Attempts at Quantifying Differnce

Friends, Family, Fulbrighters!

안녕하십니까 ~ Cheers from Changwon!

I hope y'all are doing well and enjoying the change in seasons back home.  We've entered one of the most picturesque time of year here in Korea - Korean Maple trees are splashed with rich shaded blends of amber to gold making it difficult  justify staying inside to write this email. 

I've just returned from a weekend Fulbright conference in the historic former capital Gyeongju (경주시).  In between the soju-soaked reunion merriment, I prepared a presentation on research I've collected from my students  and spoke in front of the 120+ ETAs.  I and wanted to share an abbreviated version of the presentation with you here - if nothing else, I've included some colorful graphs~~~

About 8 weeks ago I arrived at Changwon Science High School (CSHS) early on a Monday morning.  I toured the facilities and was contractually obligated to view classes for the day to get a sense of how they operated.  The first period courtesy bell (read: symphony music) echoed throughout the halls, I found my classroom, and prepared to observe my first class.  Of course, I was asked to do the exact opposite and teach.  No biggie, I slapped my keychain into the computer and put on an overzealous, animated face. This is the sea of faces I saw.  My students and I hadn't a clue how to gauge each other. 

I paused to smile at the acute reciprocal awareness my students and I shared.  Today, we stared intently at one another asking a series of questions, some out loud, some to ourselves.   I got the staple " How old are you? Do you know kim chi? Do you have a girlfriend? How could you get a girlfriend with that beard?" questions. Silently, though, we all tried to figure out each other’s personalities, values and goals.  How would the rest of the year go with me as a teacher?  How would we, together as a class, turn this (sleeping student) at the break period to this (students gathered) on a daily basis?  At the core of these surface level questions, we asked:

--> How do we cultivate a meaningful space for personal development while improving our English?

--> How do our different cultural values and life experiences influence classroom   learning?

             Furthermore, the sociologist in me asked how larger societal and economic trends had influenced my students in a way that I could simply not perceive.  I'll admit that my knowledge base of Korean society was somewhat shallow before I arrived in July.  Limited to tour books and online news articles, it was no secret to methe economy had boomed in the past several decades – the swells in capital and plummets in unemployment are well documented.  Indeed, by many quantitative measures, Korea produces the smartest students in the world.  Yet these hallmarks of success may overshadow some of the most important aspects of life.  Korea has consistently scored lower on measurements of happiness – whether we’re looking at suicide rates or self reported levels of happiness for adults or high schoolers.

            Given this well documented troubling  juxtaposition, I couldn't help but ask how I would navigate ethical teaching without formally addressing some honest pressures my students face.  I expanded my unit planning beyond the scope of my limited teaching knowledge and incorporated a former Fulbright researcher's work on increasing high school student happiness into my curriculum.  The "Project Haenbok" (project happy) curriculum suggests that one way for students to increase their happiness is to recognize their strengths and use their strengths to accomplish tasks that are difficult for them using their unique strengths. Why not?!   Designed by two big names in the field of positive psychology (Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson) The Values in Action (VIA) strengths test serves as an operationalized assessment for their “Character Strengths and Virtues Handbook.”   - Think of it as  the positive psychology counterpart to Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).  The idea behind having my students take this test and positive psychology in general is that instead of focusing on weaknesses, we would focus on the positives and what people are good at.  Instead of focusing on what is wrong with people, why don’t we focus on what’s right with them?

        For one whole class period, students partnered up and worked through the somewhat high level English VIA strengths test. The test is a set of 120 statements with likert scale self-identifying response choices.  The test is available to take in Korean and English, so students were never completely lost and were forced to translate together.  The tests took partners around half an hour to complete, and after receiving their results, they wrote their top five strengths in their journals, on my excel spreadsheet, and emailed me the results.  I tallied up the results of my ten classes and found that the top strengths of my students were curiosity, love, honesty, kindness, and judgment.  These results are not earth shattering – love, honesty, and kindness are interpersonal strengths, not actions based strengths, and are consistently highly represented as top strengths worldwide. 

Prudence is one of my signature strengths, so let me speed through a few disclaimers.  First, I was working with a small sample size (n=174) at a specialized high school for science students.  I’m no psychologist – Please, I wanted to make a lot of money after graduation…so naturally I majored in sociology.  I’m also very new to Korea – My first bipimbap (비빔밥) was in the airport before hopping on a bus to Fulbright Training.  Statistics wise, I collected and analyzed only the frequency of the top five strengths from my students, meaning they are not truly weighted.  I didn’t control for socioeconomic status, gender, age, or any other demographic factor.  These results are likely shaded by the tests’ ethnocentric composition – values like forgiveness, for example, are bound to be measured differently in every culture. Most importantly, these results shouldn't be generalized to explain or judge values in Korean society.  

