A Child's Perspective

I was cheated by my sister. I will be revenged on my sister.

There were many pretty girls there. Seong Hyeon and I are fall in love with them.

We were drank.

We ate hurry-scurry.

Hoho, we were general trend.

I don't care about dress. Any clothes look good on me. I think I have wonderful tastes in clothes. The skini jean didn't go with this shirts. I try to go along with the fashion.

On the street, a man says to me. Where are you from? I said, I'm from Korea.
A Man: Ohh, Korea? Where are you going?
I: I am going to the NASA

NASA Professor said, what do you think of Albert Einstein?
I: Me! I think he was a genius.
Professor: Great!

I want him to hate Japan. but I want him to like us. Miracle of the atomic bomb is coming. I trust him.

I go to English institutes after school. I don't have enough time to play with friends because I have to go to the institutes. I feel bored when I study with my math tutor. My English tutor told me I should be be memorize ten new words a day. Mom allowed me to watch TV when I finish my homework. My English teacher always assigns us too much homework.

It's a little desolate to write in English.

I'm dieting. I should be careful about my food. I want to be slim and pretty. I started jumping rope for 2 minutes a day to reduce my weight. I should be careful about my food. I keep on doing sitlupe to reduce the fat on my belly. I am healthy.

I have 230,000 won. But Mom said, “3:17”. So, I have 69,000 won. I'm sad.

I hope I can grow up very fast so that I can do what I want to do!

I want to be a teacher when I grow up. I want to make a lot of money. (I didn't have the heart to tell the kid how incredibly ironic/hilarious that statement is. Better to let them realize the cruel reality on their own)

I want to be my teacher's pet.

I fought with my sister all day during vacation. My parent always quit fighting. However, she stimulated me until my limits.

I gain weight seriously in this winter vacation. I need a diet.

I had a snowball fight with my father and brother. I put snow snow in my brother's clothes. Then he made me eat snow.

Today was so boring. I got up late in the morning. Then I washed and had breakfast. I had no idea what I need to do. So I read books. But it began to bored soon. Then I played computer games. But it began to bored again soon. I need to go to bed early today. How boring...

As feeling good, I served merrily.


BABBLEFISHED:


Eats a morning at 8:00.

The thought is exchanged little by little pessimistically.

Washing dish hell!!!!

The breath comes out automatically.

After finishing an arrangement, the off-time is honey taste.

Become the inside chart recently and if Ji the position school uniform it dose not put on uncontrollablely and in thought also the good vacation homework and duty activity to do it becomes but the vacation the degree of the ramyon it will be able to willingly submit.

Three line 20 with barking.

Is difficult but homework awareness does eagerly, is endeavoring.

Thought cleaning ended quickly and from child capacity and baby river crossing boiled from played and toward the house returned from hygienic roon.

3 people ten thousand sons we cleaned the royal tomb inside the post office only amd the trash which are picked up and They burnt.

We personage ate. To initially delicious doubing recording which will swell up and from the elementary school playground and to put out soccer par garage breath breath quality certainly more played and into the house came in.




This is just a small dabbling of what my kids wrote. Having now delved deeper into my students lives, I can have nothing but respect and empathy for the hectic lives these kids are forced to live. I already knew that my students, and all students in Korea in general, only sleep 4 or 5 hours a night on average, due to the long hours at school, followed by private academy classes into the late evening, with homework to work on back home as the veritable icing on the shitty cake. Simply put, Korean children don't ever really get a chance to be just that: kids. I was upset about the fact that my students had to waste several weeks of their winter vacation sitting around with my dumb ass, but it turns out that even their precious little time outside of school was taken up with classes and organized, parentally enforced bullshit. Obviously, many of them went to additional private academy classes, and as you can see from the passages above, the kids aren't too fond of them in general, but I was also surprised to find that these kids were getting stuck wasting day after day in church based camps and workshops. We we're talking 10 am to 6 pm days at church, at least from the few that listed times. Yuck. They have been so badly conditioned and bombarded with work, work, work, that they have no idea what to do with themselves when they don't actually have work to do. Sure, the kids would go and play from time to time, but the overwhelming answers to what the students do in their free time, when they aren't in classes, are play computer games, study some more, or sleep. The kids don't do anything, and I mean anything else. As you can see from the passage, on the rare occasions where the students don't wanna do any of those three previously listed things, they are shit out of luck. What about all those hours spent out in a forest or field or something with nothing but your imagination to create worlds in which to play in for hours at a pop? Well, for starters, these kids are never taught to creatively think or think outside the box and they are never given any creative outlets for their ideas. Creative expression doesn't really score well on standardized tests, so they don't bother with it. I would be shocked if my few creative and “different/weird” (remember, that's not a good thing here) students don't have the color beaten out of them by the nightmare that is high school. Couple all this work sans down time with the parental pressures they are under, and you have a recipe for disaster. Since there is no Social Security here and most families are rather small, the parents put tremendous pressure on the students to succeed and make lots of money, rather than follow their passions, as the kids have the burden of supporting Mom and Dad when they get older. An additional wrinkle for girls (although it probably hits guys a bit here too) is the skinny ideal. You saw from the quotes that a few of the girls were worried about their weight, even though these girls were nothing near “fat”. They clearly don't qualify as fat by the American definition, but most of them don't even qualify as fat by the Korean definition, which is incredibly skewed, clearly. Eating disorders have to be huge here, as most Korean women fit into one of two categories: 1) They appear to eat half their body's weight in food at each sitting (granted, its not much when you only weigh 20 pounds, but still), yet still remain twig-like. Say it with me everybody...Bulimia 2) The other end of the spectrum is the women who eat such small portions that you wonder if that would be suitable portions for their little rat dogs, let alone a human being, which screams Anorexia. Throw all this shit together and its no wonder that suicide in children is such a concern here. Their idols aren't making it any easier either, as today another famous young actress, from the most popular soap opera/drama on TV right now, just committed suicide. From the few people I've talked to, that makes 8 or 9 celebrities who have killed themselves in the last year or so. Christ. I'm more and more thankful every day for the childhood that I was actually able to have. You should be too.