I begin to insert myself into my co-teachers' good time.

You all know by now that I have doubts about my teaching skills. Most of the time, I ask a lot of advice from my co-teachers and defer to their judgment in times of uncertainty, trusting that they know more than I do about what's best for our students.

The exception to this is Han Jin-An, the older male teacher who barely speaks English. I know from the other teachers that he has a reputation for not caring very much about the students or how much they learn. Generally, about 90% of the students sleep during his class (the English classes he teaches alone, not the ones I teach). He makes no effort to wake them up. His participation and attendance in the classes we "co-teach" are spotty to nonexistent, and so I have had to rely on my own judgment from the beginning in his classes. I have had to decide what is best for my students in the 50-minute time slot that I have influence over their lives.

And this reliance on my own judgment is beginning to spill over into the rest of my classes, I think. I am starting to knowingly go against the will of my well-meaning co-teachers on occasion, over small things.

For example, last week I taught family vocabulary and expressions to both 1st and 2nd graders. To get their attention, I made up a poster of my family tree, using pictures that I printed from my computer's photo collection and from the photos Mom has scanned and put online recently. While making the poster, I hesitated over the little red hearts I was cutting and pasting to represent marriage. To lie to my students and tell them my parents are married, or to draw a zig-zag line through the heart and teach them how to say "divorce"?

Divorce is a taboo subject in Korea. It's really, really looked down upon. Prior to doing the family lesson, I hadn't told even the teachers I am closest to that my parents are divorced. And it's not because I'm ashamed of it, or because I'm still upset about it. I don't think either of those things are true. But they just assumed that of course my parents were married, and you know, Park Mi-Ran is the immovable force.

But a lot of my students come from so-called "broken" families. Many of their parents are divorced, many of them were raised by single parents. Some of their parents died when they were young, some of their parents deserted them, some of their parents abused them. Some of them were raised entirely by their grandparents. Etc. And these students are so ashamed of this, so ashamed that their families are not picture perfect.

How could I not tell them my parents are divorced? How could I not laugh along with them when one student said "goodbye, heartbreaker!" when I asked them to think about why the heart over my mom and dad was different from the hearts over my grandparents and my aunts/uncles? How could I not give them a reason to be more open with me, to show them that a different family doesn't have to mean a sad family? They look up to me. Maybe knowing that I am the product of divorced parents will help them believe that they can be happy and successful, they can do exciting things too. (Because to them, my life is so strange and exciting.)

So in every class, I purposely highlighted the reason for the zig-zag line, despite the fact that it was easy to see that my co-teachers were uncomfortable with it. Because I thought: "this is a good thing for my students."

Then, today, one of my students said, "Pamela, you like black men? Black people what name?" They are so curious about the existence of black people in the U.S.; it is strange to them to think that I grew up in the presence of black people (and not even that many! I grew up in suburbia, for christ's sake!). Most of them have only ever seen a black person in the movies, usually represented as a gangster. There's a lot of racism directed towards black people here, way more than in the U.S., and way more blatantly.

When the student asked me those questions, my co-teacher immediately tried to steer me away from the situation. But I said, "No, please help us talk about this, this is important." Because this student wanted to learn something real, for once, and I wanted to teach it to him. And maybe now he thinks of black people as a little less like "others" than he did before.

The point is, I still let myself be guided by my co-teachers in a lot of situations. But I'm starting to think that sometimes I know what is good for my students, too; I am capable of teaching them something real.