Happy Halloween from Korea!

So the past few weeks I've told you ALL about this place without telling you much about...this place.  For an example of what I mean, think of your best friend.  how do you describe him or her?  Is he tall with blonde hair?  Does she have long hair and blue eyes?  Is he the guy in the red shirt? ( or  "was he the guy in the red shirt?" if you're a star trek fan).  Did she have the long, overly elaborate name that either means she lived in the 1460s or her parents don't get out much?  We forget how much of even our basic ways of describing who we're talking about are based on coming from an individualistic society. 
Korea is not exactly as diverse as America.  It's hard to explain what it's like to walk down the streets of a major city and see only one ethnic group.  I get attention just for being of a different race.  It's really incredible.  But it goes further than that.
Yes, very dark brown hair and brown eyes describes 98% of the people I see.
But school uniforms further erase personal lines.  And almost every single school has them.
And what if I went on to say that these schools also require school haircuts for both boys and girls?
And every family name I've heard is one syllable, while the first names are two.
So how do you describe someone here without all the factors we take for granted?  Well one of my students was trying to tell me about another and described her as the girl with small eyes.

I'm not gonna touch that one.

Either way, the culture is so far divorced from our belief that individuality is an ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY part of life, it still shocks me sometimes. 


On a completely unrelated note, I did have a fun and enlightening experience with a class.  I'd like to hear your thoughts on it because I may be losing perspective on the issue.  When talking to one of my upper-level classes, I had them do a simulation where they decided how to run a government.  Their top priorities? 
1. Providing care for the elderly
2. A strong military
3. Medical and technological research. 
Other options on the list included free hospitals, college grants to students, free k-12 public schools, and even sanitation services.  Ever-interesting.  I'm not sure I could pinpoint the answers an American school would give as to what the government should spend its money on, but I'm intrigued to hear your thoughts as to how we would rank it.  I may have them play the lifeboat game next.  THAT will be a challenging day.

I'd like to leave you with one more story, in the spirit of halloween.  It's a korean ghost story that all the children down to nine years old knew.  It goes something like this
A middle school is preparing for the end of the year, and the students in the classrooms are aware of the rankings- who is the number one student, who is second, who is third.  On one of the last few days of the school year, the number two student invites the number one student up for a rooftop celebration of how much butt the two of them kicked on the school.  Except the stakes are a little higher than that, you see.  The number one student has a much more promising future because of the rank, and the number two knows this.  And as they toast each other on the rooftop, 2 pushes 1 off the roof.  The class is in mourning as the school year wraps up, and when the final exams are less than a week away, 2 is studying alone in the building late one night.  It's storming outside (as outside is wont to do in these stories) and when number two looks out, and sees something strange silhouetted by a flash of lightning, this genre-unaware student pops over for a look.  Peering out the window into the darkness, unable to see anything, the student is shocked when the lightning flashes again, showing the eyes of student 1 staring right back through the glass.  Student 1 reaches through the window and grabs 2 by the throat, pulling both of them to a very poetic end.

The moral of this story could be one of either two things.  It clearly shows how much pressure is on these students.  When the children are pushed so hard every day to attend multiple schools and fight for their life in an ever-more-competetive school system, it breaks them, and costs them their childhood.  It hurts somewhere inside my chest to see a 10-year-old leaving school at five oclock (her second school of the day) and I ask her if she's headed home now only to be be told that she is headed to another school.  There's no doubt in my mind that the first lesson we can take from this story is a warning of the dangers of such a high-pressure school system.


The second lesson is always be student number 3.

'Til next time,
Jeff-Teacher