Teacher, He's Crazy!

Let me tell you about Korean classroom discipline.


It’s Friday. Its still cold and icy in the middle of March. I can’t believe it, but I’m actually yearning for the rainy, mud puddle East Tennessee Marches that, although damp, were warm enough to wear sandals and shorts. I got all nostalgic for my flip flops--the ones that shot rain water dirt up the backs of my legs on my way to class last spring.

Now, on my way to a different kind of class, I try to avoid the iced over puddles sitting slick between the holes in the gravel, my winter boots not quite keeping my toes from feeling the cold. On my ways to class I have to dodge kids, ice, mud. Mud mud mud because our school is under construction and Seoul citizens don't understand the value of grass.

Fridays are bittersweet: I’ve got the weekend just around the corner (a sweet ass St. Patrick’s Day celebration in Itaewon where my friend Ian is making his DJ debut), but to get there I’ve got to teach five classes of fifth graders. On our way to class 5-6, Jenny (my co-teacher) reminds me that this class has the infamous ADHD kid lurking in its midst.



(Me, my friend Ian and some of his girlfriends at Roofers in Itaewon. It was a combined St. Patrick's Day Party and 6th month anniversary for those of us who arrived at the end of August.)

Now I’ve heard about this “ADHD” kid. The students say he’s crazy. The teachers pity and slightly fear him. They often talk about “the boy with the disease" who is supposedly taking his medicine to no effect.

I don’t know what the big deal’s about. I come from the good ole' land of the free-to-have-whatever-disease-you-want. It seems to me like every other kid in school had ADD or ADHD. Hell, we even knew the medicine names—Ritalin was fashionable in elementary school...sometime around late middle school Adderall became the new drug of choice. We knew that ADHD kids were just like us, if not a bit more fidgety, and simply needed an outlet for all their energy. They weren’t dumber than us. They weren’t crazy.



Jenny and I get to our classroom late in typical Korean-style fashion. This suits me just fine because every minute late is a minute less that I have to teach. We begin our lesson and it goes pretty well. I recognize some students from the fourth grade who were pretty high level and usually say hello to me in the hall. Our lessons are set up like this:

Introduction: Hello class./Hello Teacher….How are you?....How’s the weather?

Development: Introduce students to lesson material. Do the CD from the book which consists of dialogs and repetition exercises. Play a game.

We get to the game activity at the end of every class. This particular game required us to put the students in groups of four. Then each group was supposed to write down as many responses to “How are you?” in English that they could think of in a specified amount of time. Usually, this meant assigning one student to be the writer in each group. Having some students write while the others contributed orally served both the advanced kids and the lower level kids' interests. At the end, we would tally the scores on the board and give the winners a stamp in a chart at the back of the book.

So there’s one winner and six losers. We had just declared the winner and moved onto the next activity, when the ADHD boy began tearing up his partner’s papers and throwing them all over the ground. Several students turned around to watch. I stopped talking, thinking Jenny would discipline him. Jenny, however, tried to continue class. So it was like this: Jenny trying to teach up at the front of the classroom, drawing the students' attention to the tv screen, while the boy went on a silent tearing rampage in the back of the classroom. He tore up the girl’s worksheets and kicked her chair, shoved her and threw her pencils on the ground. I, apparently, could do little more than stand off to the side with my mouth open, looking as if I might do something. Finally I told Jenny “I think we should do something about that.”



She sighed and walked over to where the boy and girl were sitting. But instead of removing him from the classroom, Jenny took the girl from her seat and brought her over to the other side of the room where she stood awkwardly in the upper front corner.

ADHD boy began throwing the girl’s pencils, books, bag and jacket onto the floor. This made the girl, who was now the center of attention at the front of the classroom, begin to cry. Jenny, again, stood by the girl and wasn’t sure what to do. So I said, “Jenny, if you want to take him out of the classroom I’ll continue class on my own.”

Note: Us foreign teachers had no prior training on classroom management. When I asked questions about classroom management to veteran foreign teachers and SMOE administration, the general response I got was to “let the Korean teachers handle it.” It’s a weird time for Korean classroom management because physical punishment was just made illegal and there is no other system emerging to take its place. Furthermore, most teachers still use this form of punishment even though they’re not supposed to.



So anyway, by the time Jenny decided to follow my advice about the boy’s removal from the classroom, he had begun to hit other students around him. (By hit I mean hit in the chest and shoulders. Also, the students would grab his hands and they would push against each other as if in a test of strength). Some students were picking up the girl’s stuff and holding onto it to save it from the ADHD boy’s wrath. Higher level english language students were apologizing to me, saying “Sorry teacher, he’s crazy. I’m sorry you have to see this.”

After a while, it became apparent that Jenny was simply hovering around him. We had wasted a full twenty minutes of class time and our period was almost over. I managed to ask Jenny why she wasn’t removing him from the classroom. She replied “He’s too strong.” I was debating on whether or not I to just pick the boy up kicking and screaming and carry him out of the classroom, but I decided against it. I didn’t want his parents to accuse me of anything, and I didn’t feel like I could adequately defend myself (because of the language barrier) should his parents complain to the administration that I somehow acted with misconduct. I suggested that we call a male teacher to come in and help us with the boy, but Jenny replied that the homeroom teacher of this class would be back soon (like we were holding out, waiting for someone who could control him to come back).

Right around the time some of the boys from the classroom were getting up to help restrain the rogue boy, the homeroom teacher returned. She was about 5’5 and weighed 90 lbs. Jenny looked relieved. If the circumstances were different I would have laughed.

