Bad Day...school system

Yesterday was beautiful. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, a warm breeze blew and I could smell honey suckle on my walk to school. With the warmer days beginning everyone seems to be out and about enjoying the weather. When I arrived at the school it was just another day teaching English. Classes were going well, but a lot of the students were distracted by the approaching weekend. Finally I got to one of my quiet classes. In most of my classes the students are just dying to talk to me in English, ask questions, participate, and do their work. I usually reward them with candy or a game of hang man or UNO at the end of class as long as they behave. This quiet class though, doesn't do any of that. They sit there and stare at me, they don't participate, they don't really do their workbooks unless I give them the answers and even when they play games they are pretty quiet. I had a few good students in that class but slowly they have been moved to other classes, so now I am left with only quiet, non-working students. This is very frustrating especially because I take my job as a teacher seriously.

So I get to the class room and of course the students are sitting quietly. This is nice until I try to get them to read for me, the silence is almost deadly. No one will let out a peep. Usually I will read a section, or a dialogue and the class will repeat me but only one girl was repeating me and she was so quiet. The class knows some English and they know what speak and participate mean but they were refusing to do it. It was like pulling teeth!! There is one student in the class, Jack, who is usually pretty good about reading but sometimes he gives me attitude. Yesterday he gave me huge attitude. I asked him if he could repeat after me and he rolled his eyes at me. After asking a few more times it just got worse. I started getting mad at the whole class. So I threatened the class with no games if they didn't participate. Finally everyone participated but Jack. I asked him a few more times and just got more attitude. Then I got really mad, I yelled, I slammed my books on the table and I marched out of the room slamming the door. Wow, I didn't know I had it in me! I came back with a korean teacher who yelled at the whole class and then set Jack straight. I was so grateful for that because then everyone worked and I was a happy teacher again.

Later in the day one of the korean teachers approached me. She reprimanded me for getting mad at the class and especially for getting mad at Jack. I explained the whole situation to her and told her that Jack has progressively been having a worse and worse attitude. The frustrating thing is that I know he's a good student, but he just likes to give attitude. So the teacher said that they were going to move him to another class now. The korean teachers and my boss are afraid the students will report back bad things about the school and then the parents will move them to another school. So we are supposed to have fun and play games and ignore the bad or dumb or non-participating students. This is not right to me. In fact a lot of things about the way school is conducted are not right to me. I want to help the students learn English, but it's kind of a joke. All the school cares about is making money. The students mean money, so as long as the students are happy, the parents are happy and the school makes lots of money. The school doesn't care about education one bit. I have known this since beginning work, but I've been able to ignore it thus far. Yesterday I couldn't ignore it, so I confronted it and got in trouble for it. I need to figure out a good teaching strategy that will allow me to work around this crappy school system.

So that was my bad day. Today is Friday and it's a good day, yay! Tonight heather and I hope to check out a bath house. Then tomorrow I think we're going to some market and on Sunday there is a Seoul spring festival. We may go to a temple for some spring festivities. Monday is Children's day so everyone has the day off. Who knows what we'll get into...