I want to tell you about my students.

Sometimes I forget what I've written here vs. what I've only told a few people over Skype, and on the phone with someone last week I realized that some of you don't know as much about my students as I thought you did.

My students have had a rough time in the Korean education system. Sometime in either elementary or middle school, they fucked up, and they've been on the track to a technical high school ever since. Even if they know the material, they do poorly on standardized tests, and standardized tests are everything in Korea, even more than in the U.S. The Korean education system doesn't really give you a second chance; if you haven't managed to test well by the end of middle school, then you're going to a shit high school and probably never going to college. If you do go to college, it will probably be a 2-year technical college that isn't prestigious and therefore isn't respected. That's even assuming you have the money for college; most of my students just don't. In the U.S., if your parents don't have the money to put you through college, you can do it yourself on student loans and working. In Korea, student loans are only given out at exorbitant interest rates and have to be paid back in a much shorter time period: 2-3 years. Which means if your family can't put you through college, you're not going.

Like I said, no second chances.

Aside from that, most of my students are struggling with depression or attention disorders, or both. They have extreme mood swings: some are happy and active in class one day, exhausted and unresponsive the next - or sometimes, angry and violent towards their classmates, both verbally and physically. Sleep deprivation is a huge problem; most of them are addicted to videogames to such an extent that they will stay up all night playing them and then come to school. Some of them can't afford winter coats, most of them don't eat breakfast, a few of them eat their only meal of the day in the school cafeteria. Which, in an extremely depressing way, means that food - especially warm food - is the most effective reward I can give out. They will try infinitely harder if there is a snack on the line.

And most of my students are also wracked with insecurity. They have been doing poorly in the school system for a long time, and have been told that they are bad students, that they are stupid for an equally long time. Most of them don't receive much support from home.

It sounds corny, but you'd be surprised how far something like "You can do it! You're smart!" goes when I'm trying to get my students to learn something. The reaction is often immediate. "Oh, thank you! Okay, I can do it," they say, and sit up straighter. I try to be a constant fountain of positive reinforcement. It probably doesn't make much of a difference; after all, I only see them once a week. I am only their English teacher, I can't even speak their language. I am not the place they look for unconditional support.

Sometimes I get frustrated with my students, because they put forth so little effort. Sometimes I feel like I spend all my free time trying to think up activities that will trick them into engaging. Sometimes I leave the classroom thinking I am a terrible teacher, I am not what these kids need.

But most of the time, I love them. They are crazy, they sing "Good Morning, Pah-may-la!" in opera voices out the windows of their freezing classrooms. They sometimes burst into K-Pop songs during class. And they sometimes really try, sometimes the lowest-level 1st graders try so hard and do so well with things that I know are hard for them. And I leave class smiling and proud of my students and never having felt more like Pam-Mom in all my life.

Also, let me tell you about technical high schools. There's recently been a surge of technical high school native English-speaking teachers trying to get in contact with each other, and as a result of it I've started to think more about my school's place in the overall education system. And I'm starting to realize that part of why I've felt so unprepared for this entire experience is because this is not what they trained me for at orientation. Granted, a 9-day orientation is not enough time to figure out how to teach. But by the end of orientation, I had a lot of ideas. I'd been told that most of the students I'd be teaching would probably have had private English tutoring all their lives (most Seoul students do, unless their families are extremely low-income) and would be nearly fluent by now. I had a lot of ideas; I was excited to teach my students some of the nuances of English that I find interesting. Technical high schools were barely mentioned at orientation, and when someone brought them up they were usually dismissed with something like, "If you get a tech school, good luck." No real advice.

So I was shocked when I got to my school. I couldn't use the ideas I'd been given for higher-level high schoolers, because I would lose all of my students within 2 minutes, guaranteed. I couldn't use the ideas I'd been given for elementary schoolers, because (even though the content would be at the right level) my students would hate me for treating them like children. I found myself having to come up with all my own ideas, since none of the ideas other people were putting out there would work for me or my students. How unreasonable. How was I supposed to design my own curriculum with a total of 9 days of unhelpful teacher training? No fucking wonder I've been overwhelmed.

What I mean to say is: the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education (my ultimate boss) has written off technical high schools as a lost cause, and they are not making any real attempt to train the teachers they place in these schools. Supposedly, the turnover rate of native English-speaking teachers at technical high schools is nearly 100%, which isn't that surprising given that we are given NO PREPARATION for the situation - but it also means that (supposedly) there is no one experienced enough in teaching at a technical high school to be able to train us.

I'm not sure I buy this. After all, even if there aren't any experienced native English-speaking teachers, surely it would be similarly effective to have a Korean English teacher speak to us about the things we are likely to experience in technical high schools, and to give us some idea of how to approach the lesson material. Surely they could bring in a guidance counselor to tell us about some of the struggles (mental and otherwise) that our students are likely to be going through.

Have I conveyed to you how frustrated I am about all of this? It really makes me angry how much my students are continually written off by the education system and Korean society as a whole. I want to say: "They exist, okay? They deserve to be taught well."

And all of this is part of the reason I am thinking so hard about renewing my contract at my same school next year. Partly because I love my kids, partly because: Pam-Mom, partly because I have an amazing support network in the teachers at my school, partly because I will never be satisfied with myself until I learn how to teach these students effectively, partly because someone has to learn how to give these kids what they need, and who is going to do it?