6
Interview
Among the eight instructors who worked full-time at Eagle Academy, Sean Morgan was the mothers’ favorite, and the instructor the students talked about most at home.
Sean Teacher said this. Sean Teacher said that.
Sean Teacher wore funny hats during a lesson to illustrate figures of speech.
He wrote them personalized notes on monogrammed stationery and took them on field trips to musicals and museums. He taught math and English, which was an unusual combination, and he and another popular instructor, Henry Teacher, hosted a culture club to discuss films and novels they considered masterpieces.
Except for his glasses, Sean resembled the actor Sidney Poitier, and unlike the other teachers, who dressed casually, he always wore a beautiful suit and tie to the hagwon, regardless of the season or occasion.
A summa cum laude graduate of Yale, he had studied physics and European history, then gone for graduate studies at MIT.
He left the doctoral program within a year because it wasn’t for him.
After loafing for a few months back home in Philadelphia, he found a job teaching calculus at Collegiate, a boys’ school in Manhattan, then fell in love with Mark, a Korean American banker visiting New York from Seoul.
Sean followed Mark to a new country and found that he liked their life in the fast-changing city, traveling in Asia whenever he and Mark could get away.
Sean had been a Whiffenpoof, and if the students were very good, he would sing “Danny Boy,” and even the other instructors would stop everything to listen.
Everyone was a little in love with Sean, and he was the highest-paid instructor at Eagle Academy.
He worked hard to earn his high salary by forsaking everything except for work and his boyfriend.
When Clara Song brought the Koh children to Sean’s classroom, Sean was talking to Peter Son, a prospective student at Eagle who had recently arrived from England and was the only child of the landlord, Renee Cha.
Sean waved them in and pointed to the seats in the front row. The Koh siblings stared at Peter, and Peter smiled but didn’t say anything.
“Did Peter start?” Clara asked Sean.
“We were waiting for you. How are you feeling, Peter?” Sean asked.
Peter shrugged. His jet lag had passed, but he still felt tired.
He perked up when he saw the other three kids.
The two boys were almost identical, except that one was taller and the other wore glasses.
They had longer hair than most guys from Seoul.
The girl wore her dark hair in two braids.
They were dressed nicely. Peter touched his dyed-blond hair, cut close to his scalp.
“That’s my team!” DH shouted, pointing at Peter. “I always wanted one of those. Where did you get that? I never saw one here.”
Peter looked down at his Arsenal Football Club jersey. He had drawers full of them.
“Wait! What? Is that number nine? That’s my player. Oh, man! Is Alan Smith your guy? I’m a striker!” DH rushed to Peter for a high five, and Bo shook his head. Mido had not seen DH this excited in a while.
“Hey.” Peter slapped DH’s right hand. “Yeah, Arsenal is my team,” he said with a British accent.
“Well, that’s settled,” Sean said, smiling. “How about some assessments, and then you fellows can talk soccer.” He handed each of them a different assessment packet.
“All in, this should take about an hour. I’ll call out at the thirty-minute mark when you should switch between the two sections, and when I call time, you’ll put down your pencils.”
The students picked up their pencils and opened their assessment packets.
Sean gathered his own papers and checked his watch.
He had just finished interviewing Peter, who would head to Andover in a few months.
In the meantime, his mother wanted him to study at the hagwon.
He was a strong student and quite capable but not a happy kid.
For two years, he had been studying at King’s College School, a boys’ school outside of Central London, but had not liked it much.
Since his mother had to work in Seoul, Peter had boarded with Korean homestay guardians in New Malden and commuted to Wimbledon each day.
Although he could manage the schoolwork and sports, it had been difficult for him to make friends.
When a few boys on his soccer team teased him and didn’t include him on the crucial plays, Peter ran away to London.
He had tried to see Suede perform but couldn’t get into the venue, so he had roamed the streets and ended up frequenting the British Museum.
He went missing for almost three days. His mother, Renee Cha, a divorced heiress of a midtier conglomerate, got on a plane.