That said, I found comparisons of my students’ strengths with the top strengths in the US to be simply galvanizing.

   

          This first graph is an overlay of my students’ strengths compared to the top strengths reported in the US.  You can notice the 3-4 red outliers that represent areas where Americans report top strengths more frequently than my students in blue.  Conversely, the second one shows the descending order of top American strengths and highlights the areas in blue where my students’ top strengths outshine the American ones.  These graphs are worth a closer look, because they offer a curious departure  from research conducted elsewhere in the world.  Whereas the UK and the US reported similar top strengths and the US and Japan reported similar strengths and weaknesses, the results from my students diverge on a few key action-based strengths.

True, my students share similar top strengths of honesty, kindness, and judgment as Americans, while finding zest, spirituality, and humility to be areas of improvement, but take a look at some of the most stark differences.

--> They were thirteen times more likely to score their ability to self regulate as a strength than Americans, far more prudent, had higher social intelligence, and were on average more curious than Americans.
-->  Conversely, Americans were more likely to report higher levels of fairness, scored overwhelmingly higher on self-reported levels of gratitude, and reported perspective to be a higher strength more often than my students. 
               Now, I hesitate to spin my wheels and make cursory judgments based on this limited testing. I will say that I believe the high levels of curiosity and prudence might be particular to my niche discipline science students – their curiosity and prudence helped get them to their intense science studies today.  Instead, I asked my co teachers and students what they thought of the most drastic differences in between the reported American and CSHS strengths.  They the most to say about gratitude and self-regulation. 

              Gratitude was the least commonly reported strength among my students.  I found this perplexing because I felt the compulsory need to show my gratitude starting with advice in our predeparture manual. "Gift giving is very important in South Korean culture. You will create a positive first impression if you bring gifts for your school (Principal, Vice-Principal, and Co-teacher) and/or homestay family. Conversely, you run the risk of creating a very negative first impression if you do not participate in this aspect of South Korean culture." Indeed, about a week ago I bumped into a fellow Fulbrighter on the way back from a weekend bike trip as we each made our instinctive pilgrimage to the gift stand to stock up on regional chocolates. 
           It seemed to me that Korean culture placed a high value on gratitude.  I was directed my my co-teachers and students to dig deeper:  What actually matters for gratitude, the sentiment or the action? 

• “We have a gift culture that is ritualistic.
• ”“[When I received my last gift] I didn’t feel grateful at all! I knew [they] didn’t really care.”
• “There is an ambiguous line between gift giving and bribery.”

 My teachers and students had these reactions, suggesting that Korean society has experienced a recent evolution from authentic gratitude to more ritualistic expressions of thanks.  Indeed, one teacher went as far a to suggest that gift giving – at least at our school – has had a problematic history with bribery.  In an effort to distance himself from any doubt, our principal forbade gift giving among teachers and staff during Chuseok holiday last month.  Although I’ve witnessed and partaken in showing my gratitude through gift giving, the results from this test helped me begin a rich conversation about the meaning of gift giving.

What about self-regulation?  The first week of school I had a casual conversation about the new “standing desk” trend among hip young professionals in San Francisco.  I joked that a friend of mine is nearly ready to tattoo “SITTING KILLS” on their forearm.  My co-teacher stared blankly at my ignorant face and simply said, “When students stand, they don't sleep.”  I’m in a perpetual state of astonishment with the dedication my students have for anything they commit themselves to – whether that’s studying into the wee hours of the morning or clearing Assassin’s creed 4 during the 20 odd hours they have off from school on the weekend. There’s no question that my students are more disciplined than I am, but it was only by asking my Korean students and teachers what discipline meant to them that I could begin to understand the ambiguous line between societal-control and self-regulation. 

I don't want you to finish reading this meandering email with overly judgmental conclusions or broad sweeping generalizations; in reality I just conducted pseudo science research using pseudo science research.  Rather, I conducted this strengths test with my students so I could learn a little bit more about them.  I wanted to and reflect on how we share similar values and where my students on average excel.  I wanted to help them recognize what they’re good at and discover ways they can capitalize on their unique aptitudes. This test helped serve as a remarkable way to begin meaningful dialogue.  Regardless of where we grow up, it’s all too common to focus on our shortcomings rather than our successes, our weaknesses rather than our strengths.  Through focusing on the positives, we can continue to find inspiration in ourselves, and cultivate optimism and self-confidence in our classrooms.  

