Creating Boundaries With Your Students
Happy Summer Holidays to All the Teachers in Korea!
As a foreign teacher in Korea it is very difficult to gauge what is an acceptable boundary between you and your students. Korean students love to touch, but controlling how they behave around you and what is an acceptable personal space is a task that I still have no clue how to handle.
As teachers, of course, we have to distance ourselves from our students. But the rules here in Korea can often be confusing. For example, one boy had a fight with another, and when my co-teacher saw that he had a black eye, she spoke to him while stroking the back of his head and neck. Imagine this situation in The West!
It simply wouldn’t happen. Instead, contact in any way is seriously frowned upon. In Korea, students are quick to touch you. Since I have hair on the backs of my hands, students like to stroke them. Some students try to prod my stomach to see if I have a six-pack. Usually they do this too quickly so I don’t have time to tense my stomach, which often results in students laughing saying ‘no six-pack’.
There have been other situations where I’ve felt very uncomfortable but I didn’t react because I worried that the students would think I was repulsed by them. For example, a boy in 1st grade was playing with my hands for about 5 minutes during sports day. It was unusual for me, but I couldn’t react negatively towards it.
In a more recent example, last week the students were watching films in my class. I had my camera and was playing around with it at the back of the class. Some girls who weren’t interested in Transformers came over and asked to see my pictures.
The Girls May Not Have Been Interested in The Movie, The Boys Were Loving it!
I was sitting down and they gathered around me. They were all leaning on me, and one girl was leaning forwards with her hands on my thighs to support her. Again, imagine this in The West! Not only did I feel very uncomfortable, I also worried about what a teacher would think if they came in and saw me. Although I didn’t shove them off, I quickly rushed through the pictures and told them I had work to get on with.
I can’t count how many times the students have pulled me, prodded me, held my hand, and tried to give me a massage. Instinctively, it’s very disconcerting, but this type of contact doesn’t seem to phase the Korean teachers, and since I’m in Korea it shouldn’t bother me.
I just need to learn to feel more comfortable with having a smaller personal space.
