Venting for a Solution

This Wednesday and Thursday the English teachers were in charge of judging English stories re-told by our students. This was on a volunteer basis. In typical Korean fashion, I found about this on Tuesday half-way through the day from a student. I asked about it after school was finished and my co-teacher (who is slowly transforming into some evil Disney queen) and gives me her automated message: "I don't think that's important for you." Here we go again.

Wednesday afternoon rolls around and set up begins in the classroom next to my office while itty-bitty Grade 3s are pacing rehearsing their stories around my office. Upon entering the classroom I'm given a "rubric" written in Hangul and a copy of each student's story. After skimming through most of the stories they are all folk tales which have been horribly translated into English and are entirely completely expositional. You betcha I got some examples:

"Not just lion, the lion was the most powerful and wise. He know that dogs and cats to counterbalance each other, he started to wonder how to reconcile them. . . Deepening friendship of dogs and cats, but the did not."

"I fly to Dream World. / "welcome, Dimpy" I meet new friends. / I go to the castle."

"Hello~ everyone, How are you today? / My name is ______ / I'm in the     4 grade. I'm a little nervous. Please listen my story well." (All of them memorize something like this, and yes they left the name line blank, and older grades failed to breeze through this.)

"Oh, my~ A mouse chews my hat. / 'Don't chew my hat. Go away!'/ A mouse is gone. 'I'm sad.'"

Due to nerves there were far more enunciation and grammar mishaps than I bothered to count. That's a little unfair, the first group of students was actually really impressive but as the students got older the quality dipped quite drastically. But all except for 4 or 5 had this dreary "my parents made me do this, I hate my life" voice which was really depressing. After judging the first batch of kids, I have come to realize that this is a complete joke: One co-teacher has merely ranked the students with no additional notes and the other two gave each student letter grades for the three categories. I made up my own criteria as anyone would for the first set so obviously my rankings were much different from theirs.

Judging these stories was beyond challenging for me. One student at a time came up with no notes and recited their story from memory. Then there were other kids who brought up visual aids, which gave them the story's plot line in a neatly wrapped package. I asked the Queen Bee if we mark them on visuals:

"It's up to you."

"Well do you?"

"Maybe, sometimes."

. . . Great. Then there was the issue of length and the amount of repetition. One child who brought in visuals that led her through a story about a star searching through a collection of shapes to find her missing piece repeated the same two lines, with minor adjustments, for less than a minute. The best ones stretched out to two minutes apiece, with expression and dramatic pause and no visuals. I'm only talking about the Grade 3's too, which were, by far, the best group as a whole: three of the seven students scored above 90%.

The Grade 4s, 5s, and 6s all shit the bed barring one or two exceptions. Maybe it’s because they have more homework and less free time. However, another factor was translating the rubric's criteria, courtesy of Google translator, so I could be on the same page as my CTs. Too bad all of the discussions post-story telling was in Korean. They asked me for my top 5 and then that was it. I could have slept, I could have rearranged all the desks, I could have farted as loud as humanly possible; they still wouldn't turn a head.

Four or five kids forgot their story which resulted in an incomplete mark. One really irked me though, this student who is one of the brightest ones I have the privilege of teaching told a story about Gandhi (I don’t think I even knew who Gandhi was in Grade 6) with a number of pauses and prompts but made it to the second last sentence. He was standing their silent hemming and hawing for what felt like an hour, until he resigned in Korean. I scored him as if he did not quit and he had the second highest score, tragic, instead a student with a story about arguably nothing placed third. C'est la vie.

Now after venting let's thread a silver lining through these dreary two days: If I am given the opportunity to return to my school I will organize and lead this story-telling contest to not only challenge students and their abilities while insuring fairness, but develop sound  marking schemes and expectations for each grade level. Expectations are necessary because there were students in Grade 5 using the same story as a Grade 3. For all I know they could have done this the past 2 years too. Sorry, back to happy/optimistic thoughts. I'm EXCITED to challenge myself here, who knows this might benefit me back home (job-permitting). I really like the concept of this event and it has so much potential to be AMAZING. There are a lot of Korean folk tales and a lot of them are in my library, most involve animals pranking one another. Hopefully, with some dramatic coaching these stories can be brought to life in the upcoming year, presuming I stay here.