Thanks for giving this a read!  If you'd like to take the strengths test that my students and I took, click here!  In case you're curious, my top strengths (according to the test) were:

1. Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence
2. Forgiveness
3. Judgement
4. Kindness
5. Perspective

And of course, no one needs another email to read, so please send me a quick response if you'd like me to remove you from my lil' blast!

Cheers, until next time,

-Robert

PS - Check out the colors on these leaves! A mother-naturely nudge to get outside!

My Semi-Charmed Changwon Life

안녕하세요! Cheers from Changwon.

Since my last update, I’ve:

-->Stumbled through just under 80 hours teaching English

-->Become local locomotion savvy between buses, bikeshares, and a new whip

-->Shot my weekend at a sleepover SAT composition retreat

-->Blown minds with my mad chop-stick skills

Let’s start with my contractual duties – teaching English. 

During the course of my senior year, you may have been (un)lucky enough to hear me share my post grad plans.  Better captured as a cluster of buzzwords, I’ve been telling friends, admission guests, and interviewers that I hope to eventually peruse an MBA and/or and MEM (masters in environmental management) with the dream career of corporate sustainability consulting.  Those brave and curious enough to wave away this lofty cloud of progressive jargon (or pressed me before I was obliged as a senior to have an impressive elevator speech prepared about my future) might know that I’ve always considered teaching high school a potential career option.  I’d daydreamt of teaching sociology, photography, and environmental science at a small high school, shoving the prospect in my mind for something trendier and more prestigious. 

I caught myself juxtaposing this fantasy with my starkly different reality – teaching a different subject in a different country to very different students.  I teach between 1- 6 classes, Monday-Friday at Changwon Science High School. There are 174 students who spend M-F studying and living at the school, often getting around 5-6 hours of sleep a night.  Ten 50 minute periods constitute the bulk of my class load, eight classes divided among 160 first and second year students, another two classes divided among the small senior class of 14.  Then there’s a daily conversation class (haha sorry lunch “hour”), two English professor classes, and one class for non-English professors.  The change in between is captured by lesson planning, private tutoring a student who’d lived for 4 years in Chicago, preparing students for international science competitions (I’ve got two in Italy this week!), and proofreading tests and magazine articles.  My apologies for all the numbers – osmosis of the omnipresent STEM mindset is taking place. 

Aptly named, the STEM focus at Changwon Science High School means English is at the bottom of everyone’s totem pole.   The slant for science and insignificant role of English has a drastic effect on my role as the native language teacher.

The Positives:

·  (near) free reign over my curriculum – I’m teaching a semester long course on improving levels of happiness specifically tailored for HS students in Korea!

·  I’m textbook free.

·  There’s little institutional pressure to achieve specific grammatical ELRs.

·  A longer winter break – Who would want an ENGLISH winter camp at a science high school?!

The Negatives:

·  Mixed levels.  English classes are determined by age, not ability – I have one table where a student who lived in Canada for two years sits across the student who routinely yells at me, “TEACHER I LOVE YOU….BUT TEACHER I CAN’T ENGLISH”

·  English class is seen as a break from their otherwise science-packed schedule. This affects everything from motivation to sleeping in class. 

·  Requests for supplies, testing days off, etc. are heard last from the English department. 

·   Tl;dr – English serves a novel role for most everyone besides the English teachers. 

Everything from classroom management to the overarching benefit (or lack thereof) I bring to the students is specifically tailored to the unusual scholastic situation of my 174 future science leaders.  It’s clear that I might never grasp the dedication and pressure Korean students (and certainly those on science tracks) have to study, I’m slowly identifying the clues.  Some are more obvious than others.  During the first week, co teacher and were discussing health trends in Korea and the US.  I offered my thoughts on “standing desk” trend in the US – something to increase blood flow and calories burned.  I was later led to the corridor of standing desks outside the study hall where students who fall asleep while studying are instructed to stand and continue working past 1am.  One English teacher in her late 40s has a head salted with grey hair.  So does the boy in the front row of my Thursday morning class.  I’m often torn between making sure each student speaks up alone at least once per class and making sure the students have a mental break – a moment to focus on sleep or their emotions rather than the homework they try to sneak beneath their journals. 

