I’ve come across a few strange things at the schools where I work in the last couple of weeks. Two weeks ago I had a lot of time off because of mid-term standardized tests. In the middle of this week of testing is a national holiday… Children’s Day. A day for children to play an generally be happy (in theory). This year Children’s Day took place on a Tuesday, right in the middle of the midterm tests. As you could imagine in a country where student achievement is held in such high regard, you could easily see that there were thousands and thousands of students feverishly studying on this traditional day for play… pretty ironic!
This last week I was apprized of yet another holiday, Teacher’s Day. Before I came to Korea, when I was doing some research into exactly what I had gotten myself into, I found a number of references to Teacher’s Day on some of the expatriate blogs I was reading. They all referred to charming little children coming to school and giving the teacher presents. At the time, I thought…”hmmm… this may be interesting…”. This last Friday my school (and many others) had Teacher’s Day as a day off from work. It seems that this traditional holiday is related to some other traditional activities, where expectant parents annually give teachers a gift (nod, nod, wink, wink…) to help ensure that their child gets the ‘best’ possible ‘education’. Since this can quite easily be made to look like terrible corruption (maybe it is…), the practice been made functionally illegal (from what I’ve been told…remember why I named this blog what it is…). So, Teacher’s Day can be seen as a day that relates to this activity, and therefore it can be seen as rather insulting (I guess…).
For what its worth, this is a great example of why I did name my blog what it is. There is so much that goes on in this culture that is inexplicable to my western sensibilities. there is also a great deal that is quite strange until, after a long bout of explanation, I finally see what all the bother is about. I’m still not sure which category these topics relate to, inexplicable or strange…