TWO KOREAN FORTRESSES OF INDIFFERENCE: CO-TEACHERS AND THE NATIONAL TEXTBOOK
Lately I find myself really wishing I could change my K-co-teach.
She doesn't present my case at all to administration, I feel. Having been at the same previous school for five semesters, I'd forgotten to establish the climate most useful in Korean-to-foreigner work relationships - a passive-aggressive war of attrition. But I'm back on the ball starting Monday.
So far this is the way all of my concerns have gone... (minus the imagining part which only developed recently) If I walked to her and said, 'I have an axe in my forehead and it really hurts! Could you help me?' then going by the way she's mediated everything else to date, I'd have to conclude that she would then have a long meeting with the administration while I bled, and then come back, sit me down and in torturously slow yet perfect English, explain to me that they have determined that the reason I am suffering is because I have an axe in my forehead. And that would be the end of discussion. She would sit there, smugly accomplished, dutiful, suddenly interested in inspecting her attire for any possible dust, quietly waiting for me to go away, possibly wondering why I haven't yet.
I would sit there and (only for the briefest moment) imagine the fascinating and beautifully-spotted red mess it would make on her prim black suit were she suddenly decapitated at that very moment.
I calmly tell her that I already knew that when I spoke to her and could she please help me and she would say, 'sorry you have to suffer that.' That's what talking to my co-teacher about every issue is like. I don't think there was any doggie-doo in the small welcome cake I gave at the beginning of the year, but maybe I should have taste-tested it first just to be sure.
It's too bad that war of attrition (i.e. until the principal notices *and* decides the atmosphere needs to change (and that can be a long time unless you're an especially gifted person at bringing about change even across languages)) seems to be the only way for foreigners to get things moving forward in this country's teachers' rooms. But I'll be fine, I've decided. I've still got the battle armor locked away in the storage room somewhere. Ah here they are: selective language difficulties in requests for favors, the policy of saying yes but doing what you were going to do anyway regardless of what you just said, and of course the golden rule in Korea: it's better to say "sorry" afterward, than "may I?" beforehand. They still fit well.
Discussing problems embedded in the Korean national English textbook is kind of the same experience. EFL teachers of many stripes, young or old all seem to be united in their hatred of the series, which runs from grade 3 to grade 6 and does not start with any alphabet or phonics, but rips straight into 'My name is Minsu' from no precedent (unless you count Hangeul) (which of course ought to be a no-brainer for Korean toddlers, right? Just think back to your first experience with any non-arabic letter-based language. Did it not just immediately jump out at you too? No? Well we can't all be blessed with the chromosomes I guess. )
On my earlier point, I heard today about a fellow waygookin ELI who asked his co-teacher to get the IT guy to fix his projector and a week later she said, "Oh, the IT checked your internet, it's fine." Great, but he wanted the projector fixed! I'm sure that if that IT note were just scribbled out in Korean, it would probably have been done faster and handled correctly. How frustrating it must be for non-fluent speakers of Korean to be here.
But as regards the national textbook, I've had a hate-love relationship with it. Yet even in the dark of night, a light appears to have come. Let me explain.
I hated the national textbook (for the subject of English) when I first arrived. And on its own, yes it's quite awful. Zero strategic competence promoted, next to zero socio-linguistic competence promoted. I say next to zero because the applicable situations for use of its target language are obvious and well-presented, but because none of the necessary pliability/removeability of the language is introduced, no near-parallel situations and no other situations in which most of the target language could be useful are studied, explored, understood, or even imagined. It just does not reflect the way language is used, and so does not help at all in the natural process by which humans are going to dissect and use the language naturally anyway.
It's almost approached like programming, the way a robot would try to use language... patiently waiting, perhaps eternally, for extremely narrow prerequisites to be met in order to summon the studied target language recording. And although we're dealing with humans who should be able to see that and jump over it, unfortunately, with no hint of reality (i.e. bendability) in the lessons, this rigid army-method is what's promoted - indeed, it's what's rewarded in Korean English language classrooms.
Having acknowledged that, I have to say that my relationship with the national textbooks has changed drastically this year due largely to my elementary school co-teachers having published their own excellent companion workbook (student workbook and teacher's guide) which bridges a lot of gaps, and secondly the enormous amount of work that the twenty-one school teachers leading grades 4 through 6 have done here to have all materials made, properly boxed, labeled and shelved for easy reference.
All of the textbook lessons now have at least two (and some lessons as many as four) supplementary periods, both pre-lesson preps and post-lesson work (and sometimes mid-lesson) for the standard four-periods-per-lesson textbook series. And what they do is great - instead of eight cards for one-line bingo, we usually have twelve which you can do a lot more with of course. Pre- and post-lessons consistently design each unit to move from controlled learning to an end result of open or uncontrolled learning i.e. independent composition, open substitution drills, role-plays and basically freer use of the language. It's not as free as it could be, but it's a lot better than what the national textbook would leave you with. I'm thinking of making or buying a copy of each grade and bringing it to Gwangju for the next teacher's meeting and showing what my lesson plans have started to look like. In short, I am no longer dreading my textbook lessons but look forward to them. However, they still need to go a step further than they do.
Another thing is that I've started to develop a small running inventory of the unwritten but high-currency values that Koreans having in estimating what constitutes good classroom games in experimentation. I've started, therefore, to bend the rules a bit with variations on their old workhorses, knowing a bit better how they relate to the national textbook.
So my concept of the national textbook has changed. Now if I could just get the co-teacher changed, I'd be all set.