In order to better grasp the degree and nature of the educational pressures my students face, I know that I’ll have to develop a better understanding of what happens in classrooms other than my own.  How do other teachers behave, and how do they shape the lives of their students?  To explore this question, I’ve adopted a “Yes Man” persona.   “Want to play volleyball weekly with the other teachers?”  “How about spending the weekend making SAT questions for the upcoming practice test?” “I think it would be a good idea to get to know the other teachers over soju and beer after class.”  Yes! Sure!  내!

Understanding I’m underqualified to assess the pedagogical efficacy of the Korean Educational system – let alone become an agent in it – I jumped at the opportunity to serve as the native English reviewer for the Gyeongsangnam Province practice SAT conference.  The two-day event was held at Royal Hotel in Bugok 부곡 – a former vacation destination famous for natural hot springs. While initial investment in the town led to the construction of dozens of motels, developers overestimated the town’s potential popularity.  The Bugok hotel infrastructure reflected a boom frozen decades ago.  Given the town’s history, inferable financial struggles, and relative isolation, the location was perfect to house the influx of test-prepping teachers. 

The 13 hour English section preparation that took place Saturday was simply fascinating.  Teachers are only allowed to draw passages from a nationalized “Educational Broadcasting System” (EBS) textbook.  The theory behind publishing the material that 70% of the test would be composed of ahead of time is to alleviate the financial burden on families to send their children to afterschool tutoring in English.  Of course, I would argue that students would then focus on memorization rather than comprehension, and the actual goals for testing are brought into question.  After spending the morning reviewing selected passages and corresponding test questions that teachers had previously prepared, the group of ten or so English teachers gathered together to express their concerns and critiques.  I had too many to count.  While I only had stylistic critiques on some passages, other passages were painful and downright confusing to read.  Riddled with subject-verb disagreements and unnecessary gerunds, trudging through such erroneous passages was in itself a trial in skimming for contextualization. 

With the test bleeding from my edits, I joined the circle of teachers to discuss the minefield.  Although we were all taught English, the meeting was held in Korean.  After five minutes, I was asked to give my opinion for the first question.  I delivered my diagnosis – One subject verb agreement, an awkward phrase, and a run on sentence.   The group paused, then moved to the next question.  Misuse of a proposition, a missing article, and another run on.  Another pause.  “James, I’m sorry to tell you this, but we are only here to discuss if the answers make sense,” a veteran in the program smiled politely.  Almost daily, this was the kind of culture shock I encountered that is almost impossible to prepare for.  It’s not about homesickness or adjusting to odorous cuisine, but about more ancient values that seep into more modern systems that go unnoticed until they’re experienced.  One teacher jokingly called the EBS textbook “the bible” – “it’s a sin to edit it,” the group chuckled.  Out of 45 questions, we did end up making a handful of integral edits to the EBS text in addition to the test questions.  I learned that to change the text is viewed as insulting to someone higher up.  Even in this professional setting – where the quality of the work produced would directly impact thousands of students – the unofficial priority was to help save face.  By the end of the conference, I stood my ground on a few irreconcilable passages and do believe the team helped create a test that was passable (in both senses of the word).  I never would have anticipated, however, how large a role culture would play in the process. 

~~~~~

Outside of the classroom, I’m learning more about Korean culture by stumbling through it.  Yesterday I presented gifts wrapped in towels in celebration of Chuseok (추석) and later but the head off a fried “money fish” while out drinking with my host father.  I have the choice of goldenrod yellow water infused with barley or self-boiled from my lil’ electric kettle as my choices for potable water in the house.  I’ve become a NUBIJA bikeshare regular and am constantly in denial of the fact that that I’m juuuuust a little too tall for the highest seatpoast setting.  My life is at the same time beautifully straightforward and wholly complicated.  I’m finding success in my contractual teaching duties but am required to use a significant degree of brainpower locate and purchase some purell, tape, and white out (the lifeblood and currency of my school.) 

My freshman year of college, I made sure to take advantage of at least free consortium lectures a week.  I wrote my college essays about how I would digest several documentaries on various topics a week.  I’ve got a genuine appreciation for learning (for the sake of learning).  It used to be something I felt that I needed to seek out.  Here it’s unavoidable.  Every day’s a new set of lessons, new course material.  Although I’m a teacher 5 days a week, I feel more like a student every day.