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.