wang-ta

Someday I'd like to have a job that provides a consistent sense of accomplishment. In this job, such feelings are transient and sparse, and typically only occur with younger students. When you have students who 3 months prior didn't know the alphabet, but now are reading sentences on their own, you feel like you've actually done something. But with older kids who don't seem to care what you have to say and generally ignore you, the fruits of your labor aren't noticeable, probably because said fruit died on the vine.

But I sympathize with the older ones, the middle schoolers. I get frequent reminders that their lives are pretty drab, relatively speaking. It's all work and little play for them.

Today, at the beginning of one of my middle school classes, I had to give a vocabulary test. They have these tests twice a week - each day they come to my academy. The tests consist of 30 words they are to have memorized. If they get more than 5 wrong, they have detention and must stay after class, sometimes as late as 10:30pm. Personally, I think forcing a kid who has to go to school at 8am, stay at an academy until 10:30pm is a form of child abuse. I genuinely wish I didn't work for and make money via a system that does that, which is why I freely allow kids to cheat on the tests to earn a passing mark.

I have nothing to do with these tests. I don't make them or grade them. They have nothing to do with my classes other than that they eat into my class time. This is kind of annoying, because anytime a kid has a question about it, I don't have the answers because I honestly don't know anything about them. Today I had a kid ask me a question about it, and I said something like, "I really don't know. Nobody tells me about these." The way they interpreted my response was that nobody in the academy tells me anything, or, nobody talks to me. Some 9th grade girls in the class latched onto this perceived response, and asked, "Awww, teacher. Are you wang-ta?"

"Wang-ta" is a Korean word that means a bullied student. A student who has no friends and is an outcast is called wang-ta. They got a kick out of imagining me as wang-ta, and began saying things to me like, "Think of your mother and father," and, "You have your whole life ahead of you."

I was surprised at this, because they were actually saying perfect English sentences. I asked them how they learned those sentences, and they replied that those are things that their school tells them quite frequently. Now, first of all, it depresses me that these are things that these kids must be told at all. My memories of middle school aren't exactly vivid, but I don't recall being actively told not to kill myself. Second, it depresses me even more that these kids are told this so much that they have the phrases memorized in a whole other language.

But they do need to be told these things. Overworked, over-stressed, bullied kids all across this country won't stop jumping off their apartment buildings. It's a massive problem, and I can't help but feel that I, working for an English academy, am part of it. But the academy system here isn't likely to change. The kids will continue to be overworked and over-stressed. Stopping school violence and bullying is the main objective, which they aim to do by installing more surveillance cameras in classrooms. Really, that's the idea here. To me, a much better solution would be to allow these kids to have more moments in their lives in which they aren't at school, or an academy, or studying. Give them more time to play sports or games or whatever hobby gives them some enjoyment in their lives.

However, reducing education hours is a risk they aren't willing to take. They are a lot of natural resources on the Korean peninsula, but unfortunately most of them are in the North. As such, South Koreans view their minds as their most valuable natural resources. The future of their country is dependent on the bright minds of tomorrow. Through this lens, teenage suicide could be seen as brutally Darwinian, separating the what from the chaff, so to speak.

While the academy system here is dying, it's not dying nobly. It's not being put down out of compassion for its subjects, its death is more ironic than that. It can be expensive in this country to keep a kid ahead of the curve. Parents have to shell out a lot of dough to give their kids the perceived advantages that various academies promise. These added costs to having a kid are causing South Koreans to stop reproducing. Enrollment in academies is going down, because Koreans are having less kids, because it's too expensive to enroll kids in all these academies. It's like a snake eating its own tail.

So, I don't know. This post has been all over the place, I think. I just wanted to tell the story of some students jokingly telling me not to kill myself.