death

Korean students seem to have a strong fascination with death. Maybe all students have it, but I just wouldn't know because I only deal with the Korean ones. 


Today I had a class with some younger kids, ones who don't really know a lot of English. Today was a project day, which meant I just give them some paper and crayons and they draw a picture based on the unit we've been studying. This unit's theme was something like "Our Town" so I told them all to just draw pictures where they live and buildings nearby. I divided them up into groups of two, so each could would draw half the picture, then we glue the pictures together and, I don't know, hang them on the wall or something.

The class goes on and I stare at the clock and intermittently check on the kids. I notice this one group of, oh let's call them not exactly world-beaters, working pretty heavy with the red and orange crayons. I take a look at their picture and see that they've drawn, rather crudely of course, an apartment building with someone on top of it smoking a cigarette. The person has thrown their cigarette off the building, which has landed on a grocery store, and set the grocery store ablaze. A few massive stick figures, also ablaze, are fleeing the grocery store, while others lie motionless on the ground, having already succumbed to this lamentable conflagration.

In another instance, a couple weeks ago I had a speaking class with two middle school girls. There are typically a few other boys in their class, but on this day all but these two typically nonvocal girls were absent. The class is already kind of a disaster because half of their textbook is in Korean, so I never know what the instructions or directions are. Some of it's easy though, such as the parts where they just have to look at a picture and describe what's happening. There's another part as well, where there are two pictures which are sort of beginning a story, and then the third frame is empty and the kids are supposed to speak aloud how they imagine the story might end.

For example, on this day the first picture was of a woman in an office, clearly overworked and stressed. The next frame was of that same woman receiving some plane tickets that said "Hawaii" on them from a travel agent. So now it's time for the kids to speak aloud what the third picture might be. I ask the one girl, and she says something like, "The woman packs her suitcase and goes to the airport. When she gets to the airport she realizes she forgot her ticket. She can't go to Hawaii so she goes back to work." Pretty glum. Now it's the other girl's turn. She says, "The woman gets on the airplane. After 20 minutes the engines fail. Everyone is scared and screaming. The plane crashes into the ocean and everyone dies."

The best part is that these two girls aren't saying this stuff for the fun of it. Neither of them crack a smile while they spin their misanthropic yarns. This is just how, after 8 years of the Korean education system, they view the world.