School Notes

1) I have 9 more days of winter camp; the last day is Feb. 3, but we have Saturday class on the 30th. Attendance continues to be abysmal.

2) During the break between periods, I watch from my window as about a dozen students, in twos and threes, climb over the fence and make a run for it. Occasionally, I yell out for them to be careful, as the fence is a good eight or nine feet high. Some of them turn and flash me a smile: "Hi, Teacher!"

3) Curiously, the touchscreen function of my classroom big screen decided to stop working this week; no idea why. Supposedly, some bloke was to come out this afternoon and have a look, but it's not in my job description to wait around for him. Not me, I paid my bills (you do this at the bank), then went to 마당집 and had galbitang for lunch.

4) This week in camp, I did a "unit" on advertising. It began with some activities from a good PBS website: pbskids.org/dontbuyit/ and a Canadian site: www.media-awareness.ca/english/games/coco/index.cfm. While I'm doing links, Adforum.com is a great source for current worldwide ads to discuss. Later on, we analyzed the US Presidential TV ad campaign "Eisenhower Answers America", using material from this website: www.pbs.org/30secondcandidate/. I thought the issue of involvement in the Korean War would interest them.

But their favorite thing was this pair of videos:




The culmination of the unit was to design and present an ad campaign for some product--either made up or real. They were mostly poor, though a couple actually met the requirements I set.

Then there was one boy who did a suicide-prevention public service announcement--challenging material, to say the least. I thought his slogan was really good:

You are an actor or actress in a happy-ending play ... called life.

Gross Korean Happiness

Since the global spread of the H1N1 virus, the government has made quite a fuss, forcing schools to check students' temperatures at the gate and dispensing hand sterilizers, which itself can hardly be blamed. The truth is, no student has died of the new flu, but hundreds of middle and high school students kill themselves out of undue burdens to excel above their friends and gain acceptance to prestigious universities.

Wow! An unusually lucid statement in an editorial from The Korea Times on Friday, titled Gross National Happiness. It hits the nail on the head, pretty much. But it also says the following, which is a cop-out:

The national obsession ― mostly led by the government ― to become an advanced country as soon as possible through enhanced competitiveness hardly allows its people any breathing room. Just look at parents who are driven to send their toddlers to after-kindergarten classes, in hopes that they can gain some sort of real-world advantage. No wonder Korean students' sense of happiness is especially lower, showing a wide gap even with the last-placed runners-up.

How is the government to blame, exactly? The piece is a little unclear on that, but mostly stems from President Lee Myung-bak's promise to get Korea into the G-7. Once again, I have to point out that this was part of the platform he ran on in the elections a mere eighteen months ago (and for which, presumably, he was elected); after gaining the majority in the popular vote--a rarity in this country of about five gajillion political parties--he is trying to act on his promises. How dare he. Presumably an elected government reflects the wishes of its voters, at least when it comes to platform goals.

The same thought occurs to me in the healthcare reform flap back home. Obama ran on HCR, and is trying to live up to his promise to the American people. But some small minority is screaming, "Give me back my country!" I understand the reaction when it comes from people in the insurance bizz, say, or pharmaceuticals (the legal kind, I mean), but when some old man warns his congressman, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!" you have to wonder what's going on. (Note for the Teeming Dozens who are not American: Medicare is a US government program.)

Anyway, the editorial continues:

The Lee Myung-bak administration may be able to jack up the birthrate ― even considerably ― if it drastically expands spending on mothers and children to some of the levels of more successful countries, such as France. Likewise, it could pull down the suicide rate by paying far greater attention to these social ills and staging long-term campaigns.

France, huh? Wow, America's world esteem has dropped so much that even Korea sees a better example in France! Remember Freedom Fries? It's schadenfreude time for beret-wearers.

Of course, the French do have quite generous benefits for expecting and new mothers, including maternity leave with job guarantees, reimbursement of expenses and an allowance during leave time. This page says France spends 15% of its total budget for family and child services--and it is bucking Europe's declinging birthrate trend by a healthy margin. The French rate is 1.8, the European average is 1.3, and Korea's birthrate lags at 1.2. By comparison, the US rate is about 2.1, just enough for replacement.

Today's Korea Times

A doctoral dissertation delivered at Columbia University by Samuel S. Kim and reported on at Korea Times today posits that 44% of Korean students studying at Ivy League universities in America drop out by the end of the second year.

The article provides familiar statistics about the high rate of acceptance to the Ivy League for Korean students, and posits the following reason for the drop-out:

Kim said in the thesis that such a high dropout rate is largely attributable to Korean parents forcing their children to study rather than participate in extracurricular activities, an essential part of overseas education for foreign students to acclimate themselves to American society and get a good job in the long run.
According to the thesis, Korean students consume 75 percent of their time available for studying, while they allocate only 25 percent to extracurricular activities such as community service.
In contrast, American students and those from other countries tend to equally share their time for both study and other activities.

Another story, oddly related, is the suicide of "Korea's actress" Choi Jin-sil, who has been a "national heartthrob for two decades". While her death appears related to her depression over Internet rumors about money she was owed by actor Ahn Jae-hwan, who committed suicide in September, it serves to point up Korea's high suicide rate.

How is it related? Suicide is frighteningly common in Korea, among the highest in the OECD, especially among young students--apparently unable to deal with the stress of getting in to the top schools (SKY: Seoul National, Korea, and Yonsei). China Daily weighs in.