Much to my surprise

When I first started thinking about coming to Korea to teach, I started paying attention to the stories I  heard a bit more closely. When it came to schools I heard a lot about orderly classrooms, how Asian students in general were much more studious as well as much more orderly and respectful in the classroom. I was left with the impression of rows of uniformed students sitting rigidly in their seats and participating appropriately.

Yeah, not quite.

Teaching elementary school here means that I teach converstational English to students in grades 3 through 6. In my first week I introduced myself to the students with the help of a powerpoint presentation and then took some time to go over the rules of MY classroom. I was surprised to have a student raise his hand at the end and ask "what will you do if we don't follow your rules?" To be honest I was a little taken aback by this question, but I understood it. He wanted to know if I would hit them. 

Yes, corporal punishment is practiced in the Korean classroom. It didn't take long to see it in action either. In my first week I seen students hit on the hands for failing to complete homework. I seen kids get a rap on the head from a stick for speaking out in class. I even seen a teacher punch a student in the gut. 

Shocking to say the least.

So here was this student asking if I would act in the same manner. 

I of course outlined some disciplinary measures that I was confortable with ending with sending the student to the Vice Principal. I'm not too sure what he thought of all this other than the realization that I would not hit them.

Having now spent four months in the Korean classroom I'm astounded at how the classroom is run. Now obviously I can only speak for those classes which I am involved directly, but overall I think that much of the time organized chaos would be considered success. 

I've been punched by kids, had kids going around saying "Heil, Hitler", kids running around giving one another the finger, kids saying "fuck" thruoghout the class. It seems that the level of expectation is either undefined for the students in their educational environment or that their knowledge of my unwillingness to do what the Korean teachers do, hit them, means that they are much more willing to push the boundaries with me and in my classroom.

Given this context imagine my surprise to learn that corporal punishment in schools was done away with a decade ago!

Here is a brief excerpt from an article which talks about one grade six teacher and her call for corporal punihsment to be reinstated in the classroom:

“Once class starts it’s a disaster. The kids giggle over their cellphones. So the teacher takes them away. One of the kids looks at her with hurt eyes and says, ‘I’m going to call the police’. The student gets angrier as the teacher goes on with the lesson. The students write the answers on the blackboard, one by one. Carrying the chalk, the student says to her ‘fuck you’ [in English]. All the students start laughing uncontrollably. The student has a wide grin at doing such a great thing. So she just had to go on. The teacher whacks the kid on the head. ‘Screw you!’ the kid says [in Korean].”

[...]

Why is this, you wonder? The first shackle placed on teachers’ ability to teach normally was the abolition of corporal punishment 10 years ago. The inability to use corporal punishment has become teachers’ weak point. Mrs. Kim stressed, “with no way to punish students who violate the rules, the school becomes a lawless place with no control over them. We have to allow teachers to use corporal punishment or expulsion when necessary.”  Beginning in elementary school you can clearly see the effects of an inability to punish violations of the rules.

I find the notion that she does not practice corporal punishment hard to believe, but perhaps she doesn't. I mean I've personally witnessed it happening, I've read about it numerous times. I've heard about it numerous times as well. Two instances stand out, neither of which I personally witnessed. The first I read about in a news article that outlined how a teacher swatted a grade 4 girl student so hard that after two weeks there were still welts on her derrier. The teacher in question was demoted from being a home room teacher. A punishment that I'm led to believe would be greeted more with relief than anything else. The second instance was relayed to me by a friend. A particular teacher was known for his unique style of corporal punishment; he would kick the students in the chest. Well on one particular instance, he did so and cracked the ribs of a student. His punishment was to pay the hospital bills of the student and was seen kicking students a week later.

In my opinion, and perhaps I'm coming off as being some Western Elitist here, but the entire Korean educational system needs to be abolished and rebuilt.

Unsupervised and unregulated corporal punishment, schooling that lasts from 9am till 12am, standardardized testing that has Korean students committing suicide as young as age 8 all speak out concerning a system that is broken and damaging to its citizens. 

Of course Korea is not the only country in the world where corporal punishment is practiced in the classroom. This comes from Egypt:

An Egyptian court has sentenced a schoolteacher to six years in jail for beating a pupil to death because he had not done his homework.

Maths teacher Haitham Nabeel Abdelhamid, 23, took Islam Amr Badr outside the classroom and hit him violently in the stomach.

The 11-year-old boy fainted and later died in hospital of heart failure in the city of Alexandria.

The court was told the boy had four broken ribs.

Abdelhamid was convicted of manslaughter.

He said he only meant to discipline the pupil and did not mean to hurt anyone.

The teacher's lawyer was quoted as saying in court: "Hitting [a child] is not banned in schools and my client did not break the law."

They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, well I'm gaining a real appreciation for being Canadian.