tales from Korea

During one meeting last year we were informed by one of the SMOE coordinators that the Gangdong district was going to make additional afternoon classes entitled “Arts and Sports”, and took the names of teachers that may be interested. When i though of the title, the first thing that jumped into my head was photography. “Hey there’s something I know about, it’s an art… I can teach that, right?”. Quite a few teachers signed up, each with their own ideas: Music, knitting, modelling, painting, etc (I didn’t see anyone offering to teach a sport). A few weeks went by and the title seemed to have changed to “Arts and Crafts camp”, it seemed that these extra classes were a first for the Gangdong area and they were altering the purpose of the classes as needed. Each school advertised the classes… but not surprisingly, numbers were low. After all, students have to go to the winter camp, most of them probably go to hagwons (Private learning institutes) and aren’t too enthusiastic about signing up for voluntary extra classes. My school seemed to fair better – with my co-teachers advertising the class, 4 students signed up.

We heard finally, the Gangdong office had decided that classes must have over 5 students to proceed – the final numbers came in, my class was the only one with over 5 students; in fact I was pleased to see that 7 had signed up – 3 students from other schools as well. I felt sorry for the other teachers, some classes had zero students. I feel it more a case of the schools doing a bad job of advertising the classes rather then the subject of the classes themselves. The classes were laid out as 3 classes per day, starting at 2pm, for 5 days (One week essentially – 15 classes in total). I made an overview of what the teaching schedule was like but it was a little stretched, to say the least. What should I do for 15 classes? It seemed a bit much. It ended up changing to 10 classes, which was great, so I decided to do them back to back and have it from 2pm – 3:30pm for the Monday to Friday.

I spent a while preparing for the lessons… Photography, what was I thinking? These are 1st and 2nd grade middle grade students (14 and 15 year old), can they handle this? I mean seriously, photography has some pretty dynamic scientific components with some very specific and uncommon vocabulary. How can I dumb it down though, and then expect them to take good photographs? I decided to just put in the essential information without dumbing it down and all, and though that real life demoing might peak their interest enough to try and remember [and use] the information. The schedule was set for the week, Monday and Tuesday would be classroom based – powerpoints, the history of Photography, the uses, etc, all the way into how photography works – how to take a good picture. Wednesday was half based in the classroom, the first part was just about composition – I tried to emphasise the importance. The second half of the class was them running around the school taking photographs of each other, trying to apply the information they learned during the last two days.

When the classes started, I actually only had 6 students, one had dropped out due to sickness. It was more a little more convenient for making teams though, and I easily divided them into three pairs. I informed them of a competition that would take up all day Thursday in which we would go outside and shoot for the whole 1 and a half hour, the place was Garden5, just across the road from my school. On Friday we would be choosing and editing the photographs using Photoshop, their choices would be submitted and I would pick the winning team there and then. Friday was a day for criticism too – I explained how to give and take criticism, and how important it is in photography.

The competition:

I explained the students must submit a final 5 photographs, based on these requirements:

• Photograph One:
• Portrait, shallow depth of field.
• Photograph Two:
• Theme is “Circles”.
• Photograph Three:
• A building, deep depth of field.
• Photograph Four:
• Theme is “Moving people”.
• Photograph Five:
• A photograph of your choice.

Here are a few images of the students when we went out shooting on the competition day.

Some of the students creativity was just inspirational, I felt like I really got them thinking about how to use their own imagination and skill to try and capture something a normal person would never have thought to look at that way. Here are the images taken by the winning team:

I have to say, the class was an absolute success and I really enjoyed teaching it. I’ve never taught anybody photography before, I still have a lot to learn myself, but to get the elementary stuff across was still really useful for these aspiring students. It was such a good feeling to see them inspired, being creative, having fun and following me around like my own little photo posse, armed with SLRs slung over their shoulders.