In the past week, I received the horrible news that a sixth grade boy in Daegu committed suicide. One of his teachers wrote a public message on Facebook about the struggle that this boy shared with countless peers all across South Korea. Her message and this singular instance, however, are not what lead me to write this post. Just two weeks after the beginning of this school year in February, one of my Korean co-teachers informed me that a second grade high school (junior) student at our "partner" school had committed suicide, and that he had left behind a note detailing his decisions for taking his life. Apparently, this young man had been studying for the College Scholastic Ability Test (hereafter the "KSAT")--the uncharacteristically pivotal examination that literally decides the future of students in this country--and felt overwhelmed because he foresaw that he would not perform well on the exam. The KSAT was only the endcap of a series of difficulties he had faced with regard to education, societal and parental pressure, and the intense "need" to succeed. He felt that he was no longer worthy of existence and that the exam had taken over, and he ended his life. Less than two months later, I learned of a very similar story with another student at a nearby school. These ostensibly isolated incidents point to a pattern succinctly described via the following statistic:
South Korea has the highest suicide rate among all OECD countries, and the suicide rate has doubled in the past decade.Before I proceed, I should issue a few disclaimers:
- I acknowledge that my perspective is limited as a non-student, non-Korean person observing the situation from the outside;
- I am not attempting to minimize the extremely high suicide rate among other populations--such as the Korean elderly--or in other parts of the world;
- I acknowledge that my students are only a small sample of all Korean schoolgoers and that their median academic level and socioeconomic background quite possibly give them more pressure than other students; and
- I am not certain of the most effective way to remedy the feelings of despair that students experience, but I am more than confident that this is a far-reaching, deep-seated problem that will require intervention from governments and schools, love and concern from parents, and hope and understanding from society at-large.
With that, let's go.
During the past academic semester, I have endeavored to learn more about my students' personal lives. While having 42 sixteen year old girls in a classroom at once does not lend itself to intimate discussion groups by any stretch of the imagination, I've sought out ways to get to know them better. Fortunately, I've had a modicum of success (I think) through instruments of the very grading system that so harshly bears down upon students: speaking tests and graded essays. The essay portion shall be detailed in a later post.
Two weeks ago, I was in the middle of teaching a lesson when two of my students walked in halfway through class. I didn't want to interrupt the learning process for the other 40 girls, so I proceeded as if nothing had happened and they quietly found their seats. After class, I asked my co-teacher why the students were so late, and she informed me that they had been visiting the suicide prevention counselor because they took some sort of test and had been identified as being at high risk for attempted suicide; moreover, both of these young ladies had attempted to take their own lives in the past year. My co-teacher expressed that it was a sad situation and left the room, leaving me in a state of awe that has never completely disappeared.
- Why do my students feel this way about themselves?
- What can I do to help?
I predict that answering the former question will prove to be more labyrinthine than I ever could have imagined, and that the answer to the latter is: not much.
Fast forward two weeks to today*
I've been administering two-minute speaking tests over the past week and have taken every available opportunity to gain even the most ephemeral insight into my students' lives...after, of course, they demonstrate that they've at least halfway paid attention in my class over the past four months. Two minutes isn't much, but anyone who has spent time in public speaking knows that it can be an eternity. Through seemingly ordinary questions, I've grown to understand the challenges that my ~700 sophomores face on a quotidian basis. I'll list several of the questions on the exam, along with a few "follow-up" questions that I often pose:
- Do you prefer going to bed early or waking up late? (Yes, I know this is a false dichotomy, and that's fine.) Many start with "I prefer going to bed early, but I can't really do that because I have to study until so late at night." I politely press them and generally find that they're more than forthcoming with information, which I suppose is partially because they never get a chance for someone to hear them out. My students generally fall into two camps: those who stay at our school until 11pm or midnight before going home and also have hagwon (private after school academies) to attend on the weekends, and those who only leave school earlier because they have to study at hagwon on weekday nights as well. Across the admittedly not-very-wide swath of social and economic backgrounds from which my students hail, I've found the story to be nearly always shockingly similar:
- They attend some form of school to study until between 10pm and midnight on five, six, or seven days of the week. If they have an empty evening at home--a rare occurrence, as demonstrated by one student today who told me that she only sees her family twice a week because she is so busy--they typically have to study through EBS. EBS is the national "educational TV" channel complete with video instruction and an endless supply of things that students should know. By the time they finish all this, they go straight to bed because they're exhausted from what has essentially been a 15-18 hour workday. Since they ate dinner at school, where they have all their meals except breakfast, they can skip that time-consuming process at home. On average, they sleep about 5 hours a night. Of course, since the lovely Korean adage says "Sleep four hours, you pass; sleep five hours, you fail," this will probably change by the end of their junior year, by which time they will be more occupied with the KSAT. In summary, they're highly sleep deprived, which makes me marvel that more of them don't just totally collapse in my class (which, in the grand scheme of things, is less important than other courses because it's not as large a part of their grade).
- What are your hobbies? What do you do in your free time? Lots of answers here, but often I hear "I like ________, but I can't do that because I am too busy studying." These responses were a dime a dozen until Tuesday, when one of my girls told me that she's passionate about singing but that she never has time to sing because she goes to school every single day of the week. I told her "You can have a little time to sing now, if you like," and she proceeded to produce an absolutely beautiful rendition of Anne Hathaway's "I Dreamed a Dream" from the Les Misérables soundtrack. She only gave me two lines, but that was all I needed--she has a surprisingly stunning voice. To hear that she is too busy with studying to even sing sweet melodies to herself is heartbreaking; these talents should be cultivated, not extinguished between poorly-translated phrases in a book.
There are other questions, and much more to explore. In the next post, I'll discuss the various attitudes toward suicide displayed by Korean teachers and others, and how this plays into students' feelings of hopelessness. All of this shall come in the following posts. For now, this is fodder for intense discussion and consideration, particularly for teachers and parents.
Until next time,
~WTRJ~
