You Jin's Short Stories

[Sophia Kang]

I also found You Jin's short stories to be relevant to my classroom in that they are about three types of challnges in the classroom--apathy, rebellion, and a mature child who shows inconsistency from his normal behavior. A running theme in all these stories was teacher as the savior, and parent as the antagonist who is irresponsible and harmful to the child. The children often call their parents something along the lines of "parasites" and teachers in the stories blame the parents as being bad influencers in the students' lives. I liked the teachers approach to becoming more curious about her students, but I felt to a certain extent, it was one-sided.