Holy moly, I fell off that blog train (wagon? whatev) pretty hard. A staggering 3 months have passed since my last post. Suffice it to say that I have A LOT of catching up to do. I believe I left off with the first part of Mom and Janis do Korea, which I will get to, but first I need to share this video.
Students are going into a solid 3 weeks of exams and I felt it was my moral imperative to show this video to my classes to get them pumped....err as much as a student can (for 3 excruciating weeks of testing). Let alone a Korean student. I have taught these students for a little more than a year now and try as I might to understand what it is like to be them, I cannot. My only option is to sympathize. And I do. Tho I can remember being their age and having teen angst on top of various other pressures, the experience was so vastly different from theirs. I had the freedom to make choices. American teenagers would not stand a chance in this extremely unforgiving and rigid education system, where academics and competition is everything. I dimiss my last class at 9:55 p.m. After that, they go home and finish their homework. When they are not studying, they are cleaning the school or practicing some discipline of the arts. The suicide rate among teens in South Korea is inconceivable.
