In August, I surveyed my students about their motivation for learning English, their opinions about our class and my teaching style, and what resources they were using to study English outside of class. By analyzing the results using some of the statistical tools I’ve taught myself this year, I came up with some effective strategies for reaching the disengaged students in my classroom.

At the moment this post goes up, I’ll be giving a presentation about that project at Fulbright Korea’s fall conference in Gyeongju. Here’s a digital version of the talk.

And here’s a detailed write-up of my survey design and results.

They say that major lifestyle changes—even positive ones, like starting a new job or moving—are one of the biggest stressors out there. By that measure, it’s been a wild week: I’ve moved in with my host family in Naju, set up a Korean bank account and phone number in my name, and started teaching English at two middle schools. Unfamiliar digs, unfamiliar language, unfamiliar students and coworkers. But on all sides, I’ve been fortunate to find myself surrounded by supportive, understanding, and hardworking people.

Skip these two paragraphs if I already told you about my weekly schedule. I spend Monday through Thursday at an all-boys’ middle school in Naju’s old town. At about forty students in each grade (divided into two classes), it’s smaller than average, but our students more than make up for it with their rambunctious energy. Fridays, I’m out in the countryside in an actually tiny one-building school that has only twenty-five or so students (it’s the satellite of a school in a neighboring city), all very proper and devoted to their grade-level classmates. The second school is in a gorgeous setting: epic mountains pouring down fog from all sides.

At my main school, each homeroom gets English class two or three times a week; I teach one class and my supervising coteacher teaches the other. After school, I teach a smaller group of students an English conversation class (the students are all required to participate in a club class but they get to choose from various school subjects). I expected the large classes to be the hard part because of, you know, crowd control. But the club classes have proven more challenging because they expose the students whose English isn’t as strong. Half of the students are bored because they understand nothing, and the other half is bored of waiting for the former to catch up. This situation calls for creative pedagogy. I don’t know what that’ll look like yet, exactly.

Now, I’ll do my utmost not to be that foreigner who windbags about “how the Koreans do it.” So, with the caveat that I do not intend to define cultural differences comprehensively, let me share two things have stood out to me this week: First, it’s really striking how much authority teachers have here. Despite my youth and inexperience, my fellow teachers place a lot of faith (certainly undue) in my ability to plan solid classes. They’ve given me a textbook to follow, along with ample supplies and auxiliary materials, but nobody has nagged me for any bureaucratic nonsense like a tabular correlation of my lesson plans with those of my supervisor. The team trusts that I’ll do the work well, and I do my best to meet their expectations.

Observation number two: There’s a stereotype that Korean schools teach everything by rote, but to me, this appears to be more of a generational difference than a cultural one. If anything, it’s kids in the US who suffer truly tedious classes, structured the same way every day (“I will be able to … ”), because American teachers’ livelihood depends so desperately on their students’ standardized test scores. While standardized tests are also a big deal in Korea, teachers themselves seem to assign (and are permitted to assign) students’ overall learning and well-being more importance. Additionally, my students in Korea take a much wider variety of subjects than their American counterparts. Art, music, literature, and “morality” class¹ matter just as much as the STEM subjects, whereas the schools I’ve worked at in the States seemed to treat anything that isn’t quantitative as an ancillary. (But then, I did grow up in the shadow of Microsoft, Boeing, and Amazon.)

In short, I really love my job. Call this the honeymoon phase, but I want to gush about one more thing while I’m riding high: On my first day, I received from the vice principal a tabbed, leather-bound notebook labeled “Teacher’s Diary.” I chuckled at the odd English, thinking it was just a regular planner, but it isn’t. Many of the teachers at our school actually keep a journal, in prose, reflecting on their daily lessons and pondering ways to improve their pedagogy. I’ve started doing the same. And I can already feel it making me more present in the classroom, more aware of how my students are faring. I mean, why wasn’t this a thing in my high school?

Fun fact: the most-viewed post on this blog, by a long shot, is the one where I shared that I’d received a Critical Language Scholarship from the US Department of State to study Korean in Gwangju. Today, I’m pleased to announce there will soon be another addition to the State Department–mandated disclaimer at the bottom of this blog.

Beginning early this July, I’ll be spending a full year in South Korea as a Fulbright fellow. I’ll be serving as an English teaching assistant at the elementary level. After our six-week orientation in Seoul, I don’t yet know the city I’ll be working in. That said, though Korea isn’t a small country, it possesses an excellent transportation infrastructure. If you’ll be there at all during the next year, send me an email so we can catch up!

