Of University Students, Animals, and "The Rules"

It's a mixture of stories, happenings and personal feelings on things this week, some of it funny, some of it sad, and some of it just being how I feel.

Let's start off with the funnier stuff - University students.

I've talked with nearly a dozen university professors in Korea now, so without actually having taught a class, I'm still fairly confident my descriptions of what it's like are fairly accurate. There's plenty of interesting things to be said about university students in Korea, but I'm going to stick mainly on the subject of entitlement.

I think I wrote about this several months ago, but I had heard a story of a Korean family who moved to Canada, enrolled their son in some college classes, and when the son failed school, the family became incredibly upset. Not at the son mind you, but at the school. How could the school have failed their son when they paid so much money for him to get his degree? While I can't guarantee the truth to that story, I've heard plenty more first-hand experiences that would lead me to believe it's true. Every prof I know has failed a student, and every prof has had that student or their parents complain about how they should not be allowed to fail their student. Here are two of my favourite stories:

A student at a Seoul university fails a class. He didn't attend any classes after the first week, showed up to the final and failed badly. Upon receiving his failing grade, he went to my friend (his prof) and told him he needed a "C". "Without a C grade I will lose my job placement," he said. My friend refused, told him he should have come to class, studied, and basically worked for his grades. After a week of continual requests, my friends boss finally phoned him and told him to give the student the C he wanted. Apparently it's quite common for students to be able to requests certain grades assuming they have some kind of special (or even not so special) circumstance.

The same friend gave another student a D in a class. The student phoned my friend one day and said, this:

"I'm confused about my grade." What's the problem, said my friend.

"It's too low." Well if you'd studied harder and done better on the test, it would have been better. "Oh," says the studend, "hold on." The student's mother comes on the phone:

"I'm confused about my son's grade," she says. Why are you confused, says my friend. "It's too low," she says. Well if he'd studied harder, my friend tells her, he could have gotten a better grade.

"Oh," she says. "Just a moment."

The father comes on the phone.

"I'm confused about my sons grade..."

I know I said 2 stories, but I just thought of another friend who had three students fail a test. They pleaded for a week to be allowed to pass. Finally she relented - sort of. She let them re-do the test AND they had to clean all the windows in her house. I thought that was pretty funny.

I'm gonna skip my part on animals right now, it's pretty sad and will take a while, so I'll fill that in later this week. Instead, let's touch on "the rules".

I'm currently signed up to work for an English camp outside of town for two weeks this summer, and I had to ask special permission to attend this camp. Another English summer camp came up, one which paid a significantly higher amount of money, and so after finding a replacement for my first camp, I asked my school if I could switch. OK wait, that's not entirely true. I didn't ask them, I told them, thinking it wouldn't be a problem. Weeeellll, was it ever a problem. While I only deal with the one teacher in my school who speaks English, everyone has been harassing her over why I'm trying to switch camps. It hasn't been very easy on her since I've been phoning the first camp to explain to them that I'm not coming, they then phone my school, and my school gets upset again because I'm not letting it go.

It seems making a "first promise" is quite a big deal, and I committed to this first camp so I should do it. What's more, working in a school means I'm a public servant, and I'm not allowed to work outside my set boundaries (in my case it's within Mokpo only). Both these camps are out of town, so I need special permission to go. Since I'm the only one benefiting from my going to the camp, my school doesn't see it as appropriate that I go. There's no real difference in how the camps work, there's still the needed number of English teachers, everything would work out just fine, but since I'd already been given permission to work one camp, they won't change it to allow me to work a different one.

Anyway, I'm rather bothered by it, but there's really nothing I can do now. My school contacted the other camp I wanted to work and told them specifically that I would not be allowed to attend. It's not a fun way to finish my time in the country, being upset with my school for something like this, but at least it does give me some more free time to see Korea before I leave.