SPEAKING
FREELY Korea shows America its lost
intimacy By John M Rodgers
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
"Somewhere in Asia"…
"Under west China"… "Northeast of Japan." Among a
classroom of 18 college freshmen, these were the
three best answers I got when I asked the location
of South Korea. Asking if they knew anything about
the country, the
Korean War and Psy's song
Gangnam Style were the only things anyone
could summon. This constituted my return to the US
classroom - speaking to a series of college
philosophy classes about my experiences in Korea.
It was a rough landing.
In Korea, I taught
at a respected prep school where the students had
to arrive before 8 am, clean their classrooms, sit
through lectures until 5 pm and then self-study
under the guise of a stick-wielding hall monitor
until the final bell at 10:20 pm. The kids were
study machines. They had to be, or else. They'd
been molded for a decade of more to fit into the
desk, to consume and digest information and to, in
as rapid a period as possible, ace an exam on that
information.
In addition, though it
started to decline in my final years, they
exhibited reverence for the teacher and his or her
subject of expertise. Attention was the norm, not
the exception. If I were a bit late to class, I'd
find a student at my office to see if everything
was OK. In the hallways, students bowed to greet
me. On Teachers' Day, a holiday still taken
seriously, students would join in song, honoring
the teacher, flowers were often given along with
numerous other gifts (though the administration
forbid any kind of money or expensive gifts due to
a historical problem with bribes nationwide).
The respect for the teacher and learning
in South Korea, at least where I taught, helped
bring life (and order) to the classroom. If you
know you're going to arrive at class with ready
students, it tends to put a little skip in your
step. Moreover, it helps to know that there's a
desire to exercise knowledge. Ask a class full of
Korean students where Sri Lanka or Tuvalu or
Ecuador is and it's a good bet many have an idea.
My first chance to enter an American
classroom post-Korea occurred when an old
philosophy professor suggested I speak to his
freshman seminar class "On Doing Good and Living
Well" about "intimacy," and the collective
consciousness/unconsciousness as they related to
my journey to and life in Asia. "Great," I told
him, "I'll get something together right away." At
home I eagerly pieced together a presentation full
of images from my years abroad mixed with keywords
and anecdotes.
Naively expecting a
classroom full of attentive kids, I arrived early
for my 2:30 pm class in a blue dress shirt with an
old red tie and khakis. I double-checked the
technology, uploaded my PPT file and made sure
everything was in order. Not seeing the professor,
I walked to his office where he began riffing on
the French intellectual Georges Bataille's
Theory of Religion. Noticing the clock (and
me), the professor gathered himself and we
strolled to class; "lost intimacy," he said as
walked into the classroom. It was a Bataille
thing.
As I stood in front of the class of
18, the first thing I noticed were electronic
devices on almost every desk or in hands - cell
phones, an iPad, a few laptops - and a look of
"are you more important than this device" on many
faces. If I'd been in Korea I would have torn into
a lecture about manners and grades and
responsibility, berating the students along the
way. But it wasn't my class so I just began with
some images followed by general,
what-the-heck-do-you-know-about-Korea questions.
Within two minutes one boy was messaging
under his desk and two students were typing on
their laptops (I don't think they were taking
notes). "Do you guys mind?" I asked, looking at
the perpetrators who only slowly returned their
eyes, a look of apathy on their faces. But,
minutes later, I'd lost them again so I just
carried on. Subsequent classes differed little.
In the professor's office after classes, I
told him what would've happened in Korean classes,
how those distracted delinquents would've had
their clocks cleaned. "It's unacceptable that they
think it's acceptable to act that way," he said
slowly. "And it doesn't matter if you ban them or
not … they find a way to use them," he said
referring to the devices. Having taught 37 years,
the professor said this newest assault on learning
(and manners) troubled him deeply. "When I retire
I am going to write a book about the collapse of
the American university," he sighed.
As I
left his office, my day complete, I once again
heard him say, "loss of intimacy" and knew he was
telling me something about the day, my
presentation's examples of overcoming obstacles to
become closer to Korea and Koreans, the inability
of many students to understand this because they
were in another place, and the general state of
the American classroom (and perhaps America
itself).
Ambling across the quiet campus,
I breathed in the late autumn air, thinking of my
intimacy with Korea, with friends, the land, the
culture, my students. I thought of how students in
Korea are forced to be intimate with school and
teachers, spending most of their days with both,
cleaning the place where they learn, respecting
the people who instruct them, and taking their
work seriously. Surely, the American classroom
could use a dose of such intimacy and austerity.
John M Rodgers spent nearly a
decade teaching AP English at Daewon Foreign
Language High School in Seoul. He is currently
editor-in-chief of The Three Wise Monkeys (.com)
and editor at large of Groove Korea.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their
say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing. Articles submitted for this section
allow our readers to express their opinions and do
not necessarily meet the same editorial standards
of Asia Times Online's regular contributors.
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