Here’s a spotlight on the website of the Thornton School of Music about me and my friend Geetha, also a new Fulbright fellow.

In an influential article reimagining how we teach art in the modern classroom, Olivia Gude observes that when students set about “looking for and developing images from inkblots, smoke marks, or wax drippings,” even the artistically checked-out ones begin to recognize themselves as creators:

Initially, students may be confused and suspicious—claiming they don’t see anything in the blurs and blobs, but as peers and teachers model an experimental attitude, soon the classroom is filled with exclamations as new images and combinations are spontaneously discovered. Students who are taught to access the creative unconscious don’t drive teachers mad complaining, “I don’t have an idea.” These students have learned the important artistic lesson that artists do not know the outcomes of their works before they begin. Artists immerse themselves in a process of making and sensitively interact with images and ideas as they emerge.

We would do well to follow Gude’s lead in other fields of art education, too. When I interned at The Greater Seattle Bureau of Fearless Ideas this summer, I noticed the staff was well prepared for students who would claim, “I’m really not the creative type.” In our workshops, we sometimes had students brainstorm on paper as a warm-up activity, but the proper beginning would always involve dissecting a story or film clip and bouncing original ideas around in a group discussion.

This works great for elementary schoolers, whose boundless imaginations seldom need more than a push-start. It’s insecurity about speaking in front of unknown students (these were summer day camps, after all), not insecurity about their creative facility, that holds them back.

High school students are another story, though. By tenth or eleventh grade, a subset of kids now identifies as “ambitious.” They are eager to see their name at the top of a page filled with text—especially if they can send it off as a college or scholarship application—and they like the idea that they have a story to tell. And they all do. But early on in our college essay workshop at BFI, when asked to describe their apprehensions about writing their applications, all also said some version of: “I have a vision for myself, but I’m not sure how telling the story of my past adds up to it.”

The lead teacher on that workshop, a professional essay counselor who volunteered to do this workshop for free, was excellent at helping students connect their future ambitions with narratives of their past. Her process seemed like a formula at first, until you looked closer and realized it was the exact opposite. The students filled out surveys to get their superficial interests out of the way—things like sports and music, or what Gude would call “‘symbols of themselves’ [that] promote narrow, limited, socially pre-defined categories of identity.” Having found this rhythm, the students next did a similar questionnaire asking about their values and social concerns.

The task of the workshop (and, I suppose, the college essay broadly) was to use storytelling to bridge column A with column B, and this central how question of writing was left to the students’ creativity. There was, of course, the obligatory read-over of successful application essays to top universities. But this teacher didn’t ask the students to count the number of anecdotes, have them calculate the ratio of “showing to telling,” or make any other such cruel attempt to reduce writing to a mathematical exercise (as if words weren’t intimidating enough without numbers). Instead, she led the students in a discussion focusing on the emotional impact of specific phrases within each essay. The students picked out the writerly gestures they found interesting; there was no judgment if they favored a passage others deemed corny or wordy or mathy. They were recognizing writing as a subjective undertaking. They were seeing the faces in the inkblots.

As I prepare to be teaching music music again after a summer of creative writing, I’m finding Gude’s article an impactful synthesis of this summer’s implicit realizations. In arts education, we can do more than turn up the volume on existing channels of students’ personas. Rather than asking that stereotypical music-teacher question, “What kind of music are you into?” I think we can arrive at a more innovative—and more stylistically robust—pedagogy by asking students (and ourselves), “What kind of musician do you want to be?” People, after all, are at art’s center.

By way of a soft ending: The next stop on this train of thought is Huib Schippers’ Facing the Music: Shaping Music Education from a Global Perspective, the core text for an elective I’m taking in our music education department. To decenter western models of music teaching and learning, Schippers favors the anthropological term transmission in describing how people encounter music. “What we hear, learn, and teach is the product of what we believe about music,” he writes. We believe music can inform a positive self-identity, an emotionally attuned lifestyle, and the construction of stronger communities, but what message do we send students when we spend forty minutes of a precious hour’s general music class memorizing solfege syllables?

We pretend stability by tracking our life’s progress as a series of marginal changes, so that from each day to the next we can see that we are still ourselves, changed perhaps in substance, but never in identity.

But sample two days, say, ten or twenty years apart within the spread of a life—could you recognize the images as of the same person? Over time the marginal changes penetrate to the being’s core. The transformation becomes comprehensive.