Teachers' Day 2021

May 15th is Teachers' Day in South Korea, a time for honouring and appreciating the educators of society. The day was full of nice little surprises which help to make up for being over-worked and underappreciated the rest of the year. Seriously, there are a lot of expectations put on teachers and efforts are often thankless, so having a special day is very welcomed.

Often, former students who have graduated from the school come back to visit their favourite teachers on Teachers' Day. They arrive at school looking a little older, proudly wearing their high school uniforms. It was nice to see some familiar faces return to the school. My Korean co-teacher has a long-standing tradition of visiting her old teacher, from over 25 years ago, on Teachers' day. She prepares food and gifts and spends time with her former mentor.

Traditionally, students present carnations to their teachers. However, South Korea is hyper-concerned with corruption and favouritism (see the arrest and imprisonment of former political leaders) that laws have been enacted to maintain transparency and fairness. Public employees are not permitted to receive gifts or favours, and this includes teachers. A class representative may give a flower or write a thank you banner on behalf of the class, but personal notes, cakes, flowers or hand-made origami are some of the things prohibited as gifts by individual students. There is some leeway for gift-giving after students have graduated and left the school.

My 5th-period students had a nice surprise for me when I walked into the classroom. They had decorated the chalkboard, and also made a sweet poster for me with messages written in English. The better students wrote several sentences, and the weaker students wrote things like, "thank you" and "I love you." I was very grateful for the effort and hung the poster on my wall at home. I noticed a little whiteout on one of the messages. The message says, "Your class is very fun" but another word was whited out and replaced with "fun". I held the poster up to the light and saw that the original word was "exciting". The student decided that my class wasn't "exciting" but "fun". I'll take it. It's school we're talking about after all - rarely exciting but hopefully fun.

The day ended with a pizza and chicken party in the staff room of my main school. Each department (about 5 or 6 people) shared the food and a bottle of coca-cola while cautiously removing our facemasks. I still can't get used to the pizza here: ham, pineapple, and shrimp. The fried chicken was good and came with a couple of hard-boiled eggs, a side dish of pickles, and hot sauce. Some teachers ate while wearing plastic gloves, which I think is a pre-pandemic tradition for finger foods. It keeps your hands clean, but it's another thing that feels weird to me. The meal was served at 4pm and was short-lived since most teachers leave the school at 4:30pm, myself included. I was able to take a hard-boiled egg home for later.

Teachers' day is over. This weekend I need to prepare my lessons for next week because at 3pm on Friday, we were informed that classes would be in-person next week even though we had made our preparations for online classes, as per the original schedule. Such is the life of a teacher in these times.