Life in Korea is pretty easy. Assuming homestay life and life at school are decent, there isn't much to worry about (besides NK attacks and nuclear fallout from a full blown meltdown in Japan I suppose). The one hardship I'll remember about Korea won't be the food, the language, the constant stares or the culture shock. All of those "hardships" pale in comparison because I had prepared myself for these things. More or less I knew what to expect and I dealt with them to the best of my ability.
Now that the second semester is starting, and I have some time to reflect, I can confidently say that I'm a far better teacher on day 1 of the 2nd semester than I was on day 1 of the 1st semester. In the beginning I was bad. I didn't know what I was doing at all. Now I would like to think that I'm doing something positive at my school when many of the other teachers clearly don't care. However what I'm getting at is my biggest challenge in Korea. There are about 20-25 children with learning disabilities at my school. We all have shy students, students that just don't get it or students that really don't want to be there. I've talked to a bunch of other ETAs and from what I've gathered, they either don't have the same number of students with learning disabilities or they just don't have them in their classes. I teach every single student at my school so that includes the students in the special education classes. From what I understand, they aren't mixed in with the rest of the students except for certain classes like English.
My frustration here is that I'm absolutely lost and I don't know what I should be doing for them. Many of them have behavioral issues so I have to spend much of the class focusing on these 1 or 2 students while neglecting the rest of the class. That isn't quite fair to the other students in the class, but on the other hand my other option is to follow my co-teacher's advice and "put these students in the corner and leave them alone." Again, I have no real teacher training let alone any special education training but I know this isn't the right way to deal with the situation. However, in a conversational class, activities are key. It's hard to explain an activity to a bunch of hyperactive middle school aged children, but add in these challenged students and my job becomes infinitely more difficult. Compounding the situation is that learning disabilities are still a bit of a taboo subject in Korea and these students are often treated in the worst way by their classmates. They're yelled at, laughed at, ridiculed and just made fun of incessantly. Then if I try to scold these troublemakers, they don't understand me well enough to see why the way they're acting is wrong. I'm pretty good at disciplining students for being too chatty but when the situation requires a moral dimension I can't get my point across.
This post may seem like I'm complaining but really I wanted to share what has been the most difficult part of my grant year. It's something that gets swept over at my school because no one wants to talk about it. Instead, when I give speaking tests they won't even send these students to take the test and I'm told to just give them a 50 because it's "school policy". In what world can that possibly be an official policy?
