The Terrible Trio

Posted on June 14, 2006
Filed Under esl & other teaching |

Meetings with the three students who participated in the mini-outburst in class the other night were mixed.

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3 Responses to “The Terrible Trio”

  1. bighominid on June 22nd, 2006 1:03 am

    Hope you’re having a good time at the conference.

    For what it’s worth, I had my first student flip-out, though for very different reasons, this past semester. It was done in a rather cowardly manner, too: through a series of angry text messages (lots of exclamation points!!!!!!). I haven’t blogged about this yet, but probably will at some point.

    I suspect that such outbursts are going to become more frequent because South Korean kids are increasingly pampered, increasingly disrespectful, and increasingly forgetful of recent history. I have, on several occasions, been tempted to point out that this generation knows very little about pressure.

    My mother lost two of her brothers in the Korean War. Her family was shattered. She still, at age 63, has nightmares. Asking yourself, “Will I live to see tomorrow?” –that’s pressure. By that measure, even the monumental stress of getting into a decent college is nothing.

    It’s all well and good to be understanding and compassionate, but I agree: zero sympathy for the overprivileged drama queens. Glad you stuck to your guns.

    Kevin

  2. gordsellar on June 22nd, 2006 6:34 pm

    Kevin,

    I’m thinking Korean writers haven’t found a way of hammering that into the minds of young people. The writing about the separation of the nations, and the horror of the war, has been–from what I’ve read in translation–mainly so loaded with ideology and agenda that I can see people not “getting it” viscerally how this shit mattered. When I left for the Workshop, I was of the opinion that the War and the North/South division didn’t matter literarily because young people didn’t care about it.

    Now I think it matters all the more that people find new, inventive ways of hammering this shit into the brains of the young — that this shit matters, that people need to be reminded that things matter, that alternatives to the present matter. SF — whether it’s libertarian, anarchist, or even the crypto-fascism of the Golden Age — is fundamentally disastrous to the status quo, and I wish there was something like it working on the Korean mind as it has on the Western mind. Reminders of how fucking evil and awful war and totalitarianism can be, how total the loss of a culture or society can be by a simply choice.

    And I’m of the opinion that young South Koreans would probably not last a day in North Korea; that having even the faintest idea about that might illuminate what pressure really means. (Nor would I, but I’m glaringly aware of it.) This fretting about grades and an optimal number of A-pluses and what rank of job one can get, and whether one’s wife is prettiest or one can afford two kimchi fridges, all of this is nothing. Hell, if the young had their eyes opened, they might realize that even Seoul University isn’t the mecca of education, that the concentration on the top 3 or 5 unis is merely an elitist manipulation; but what would these soft kids do to tear it apart? They’re so soft, so soft.

    Ah well, as Orson Scott Card points out reviewing Bruce Sterling, the key is not revolution, but transformation. It can take time, it takes vision, it takes imagination. There’ll just have to be a few people who take it upon themselves to imagine a new world, and make it real.

    Next time an overprivileged drama queen freaks out about a grade, I’m going to remind her of how millions of people are starving to death only a few hundred kilometers away, and ask her how getting an A+ in this class will help her help them. Hell, if she can give me a credible answer, I may even give her an A+. :)

    By the way, it’s not a conference, it’s a 6-week workshop, and it’s VERY intense. But so far (3rd day done) it’s amazing.

  3. bighominid on June 26th, 2006 9:04 pm

    My bad– a workshop it is!

    Kevin

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