Every Wednesday we teach “Free classes” or what some of the other teachers refer to as “Piss take classes” either way; they are not paid for, we don’t have to rush to get through the book and they are generally at a gentler pace.
My contribution to these Wednesday classes is that I get to teach 3 identical 70 minute debate classes. Following a slightly inappropriate book and encouraging discussion between a group of shy, disinterested 14 year olds. The book is inappropriate because it covers a variety of subjects that I feel should not be discussed with a group of 12-15 year olds. These subjects include abortion, unrequited love and having a stalker…not really what you want to try and explain to a group of children with English as their second language.
However last Wednesday the subject of the class was not awkward. It should have been ‘Rules, rules, rules’ and was basically about whether the students believed their parents should be able to tell them what to do. I bet you can guess what the answer to this one was…
Anyway after the first class which was like pulling teeth because they are all so painfully shy I wandered in to my second class. This class contains some of my favourite students; they are my favourites merely because of the fact THEY ACTUALLY SPEAK.
I asked them to name some rules that they have in their houses, which is how we got onto the subject of toilets. It started fairly innocently as they were informing me a rule in their house was that they had to flush the toilet, which is fair enough really. This conversation then progressed onto a rule in their house which struck me as bizarre and perhaps a little gross. ‘Do not put the toilet paper down the toilet’. It took quite a while for me to decipher what they were trying to tell me…incidentally the Korean for toilet roll is “Doo roo ma ri” (They were delighted I seemed eager to learn Korean) they also seemed highly amused at my disgust that they did not put their toilet paper down the toilet.
The longer I am in Korea the more I am learning about living with other cultures. Not just the Korean culture; but Americans, Canadians…other British people. I always thought before I came out here I was quite a tolerant person but it seems the world still has the ability to shock me.
The students found my shock very amusing, one of the more vocal students in the class started shouting “CULTURE SHOCK CULTURE SHOCK” at me. How very right she was.
Happily this then lead to an hour discussion between myself and the students about the differences between our cultures and why we thought they did things differently. Ok, so we didn’t actually get to speak a lot about ‘Rules, rules, rules’ but we actually had an interesting debate, I learnt some more Korean and the students showed how very accepting they were of other cultures. I doubt it would have been the same in a Western classroom with a Korean teacher!
