One Cup Pity With A Pinch Of Disappointment.

Ok, I understand that these girls are in the lowest level class in their grade, meaning that they represent the worst students in the school... but honestly, when you can't focus on a game of BINGO for more than 20 seconds, something is wrong with your brain. I was even offering a candy prize to the winner. You would seriously rather stare blankly into space for 15 minutes than participate in one of the lowest-brain-power, least-effort-required games known to man with a chocolate incentive to boot?

So I played pronunciation Bingo with my kids where they fill in their boxes with words from minimal pairs. I had literally said two words, I swear to God about 20 seconds had passed, and this girl starts filling in every space with her pencil until her notebook page is solid black. Then she holds it up to her friend triumphantly and goes "Bingo! Bingo! Bingo! Bingo! Every bingo!" Then she assumes her typical slouched position and goes into total mental hibernation for the rest of class. Unbelievable.

I guess while I'm on the subject of pet peeves in class, I absolutely can't stand it when students are dismissive. It takes EFFORT for some of these girls to be as ignorant as they are of what is going on in class, and that's not a frustrated and bitter exagerration. Here's what I mean: every morning I ask the class "How are you today?" and everyone will scream out answers ranging from "Fine" to "You are so gorgeous!" Then, over the course of the class, students will lose interest and go into cranial shutdown like I said before. I'll walk right up to a student 10 minutes later and ask her "How are you?", a question that I am absolutely certain she understands. It takes her 3 seconds just to realize I'm talking to her, and so I repeat the question... "How are you, today?" She honestly has not even tried listening to the question, and immediately, I'm talking milliseconds, turns to her friend and asks "What did he say?" Her friend will either translate "How are you?" into Korean or, more commonly, have absolutely no idea herself.

So what's the response when a student has no idea what's going on? It's rarely the reticent silence that you'd expect in an American language classroom, or even the sensible "I don't understand." Many of them answer "How are you?" with "Ok, thank you. Goodbye."

Blatantly disrespectful. It's simply telling me "I don't know why I'm here, I don't want to be here, and you can't make me learn anything I don't want to. Now move along."

I'll spare you my bitter commentary on the Korean education system until a later time. Better to leave this post oriented on the hollow, disillusioned products of their infernal machine.

Fin.