Busan Journal, Day 8

The Foreign Professor

We did not get off to an ideal start. The classroom, due to a quirk in the modernist design of the building, is hard to find. When I arrived, it was locked. We needed a key-card from the Chinese Literature Department since it is their room. Apart from offices, I am not exactly sure how ownership of rooms is determined, but I guess it does not matter. I am not here to reform the system nor to foment rebellion.

I had been instructed to send a student to get the key, but the first few students to arrive also did not know where to find Chinese Lit.

As I was leaving for my own department office to find someone to solve the problem, one young woman told me it was the students' responsibility to handle jobs like this, not the professor's. She took out her cell phone, started calling, then disappeared up the staircase.

After five minutes of standing in the cold corridor feeling conspicuous while the other students carried on an animated discussion in Korean, she reappeared with the key card.

From that point on, the experience improved moment by moment. The class room was a fairly small box, four rows of metal desks facing a teacher's desk in front of the blackboard. My students began filing into the back rows, as students everywhere do, so I invited them to move forward before they got too comfortable. They responded cheerfully.

Ten women and one man, all of them in their first class in their first graduate school course, about half in their 30s and 40s. I am guessing about ages here, despite knowing that such guesswork is perilous. All Korean. All with a sufficient English proficiency to carry on a conversation with me in the course of our three hour session.

And what a delight! We filled our time together quickly, first with a get-acquainted writing exercise that they each shared with the class, then with an overview of the syllabus, and finally with some background, context, and cautions for their reading of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" for the next class. My intention was as much to create rapport and interest in our subject as it was to dispense information.

I left my first class feeling that Korean students are much the same as any students I have ever taught. Well, maybe a little better dressed students on average, and clearly more fluent in Korean than in English, but otherwise more than willing to meet me half way.

My second class was with 26 undergraduate students in a room with 100 seats and a stage for the professor to perform. If I were in Houghton, I would email James in Records and request a smaller room. But I can work with a stage if I have to. Teaching is 80% performance, after all, and I have had a lot of practice.

With only 75 minutes to work with, we did not have as much interaction as I had in my first class. Still, I think we made a good start. Here the level of English proficiency varies more. But then, that is what English classes are about generally, aren't they, proficiency with the language?

And I have a number of students who will resist opportunities to speak in class. In this class on the literature of Asian immigrants to America I began by asking them to define the American Dream. I think the responses could pass for "discussion" even though I had to keep jumping up and down from the stage to write on the board.

I think it will be a great privilege and joy to work with these students. I hope they will learn from me. I know I will learn a great deal from them.

Apart from meeting so many bright young people, my favorite part of the day was the answer I got many times from the question: Why did you sign up for this course?

Over and over they seemed to think it might be interesting to learn from a foreign professor. I hope they are right.