vacation classes

Presently, it's school vacation time in South Korea. You know what that means? Mothers throughout the country, seeing that their children are not currently subjected to an incessant barrage of formal education, are stricken with the howling fantods, fearful that even a moment of quiescence means they are falling behind their classmates, and so enroll them in more private academies, thereby ensuring that this purported vacation is actually more strenuous than when school is in session.


For me, this "vacation" period has resulted in a boost of enrollment in my adult classes. There's been an influx of high school students, some of whom are clearly attending against their wills, at the behest of their parents. This is too bad for me, because one of the major benefits of teaching adults rather than children is that your students actually want to be there. Instead, now I have a few miserable high schoolers, having their vacations withheld from them, secreting brusque answers to discussion questions meant to last the bulk of the period, whilst I, a panicked rictus grin across my face, try to goad a few more syllables out of them.

There's one girl who comes to my night class. She's actually a good sport and does what she can, but she's just exhausted. When she first came to the class, she told me that she was on her school vacation. However, I noticed every day that she was wearing her high school uniform. Naturally, I asked her why, with this being vacation, did she always have on her uniform. She explained that she was attending vacation classes. I, being unable to grasp this seemingly antithetical notion, asked for clarification. It turns out it's just what it sounds like. It's class, during vacation. It's not even fun or anything. Just school as usual, but during vacation. If you can truly understand this concept, perhaps you'll begin to understand what life is like for a Korean student.

So I've been asking this poor girl about her life for the past two weeks that she's been coming to class. I asked her today how much sleep she manages to get a night, and she answered five hours. I urged her to get more sleep each night, I tried to explain how a healthy brain requires 7 or 8 hours. A middle aged guy in the class spoke up and said that in Korea, they have a saying that the student who sleeps 4 hours achieves his goal, while the student who sleeps 5 does not. Apparently it's a common refrain from high school teachers, advising students not to sleep more than 4 hours a night.

This poor girl, attending an English academy on top of vacation classes during this nominal vacation, is, according to proverbial Korean knowledge, doomed to fail because she manages 5 hours of shut eye a night.

This is going to be one of those posts that just kinda trails off and ends.