It's approximately 3:30 in the morning here in Korea but I wanted to post this before going to bed....
Tonight I decided to give my aunt a phone call before leaving work while I had access to a phone and ended up talking to my cousin as well. And very unexpectedly, my cousin and I decided to meet up for some coffee. He picked me up from work and we walked for some time, looking for a coffee shop that was still open but quiet. We sat and talked for quite some time. Did I mention that I hadn't seen him since I was maybe 10-years-old??
Anyway...while we were chit-chatting, we saw a little girl who appeared to be no more than four-years-old wandering around the coffee shop while her mother watched her from her seat. And it was freaking midnight. Seriously, Korean children don't seem to have a bedtime.
This led to me talking to my cousin about how late Korean kids seem to go to bed, while in America, children have a bedtime of no later than 8pm. And he said something that of course I should've known beforehand: kids here have no choice especially since they're technically in school until at least 9pm. Hello Eseul...you teach until 10. So of course they don't have a bedtime. Well, I guess there are a good amount of American children who go to bed late, too, but I highly, highly doubt that it's by reason of school work. Probably video games. Or television.
But the point of all this is that kids here...their lives are practically run by school. Not by choice, but by the expectations set by their parents. The mothers at our academy are a whole lot more interested in the students' progress than the students themselves. They get incredibly upset when their child doesn't improve and progress to a higher class by the next semester. It's heartbreaking to know how much stress these kids must be enduring from all the scolding and pressure they get from their parents. And what does that result in? Suicides. Korea is known for its disturbingly high rate of suicides. But can you conceive elementary school and middle school aged children factoring into that number?
My cousin told me about a recent story of a child who could never meet his/her mother's academic expectation. After failing and failing to meet 95% and above, he/she finally achieved a perfect score on an exam. With his/her report was a note that read something along the lines of, "Is this good enough?" and that day jumped off a building.
What....what is going on??
It hurts.
Even more so, I want to help them to never stop dreaming. That's what kept me going. School really, really isn't everything (although I wouldn't say that to them). If anything, it's getting in their way of dreaming their innocent dreams. I can't change the way the parents here think. That's out of my control. But I hope I can somehow...lessen the burden of these children, some being my own students. Today I had this realization that teaching isn't all that bad. I'm actually enjoying it and my heart is becoming fuller by seeing how much influence, even if not much, I can have on these kids. I just hope and pray for opportunities to love on them.
Now I appreciate even more why my parents moved us to the States. They had mentioned that it wasn't just the opportunities out there, but the freedom in our education; we won't be bound by it as students in Korea are. So many things to process.....
{eSeul}
:)
ReplyDelete