Affirmation and Revelation

Affirmation: Yesterday evening after school, I boarded the bus back to Gwangju and happened to be boarding at the same time as my mentor teacher. We sat next to each other and we chatted on the way back to Gwangju. It was a really encouraging conversation. She told me that the school was very happy with me because I prepared a lot of stuff for the students and that I took my job seriously. She said sometimes Korean people don't like foreigners in their school because they slack off and only stand at the front of the class and expect to get paid just for speaking, not teaching. However, they appreciate the effort I put into my classes, and she said I am ready to be a good teacher. I was positively beaming. How can one not?

Revelation: I was talking with the male English teacher yesterday, and we were talking about the books I had brought with me from MCC. When I told him how much I paid for them, he was astonished how inexpensive they were. Of course, books in Korea are horrendously expensive. Now, however, I know why.

He told me it's because Korea is small and has so few loggable (is that a word?) trees! I didn't even think of that.... I guess the import on lumber would be expensive...

But then that doesn't explain why copy shops are so ridiculously cheap here... food for thought I guess.

On a similar note, in the news a long time ago I remember reading a story about how South Korea was planning to move to digital textbooks. Everyone was impressed that Korea was so forward thinking, but now I understand this issue further. Korean educational bureaucracy is actually quite wasteful with paper, and this is shameful. Schools receive a new textbook every year, for each grade! My English classroom has several valuable shelf spaces completely taken up by old textbooks (we're talking maybe 1 or 2 years) that haven't even been used. Perhaps that's why Korea needs to spend so much money on education... Even so, when the students do receive their textbooks, they treat them very poorly. Many have ripped the covers off and then basically lacerated the whole thing into oblivion. It's disgraceful really.