The homeroom teacher managed to drag the boy outside by grappling with him. She wrestled both arms under his arm pits and more or less hustled him into the hall. A couple of boys from the class helped clear the way (because all the children were up out of their seats by this point) and a couple more were helping her carry him out. Once they got out into the hall, several students rushed the door. I finally opened my mouth and told them all to sit down and close the door, but not before a few of them went out into the hall. Once we had finally gotten the class to settle down Jenny told me it was time for us to leave. So we left.

Outside in the hall, Jenny talked to the homeroom teacher who gave up her struggle and let go of ADHD boy. He immediately lumbered back into the room and started shoving students around. I told Jenny I’d meet her back at the office and got the eff outta there.



For me, that class period was hell because I felt that it was completely out of control. Later I learned that the general consensus was that his homeroom teacher was so skinny because the ADHD boy ran her ragged. (I saw her last year, she was just as much of a stick then as now). I felt like there were several things wrong with this situation and I will now list them:

1.“ADHD” is not a correct diagnosis, or at least it’s an incomplete diagnosis, for this boy's condition. ADHD is simply a term for diagnosing someone who has trouble paying attention and has excessive energy. Not someone who has targeted rage episodes at a peer for half an hour in the middle of class.

2.the reason this child is misdiagnosed probably has something to do with the fact that mental illness is not readily or openly discussed in Korea. Up until recently it was something one ignored or, if it was too big of a problem to be ignored, kept out of public site. This means there is probably insufficient research into mental health issues, especially issues pertaining specifically to the Korean population and the added cultural effects of Confucianism.

3.The home room teacher was obviously not equipped to deal with this boy’s classroom interruptions. The boy should have been assigned to a male home room teacher’s classroom.

4. There should have been a method set in place by the administration for dealing with this kind of situation or misbehavior. There was no recourse available to the homeroom teacher. She couln’t take the boy anywhere when he was interrupting class. There is no “taking you to the principal’s office” option in Korean Elementary Schools. The administration is above such duties. There is no detention room or even school officials to deal with this kind of severe misbehavior. In most cases, there is not even a classroom disciplinary code in effect. Teachers usually avoid discipline by instituting a merit system instead. Or they discipline on a case by case basis.

Now, I want to address why there is no set disciplinary code in the classrooms. I think one reason is that Koreans expect that the students will discipline each other. By this I mean that there is always an all important and dominating SHAME factor. Well-behaved students are expected to keep their not-so-well behaved friends and colleagues in line. And students, for the most part, do this because they are worried about how their class as a whole looks to the teacher, to outsiders, to their parents and to the administration. For example, in the situation above, the students kept apologizing to me over and over. They were worried about how this one boy made their class as a whole look. They tried to make him seem like a rogue figure, calling him ‘crazy boy.’ When he got out of hand, the 10 year old boys in class felt it was their duty to help their homeroom teacher by helping to manhandle the boy out the door.

There is one third grade class in particular where two boys sit up front kind of close to where I stand to teach. One of them is a good student and is usually quiet, but he’s friends with another boy who sits behind him. This boy likes to talk a lot while I’m talking and rock in his seat and do generally bad boy stuff. I know that all I have to do is look at that boy when he is turned around or talking and his friend in front of him will smack his desk and tell him to pay attention. I mean, crazy, right?

The crime rate in Korea is very low. The Koreans contribute this to the fact that there are no guns allowed in Korea. But I think it’s because of the SHAME factor. People don’t commit crimes because they are afraid that if they get caught, the shame brought on them and their family would be unbearable.

The suicide rate in Korea is very high. Young people, in the prime of their lives, often kill themselves during college or even high school exam week because they are afraid of failing their parents. There is a sort of urban legend story about students at a prestigious school in Seoul who got caught smoking cigarettes at their school and all jumped off a building. SHAME is potent stuff.


Here is my random list of the day:

1.The Yellow Dust came to Korea. It clouded out the sun and reminded me of the Matrix (remember that the future humans had to block out the sun so the machines couldn’t function anymore? But then the machines just used humans?) Anyway, all the Koreans stayed inside because they said it was super bad for your lungs and stuff. I didn’t notice anything except for the fact that the whole damn day (which was a Saturday wouldn’t you know?)was depressing as hell.

2.I have my first Korean test in like an hour! I’m so excited. I hope I pass. I studied a lot yesterday but didn’t study today because I wrote this post instead. Fail. I don’t have class next week but I’m not telling my school because I still wanna leave school early. (they gave me permission to leave early for Korean class)

3.I ordered my bride’s maid dress for lucie’s wedding!!!!!!!!!!





(Here are my choices for bride's maids dresses. which one do you think is better?)

4.I just got back from a third grade class. A boy was pestering a girl all period…flipping her the bird and calling her fat. Yong-eun simply kept yelling at him to turn back around in his seat and sit down, but didn’t draw attention to the fact that he was calling the girl names or anything. She bore up well under his constant torment and kept playing the game (usually kids who are being made fun of start crying or shut down and put their head on their desk). Ultimately, Yong-eun ended up using her rewards system to punish him. We have a chart in which we have each third grade class represented by their class number. The class numbers move up the chart according to how good they are. If they are bad, the class numbers fall. Right after this boy kept talking, she moved this class’s number down below all the others. Immediately the class fell silent and another boy began chastising the mean boy. On our way out, the kids (who usually say goodbye and get up to put their books away) was quiet, and the kids sat still as if waiting for us to leave.

5. I just bit into a rice cake and it spewed rice cake juice (???) all over my computer. The Rice cake was a present from someone to the teachers, not sure who.


6. For more information on ADHD, here is a helpful photodocumentary i stumbled upon:

http://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/slideshow-adhd-in-children