lao-ocean-girl

Like every Wednesday morning, Mat and I showed up at 9 o’clock to pick up our classroom keys from the administrative office in the building where we teach.  I reached for the door knob, and surprisingly found it locked.  All the lights were off, and nobody was there.  It just seemed odd.  We then went to the grumpy security guard of our building, to see what was going on.  He proceeded to rattle off something in Korean, and all I could make out, was something about 10 o’clock.  The office staff wasn’t going to be in until 10 o’clock?  I don’t know.  We didn’t have our classroom keys, but went and found unlocked rooms to teach in anyway.

After class, I went to my office, where the Korean supervisor apologized for not telling us about a nation-wide college entrance exam that was occurring at 8:40 am that morning.  All government workers were told to come to work an hour later, so as not to cause a traffic jam for all the 600,000 high-schoolers who had to take this test.  She also told me that demonstrating farmers in some city, had decided to delay their protesting for an hour, so they wouldn’t disturb the students taking their test.

"The College Scholastic Ability Test for the 2006 academic year will start simultaneously at 966 schools in 75 districts across the country at 8:40 a.m. on Wednesday. A total of 593,806 people will take the test this year. Education authorities earlier said the level of difficulty would be the same as last year?s.

All CSAT takers have to report at designated schools by 8:10 a.m. and bring their admission tickets and IDs with them. They must leave their mobile phones at home because carrying them even by accident will be regarded as cheating.

All other electronic devices including digital cameras, MP3 players, electronic dictionaries, camera pens, calculators, radios and Walkmans are also banned."