She phoned the credit card company, and, following his charges at cafés in Bloomsbury and the bookshop at the British Museum, eventually she found him in front of the Rosetta Stone, his favorite thing to see in London.
It had been their designated meeting spot when Peter first started to roam the museum by himself.
“Oh, Peter,” she’d said, relieved, and held him.
Later, she sorted out the mess at school.
In Seoul, she brought him to speak with her college classmate Tom Song, who suggested sending him to school in America.
Peter applied to five boarding schools and was accepted to Andover, Hotchkiss, and Lawrenceville.
Renee preferred Andover since Tom knew the administration well and could guide them in the process.
Peter just wanted to leave King’s, where he didn’t fit in.
It had been embarrassing to tell his mother that he hadn’t made close friends in two years.
He hadn’t gone into detail about what his teammates had done, which wasn’t anything serious, but their joking and exclusion had made him miserable.
The homestay guardians were decent people but insufficiently interested in him.
An hour passed in no time, and the students put down their pencils.
The Koh children looked horrified.
“That bad, huh?” Sean said to DH, who shook his head like he was disgusted.
“Brutal. Well, I guess we’re not getting in.” DH tried to sound as if he didn’t care, and reached across to pat his sister on the back. “Sorry, Mido. Your brother is dumb as rocks.”
Bo shook his head, too. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think I might be stupid in this country.”
Peter laughed at their joking, then frowned, seeing that Mido was crying.
“Oh, what’s the matter, sweetheart?” Sean went to her desk to pick up her assessment.
She hadn’t finished the math section. “Oh, I see. That’s okay.
” He smiled at her. “I wouldn’t have been able to do all of this at your age.
We have to make the assessment like this because some students here are several grades ahead. Unnecessarily, I might add.”
Sean picked up her brothers’ papers, and it was the same. The three had finished the English section without making any mistakes, but neither DH nor Mido had been able to finish the math sections. Bo had answered everything, but there were errors in the proofs toward the end.
Sean picked up Peter’s assessment, and everything was completed with only a few mistakes.
“This is why I hate proctoring,” he said out loud. “Everything is fine, folks. Take a deep breath, Mido. C’mon.” Sean inhaled dramatically and exhaled. He had done some yoga in New York, and when he tutored, he taught his students meditation techniques.
Mido copied his breathing. It was easier to settle down in the presence of her brothers. The other boy seemed fine, confident in his performance on the test.
“I’ll take a careful look at these, okay?” Sean said.
The instructor couldn’t go over anything specific because each had taken a different assessment, but Sean had wanted to gauge their individual level of ability and how they would manage tough examination situations.
Beyond the substance of an examination, much of a child’s competence was informed by his psychological well-being, and consequently, he had to build them up to face anxiety-provoking scenarios.
This was why meditation was not unhelpful.
Testing conditions had to include irritation, disturbances, structural and random interference.
Sean believed there should be conflict and anxiety in testing as in life.
After a while, his Eagle students could handle any testing environment or circumstance: coughing, gum cracking, truck sounds, ambulance sirens, breakups, unrequited crushes, unfair proctors who couldn’t tell time, and even strange odors.
Once he brought in a container of blue cheese to make his Korean students adapt to an unfamiliar scent.
It was hard to explain to his friends from college or grad school what he was doing in Seoul besides living with his soulmate.
His friends in America thought hagwons were institutions of child abuse, stealing time away from play, athletic endeavors, social lives, and daydreaming.
He had heard all the arguments. It was true that private tutoring could reproduce the upper middle class at the expense of the poor or middle class and perpetuate social inequality.
His American friends and former colleagues believed that taken to the extreme, private tutoring made children dependent on more hand-holding.
There was some merit to this, he thought.
Before becoming a hagwon instructor, Sean would have agreed with them without blinking, but not anymore.
Now he knew too many children to break down the world into reductive categories of “rich kids are bad,” “poor kids are needy,” and “middle-class kids are normal”—none of that reasoning would suffice in the face of real children who had individual personalities and learning styles.
His dataset was too large and varied. He could no longer operate in generalities.