THE SHORTEST SHORTCUT

It's been a while since the last time I sat in a classroom staring at a tutor,lecturer, or whoever it may be called. These past three and a half years what I've been doing is presenting and explaining materials in front of others, simply put.

But this is definitely a new experience....Learning a foreign language from almost zero..yeah pretty much from the very bottom, the very basics of everything. Being a novice still gives a different sense to me. I love the challenges, adore the complaints I'm continuously saying when ordered to memorize numerous number of new vocabularies, and definitely enjoy the satisfaction when winning the race against the lazy part of me.

Today wasn't quite fun. My tutor, Anwar Sonsaengnim (that's what we should call him-I'm taking Korean course), was away and we -other students and I- were simply abandoned in a not-so-spacious classroom.

Some strangers were coming into the door, wanting to meet our sonsaengnim ("teacher/someone clever" in Korean). They were apparently his guests wishing to discuss something with him.

Before leaving us, he assigned us to do the exercises. I happened to know that there was already a answer key page attached in the rearmost part of the textbook. No one in my class, however, was aware of this, at least as far as I knew. It seemed that they never read or scrutinized the book before, which is so unbelievable as we have it as our sole source of learning. Yeah, they didn't know until I disclosed the fact that there was an answer key! At first they all took the assignment quite seriously...but I then decided to test how far they can think for their own sake. And I should've known they'd fail it. I spilled out the 'top secret', the rest of the class heard it, and proved my word. Some looked so surprised (they found all of the answers), and of course happy at the same time. Without even thinking twice, they copied all the answers.

I felt so sorry for their failure of being a good, sensible student. Most of them are younger than me, and they have less motivation to absorb the knowledge...What they always think is the shortest shortcut...

But I hate shortcuts that intensify the complexity of my life...I hate shortcuts that create more problems than solve problems.

As I finished my course, I also tried to build my own Korean learning blog