Recommendations for Students

I’ve just finished the first class-and-a-half worth of testing for the week. I have a couple of recommendations for students:

• If you find English difficult, then I recommend studying harder, and more, as a solution to the problem. Not studying, I find, tends not to resolve the problem at all.
• If you fail English in your second year and require the class to graduate, and if you don’t manage to improve your English skills somehow, the least you can do is not leave it to the second semester of your 4th year, because you’ll probably still suck at English then.
• Don’t try to hold extended conversations in Korean about how you deserve an A in the class. If you can’t even try explain that much in English (no matter how incomprehensibly it comes out), you don’t deserve a C, let alone an A.
• If you’ve been strutting bad attitude and a Fuck-You-Mr-Teacher scowl on your face all the way through class while refusing to practice at all for a whole semester, despite repeated and earnest attempts on the teacher’s part to help you because you obviously aren’t absorbing the material, then the least you can do is NOT to imply you DESERVE a mercy-D instead of an F when the exam finally comes and you cannot answer even ONE (1!) bloody question from the MERE SECTIONS OF THREE (3!) MEASLY UNITS your teacher has resigned himself to teaching for the last half-semester, when other classes have dealt with four or five units of comparable length.
• No, being cute and sweet and wearing fake eyelashes will not get you a passing grade, if you cannot answer any of the questions in anything remotely like English sentences.
• Studying is less useful than practicing. But even blunt studying is wiser than cheating. I WILL ask you to put away the paper with all the answers on it, because I WILL notice you’ve plopped it onto the table in front of you when you sit down for your test.

Not the best classes, the ones I’ve tested. As usual, the final test is with my most advanced class, and I’m quite looking forward to it as a happy ending to the week.