Quite a selection there, and not without some synergy and symmetry to it - after all, what does a teacher do but try and reach 'her' students, which may become quite an ache for some, needing to be soothed with tea, but best soothed by the occasional 'ta' we get from a student.
A while back I had a little mini rant on Facebook regarding the hiring of teachers who then are not expected to teach! I was referring to one of the current and historical situations in Korea - the wholesale importation of English speakers to act as assistant teachers in school classrooms, where the majority of them either end up being frustrated by their Korean co-teachers, or the system, or both.
From the Korean perspective, I am sure there is just as much frustration with a lot of people who have no teaching qualification, who often mangle their own tongue quite seriously (and glancing at the writing skills displayed by some contributors to Dave's ESL Cafe, sometimes criminally so) and who regard Korea as one big party spot.
Unfortunately both perspectives are skewed, and since I can only really speak about what I and some of the people I speak to have experienced, I will leave it to a Korean teacher to vent their frustrations, and only address those that seem to be common to most people I have spoken to during the last couple of years.
The major frustration is the lack of information - understandable when they cannot really be called fluent speakers of English, but even mangled information is better than none. What tends to happen is that a circular, instructions etc. are sent to schools in Korean. These form just one small, nay, minuscule part of the immense mound of paper that governs the school system - another thing to be read, signed and passed on to someone else to read, sign and pass on. This means that if the school receives a communication from the GEPIK program, say, the administrative assistant has to read it, sign it, file it in a neat folder, pass it on to the administrator, who signs it and passes it to the senior teacher in charge of languages, who then passes it on to your co-teacher who finally passes it on to you. So something could take as much as two weeks before being brought to your attention, by which time the due date is that day or the next, or the changes have already been made and you found out about them the hard way, by violating the new regulations.
Right up there next to this one is the attitude towards English in the country. Policy makers and parents have bought into the idea that learning English is a passport to wealth, either as individuals or as a country, and so have instituted English as a subject in school. However, they have not decided exactly what it is they wish to accomplish. By that I mean that they still do not really know if they want to speak the language, or study it.
If they want to speak it, they are wasting the best resource they have - those foreign teachers who are qualified to teach English as a second language, by shackling them to a curriculum designed for studying English.
The result is a whole generation of kids who can read English quite well, since they do a lot of that, who can translate English phrases into Korean, since they also do a lot of that, but who are unable to speak or write it.
Of course there are schools where the teachers spend a lot of time drilling the speaking skills of the kids, and there are private academies where kids get taught to speak, but by and large the majority of kids end up passing vocabulary and grammar tests, given to them in Korean!
A final word of optimism - despite the drawbacks I know there are kids who do benefit, who do start using the language to communicate in, and who are taking the first steps to becoming bilingual. From them comes the much-needed 'ta!'
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