It took me nearly 3 weeks of working at a Public Middle School to notice this: There is no lunch duty for teachers. In fact, what is interesting is that the teachers eat in the cafeteria WITH the students in their own little designated corner. Nobody watches the students or tells them what to do -- they know what to do and they just do it. The teachers go about eating their lunch and the students go about eating theirs. Nobody ever yells to "be quiet" or when to go in line to go back -- the students go up to get lunch completely on their own and then leave when finished so they are back in class. There is no structure to it whatsoever... everybody just simply eats lunch in peace. There's no stress or obstacle in it: You just eat lunch.
In fact, in hindsight, I do recall now asking some Korean students once if they ever participated in a "food fight" their quick reaction was "Gosh, I would never even think of doing that".
I suppose that after being here this long I really didn't think much of it because it's typical Korean way of doing things to have little to no structure. The teachers don't have any "duty" of any sort (lunch, bus, after school, etc.) -- they just teach. Heck, I don't even think my school has a master schedule yet as far as class times go and it's 3 weeks into the school year. Everybody just goes with the flow of what schedule they are told for that week.
That's really neat. I find it interesting to see how other cultures do things. Sometimes it's a real eye-opener for us Americans who often tend to think that our way is the only way.
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