When during my first year at The Contemporary Learning Academy (CLA), the school at which I taught in Denver, I asked a student to identify who had thrown a paper ball across the room, he said to me, "Mister, snitches get stitches and end up in ditches." And if you've yet to figure out what that means, in other terms it means, if you tattle-tale on someone, you stand to get beat up or hurt in some way.
That was the ethic amongst the students (or most of them) at CLA. From affairs at school, to affairs in the streets of their neighborhoods, most of my students staunchly believed that 'snitching' was taboo. In practical terms, it meant that most of my students handled almost all situations without consulting any formal authority figure such as a teacher or a police officer. Sometimes, I'd hear about one kid getting jumped by a gang of other kids, and though had I been the one who was jumped, I would have immediately thought to call the police, that thought would have been one of the last for most of my students. So, to recap, at CLA snitching was taboo. Period.
Fast forward to today. In my classes, I often play instructional games with my students in order to facilitate them practicing the key phrases for the day. Often time I award the winning team with candy, or penalize the losing team by requiring them to clean my room for two-minutes after class. Today, I was not giving out any candy which meant that the losing team had to clean the room for two minutes.
As class came to an end, it became clear that team one had lost by quite a few points, so I excused team two and three, and asked team one to hang around and clean the room for two minutes.
Team two and three shuffled out of the room, and team one came rushing towards my desk. Exasperatedly, about five students, in the best English they could muster were trying to tell me something that seemed extremely urgent. For about 30-seconds, I could not figure out what they were saying. And then it hit me. They were telling me that two of the students from team one sneaked out of the room with team two and three. More over, the remaining members of team one went as far as to write done the full names of the two who had left, and they told me the name of their homeroom teacher.
I was totally taken aback. Not only had about five kids come forward to tell me about the two students who had left, but they had NO hesitation in doing so. Their ethic seemed to be one that openly acknowledged a wrong had been committed, and knowing they were on the "right side of the law" decided to come forward and point out the situation.
There are tons of thoughts in my mind as to why students at CLA are extremely unwilling to tattle-tale whereas my students at Samnam have no hesitation, but since I'm off to dinner, I'll have to get back to that later.
In short, I think my CLA students unwillingness is related to most of them being raised in a culture where they held minority status, where at least in part due to that fact, were socialized to distrust authority figures in general, and moreover have come from a history of oppression and subjugation from the dominant class. Though I do not yet know my Samnam students as deeply, I can at least say that here in racially homogenous South Korea, I'm sure many of my students are coming from a VERY VERY different place.
More on this later...Now it's time for some Chigae.
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