal of the school gave a speech to the middle school students in which he referred to English as a “weapon” that they should wield to reach success. Man, did that make me feel like a colonist. That is one reason that I try to “Koreanize” as much as possible. Really, though, my weapon of choice as an alien in Korea is the electric fan. Koreans believe that a fan left running overnight in an enclosed room will cause “fan death.” The superstition is that the fan will create a vortex or suck up all the oxygen, leading to suffocation, or possibly kill via hypothermia in the night.

Actually, you can leave both your fan and your ray blaster at home. Most aliens are safer in South Korea than where they came from. The only thing you may need to fight here is xenophobia. The swine flu certainly hasn’t helped. It is as though “swine” translates into Korean as “foreigner.” While several people I know have complained about racism here, I prefer to think of how well Korea is dealing with foreigners considering the newness of their presence. It takes a long time for a traditionally homogenous country to accept foreigners living amongst them, and while I have felt racism during my time here, I am generally treated more like a guest than like an outsider. My friend Josh had a really touching experience as a foreigner. I was speaking to his co-teacher, Mr. Park, at Josh’s farewell party the night before his return to America. Mr. Park admitted to me, and to Josh, that he used to be racist against Americans because of his strong patriotic beliefs. His relationship with Josh, though, had been so good that he had come to perceive all foreigners with a more open mind. Even though Mr. Park did not like to drink or stay out late, he was out drinking with Josh until four that morning as a gesture of appreciation and camaraderie. Another of my friends taught an English camp with me, and one of the students wrote an article about him for the camp newspaper. She wrote that the only black person she had met before him had been unkind and that that was how she had come to think of black people until she met Landon, who was kind and had a warm smile. So rather than feel attacked by the xenophobia in Korea, my best advice to any foreigner is to welcome it as an opportunity to make change.