Witnessing Social Interactions in a Closed Microcosm

With this week drawing to a close, the isolated boot camp at Chuncheon has officially passed its "1/4 completed" mark. As the students began to get accustomed to the study environment, schedule, and the routines of daily life here in the camp, we all have began to shift attention to things that are much more conventional in any social environment. As the same group of people interact everyday, they are bound of get to know each other deeply, and with the knowledge, a whole new level of communication beyond "Lets play" and "Lets study" sprout among the populace.

And with the increased communication comes increased drama. The stories of who likes who, who hates who abound, and precisely because no one has anything else going on in their lives besides studying/preparing for the SATs, such "exciting" rumors spread like wildfire, often leading to intricate subtleties in relationship among individuals and social subgroups. Well on the surface everything looks dandy, with most of the kids and us the staff getting along incredibly well, underneath that facade, a whole new world has been created and is being expanded...very fast.

And speaking of social grouping, it is interesting to note how a certain hierarchy has been established among the students to determine the "pecking order" among even the kids whose age difference amount to little more than a few months. With the closed environment and constant monitoring being major obstacles to outward expression of rank within the said social hierarchy, the local "leaders of the packs" are still somehow determined through an extensive, non-stopping verbal exchange supplemented by performance during sports activities on Tuesday afternoons.

And as the students go about jostling for position in their little hierarchies, we the teachers and the staff were not oblivious either. While the age factor plays clear dominant factor for rank among students and the staff themselves, when the two groups mix together, a whole new set of reactive chemistry develops. As figures of authority and discipline enforcement, the staff do get some sort of respect and submissive hatred among the students, but unlike the staff in Seoul, who only see the kids in class, the staff (and the teachers) sort of also have to play the role of the loving parents and friends to the students.

And, as far as I can see with my limited Korean, the Korean staff has tried their best to stoop down to the kids' levels to make them feel comfortable living away from home for such a long time in the, well, middle of nowhere. The female staff, especially, has become a part of the female students, to the extent that some students have said that the staff "look like female students." As time goes on, the burden of domineering disciplinarian that come with staff's job description can only break down, no longer leaving the kids at the mercy of harsh commands.

Despite continued attempt to ostentatiously go through the same procedure everyday, whether it be doing SAT classes and activities or enforcing curfews and detentions from failing vocab tests, the extensive change in social relationships has changed the inner core of all such procedures. Fear for the authority figures no longer exists, replaced by shared subliminal derision of their superficially authoritative looks. Emotional backlashes from being pushed to study hard no longer exists, replaced by joys of so-called shared suffering.

Increasingly, everything has taken on a character of social experiment. One of my fellow teacher has taken on the mission of decoding the personalities of each student while remolding the social grouping to genuinely include every student. The bias of genuine romantic feelings (or just sexual lust, perhaps) has become a catalyst for remolding such groupings by introducing previously nonexistent awkwardness among different peoples as explosive reagents...and the need for individuals to belong has reshaped the characters (at least on the surface) of many people in our isolated group.

At the end, anyway one looks at the current situation, one thing is definitely for sure. The short six-week program will forever stamp a lasting social imprint on all the participants. Perhaps it is imprudent and hasty for me to judge after only a quarter of the way through, but I am in a way certain that the need to belong to a group, the failures at short-term romance, and how to keep calm and steady for the sake of the SAT classes despite all the background drama will remake everyone involved. Greater maturity? Perhaps. A lifetime of memories and social benefits? Definitely yes.

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