Kim Man-gon's Education Forum I'm Sorry I Couldn't Teach You That Back Then

It feels like a trauma, somehow. "How dare you talk back to a teacher?" "Do you want to get cut?" "Should I hit you with a golf club?" "The child may have difficulties, so please delay pregnancy and marriage." "You're a virgin, right? You'll understand once you have a baby." "What grade did you get on the College Entrance Exam?" "If we're late leaving school, we'll be late to cram school, so don't make us do cleaning." These are words I saw in an article serialized in a newspaper. I won't forget the phrase "How dare you, a mere teacher..." in particular.

Long ago, during the second military government era, a martial law commander from that region came to school to transfer his son. An aide asked whether military boots should be removed. Thinking of the children, I said yes. I felt somewhat nervous, but fortunately the commander quickly took off his boots. I even had the silly thought, 'Well, let there be no backlash.'

Teachers have enough honor and pride in the trust that people, regardless of social status, place in them to raise their children right—so I lived believing I shouldn't show the appearance of going hungry over low wages.

Yet when meeting university professors, I couldn't shake a feeling of low self-esteem. It was because of something like a social convention in our society: university professors sit in the front row, then high school teachers, then elementary school teachers, and kindergarten teachers sit at the very back.

That school had many children of university professors. When I taught first grade, even though outwardly it might have seemed otherwise, the parents of such children were docile—but there was one child, C, who was different. (This is just one of various cases. There were plenty of good instances.) Both of C's parents were professors. They told me: don't try to teach, just call and tell us which problems our child gets wrong, and you don't need to interfere with the child's behavior...

There was nothing to teach. The child could already read Korean fluently and do basic arithmetic, so what would I teach beyond this 'report'? But the child was extremely self-centered. He had no idea how to compromise and often fought with other children. At the end of first grade, I wrote in the 'overall remarks' section of the report card: "C tried to learn and practice considering and helping friends day by day."

"C fights every single day. He neither understands others' situations nor knows how to compromise." I couldn't write that. Whenever I see such expressions become jokes on TV programs like "Love Rides on the Air," I've been grateful that such a record might not be publicly exposed out of nowhere. If I had written it directly, those noble professors—whose only purpose was their son getting test answers right—wouldn't have liked it. Even with this roundabout wording, if they set their minds to it, they could probably guess why I wrote it that way and could decide to comply with what they wished.

I never learned how C grew up. The world kept changing so that it became rare to be able to keep track of such things. But then C came to visit on his own and showed me how he was doing. I was very curious about what had changed, but alas! It was still a 'visit empty-handed.' The moment he entered, he proudly told me he held a successful position in the securities industry in Yeouido, but didn't hand over even a business card, as if he wouldn't reveal details.

Moreover, this wasn't a courtesy visit—he had a purpose. Over the dinner his former homeroom teacher bought him, he revealed his reason for coming: "Twenty years have passed since my marriage, but my wife complains that I don't know how to be considerate. It's gotten worse, and now she complains every single day without missing a day. The sentence you wrote in my report card keeps coming back to me."

Did he mistakenly think that as his homeroom teacher from back then, I could teach him and solve this even now? He had the look of someone expecting me to share some clever trick, saying he was at a loss about how to live. I wish I could have said something like, "Well, since I bought dinner too, I can't do this for free," but I couldn't do that.

"I'm hearing criticism too," I sent back a deflecting remark and thought: 'There's a time for everything. I'm sorry I couldn't have you engage in activities of caring for and helping others back then. Your parents did as they pleased, you've been suffering for years, and I'm at the point of despair these days.' He didn't come to visit this old homeroom teacher again, perhaps thinking there was nothing I could do either. Could it be that those professors back then really believed that knowledge was tremendous but consideration and such things were all useless?