Memories at the National University of Education

I didn't set the National University of Education as the first and last goal of my exam years. In a way it's a school I stumbled into. All the more so because I didn't enter my senior year of high school having finished thinking through my school or career. But I have good memories of that university. So many good memories I can't forget. This piece is, in the end, probably because of my small desire to set those memories down in writing.

When I enrolled, I hadn't actually done anything with the job of 'teacher' in mind. In my first and second years, much like now, my life was closer to preparing in my own way to keep a slightly different path in mind as well. What began at the same time as enrollment was dormitory life, and I do agree that dormitory life is a life with many memories and many difficulties. There was a dorm curfew. On weekdays you had to be in your room by 11. If you passed that 11 o'clock curfew, demerits were given. Coming in between 11 and 12 was a 2-point demerit, and the structure was such that once those demerits piled up to a certain point, you could even be expelled from the dorm. The reason I had to live in the dorm was that the dormitory-life process was the curriculum my university called 'teacher-training education.' For two years you lived in the dorm compulsorily (though it didn't cost anything) and spent time with classmates. In the first semester of first year, in a dorm building called Silloegwan, a computer-education major, an environmental-education major, and I — three of us — shared one room. Coming to the room late, I used the top of the bunk bed. I used the innermost desk too. I don't remember much, but I remember that classes were hard, that grades didn't come out high, that friends studied harder than I'd expected, that even putting in the same hours my friends' grades were higher, and that school life wasn't easy.

Until the first vacation I diligently grew my hair out. For no other reason than that I wanted to push back against my father's remark, 'Won't you cut your hair once you get to college?' And I'd always had the thought that I wanted to grow my hair out once. I had this question: what is it about growing it that makes people say not to? On the trip to Jeju I took after growing my hair, there were many fun things. Because my hair was long, there were people on the trip who mistook me for a woman. I also remember friends in the lecture hall during the semester mistaking me when they saw me lying face down. If there was anything not-so-great after growing my hair, it was that seniors kept making remarks about my long hair. Honestly, even now I don't understand why those people said such things. It's just someone else's appearance, so why?

I started studying like others do. But studying was hard. The first reason it was hard was that I wasn't good at rote, grade-style study. Why call university study 'grade study'? Because there was more to memorize than I'd expected. I'm not sure 'than expected' is the right phrase. But the Korean-language-education department I entered really demanded a lot of memorization. The university I imagined was closer to one that demands thinking ability. So I thought I'd think in my own way and write the results of my own thinking. But when I actually took the exams, it wasn't so. Especially the exam questions presented in major courses were all excessively abstract and merely large. Occasionally there were finely-detailed exam questions, but such exams were the exclusive preserve of some students. There were times when things you could only find in some corner of a book came out as exam questions. Or there were only exam questions where you'd actually do better just by memorizing the whole book. Since even in high school I wasn't the type of student who valued memorization, there was no way I'd be practiced at rote study. Among those studies, it wasn't all studies that were merely hard — in some classes there were lessons that let me ask questions often so I could put to good use the abilities I had. And on some days there were lessons by people excellent at gathering and connecting the knowledge I had in one place, even if it wasn't related to the major.

After finishing the military, I pondered what method there might be to overcome the hard major courses. One of the things that, by chance, connected to that opportunity was reading literary works. In the end, because I didn't know the works, there were many times the lessons were hard to understand. I wanted to solve a problem that had persisted for over two years. As it happened, around then my reading ability and experience had improved a lot compared to my early college days, so I thought, wouldn't the texts be worth reading?

What the first-year me wanted to do was travel, club activities, and dating. I'm sure I wanted to try these three. Speaking of travel first, beyond overseas travel, I wanted to go to Jeju once more. I thought childhood Jeju and the Jeju of a college freshman would feel different. The Jeju I went to that way, I circled by bicycle. Rather than thinking I had to travel with others, I figured going alone would be more at ease, so I set out and circled alone on a bicycle, and I remember traveling along with the heat. Club activities — well, those seem to be a time that holds my regret over the many things I wanted to try and couldn't. One day, walking around school, someone had posted on a big notice board, writing this and that, proposing we form a piano-playing club. Interested, I went to the place mentioned on that paper, and the place where the club was about to be formed

One of the spaces I often walked through in my college days was the lawn. That is, I walked countless times across the lawn in front of the lecture halls. The lawn in front of the humanities building isn't a space only I have many memories of; it's a space with many memories for others too. Because there were many hours spent sitting there talking, and many days reading books. On some days I waited my turn in the shade beneath a lone tree planted on the lawn, thinking about graduation photos; on some days I walked across it thinking the weather was cold. I think spending time on the lawn back then was truly a joyful thing, and looking back now, that lawn has become a space I can't find anywhere else. Apart from the university, the only places I saw a lawn were other universities and the lawn of the place where I briefly lived in England. Korea, after all, didn't have many parks with well-kept lawns where people could run and play, and that became a reason I long missed lawns. After I started working at my current school, one day we all went on a workshop. We arrived at what was called the lodging, and there was a fairly small lawn in front of it. After a long time it came to mind, so I lay on the grass and looked up at the sky. In college I didn't lie down to look at the sky, but it seemed I hadn't looked at the sky since getting a job, so I lay on the grass. Lying like that, the university I attended really was a lovely place. Lying on such a lawn, many teachers told me to get up, saying I'd catch scrub typhus, but honestly I didn't care. If I'd cared, I wouldn't have lain down in the first place. That lawn I wanted to remember that way is an important space of my college years.