By Lee Hyon-chol

As a homeroom teacher at a middle school, I think I have recently found the attributes needed to become a future political leader in my class.

Have I got a talent for telling my students' future? The position of homeroom teacher at a middle school is generally accepted as a hard 3-D job ― dangerous, difficult and dirty. Personally, however, I am happy to be a homeroom teacher again, a role I first undertook when I left secondary education for a college position about 20 years ago.

For a while I taught in a college but the job didn't last as long as I had expected and a couple of years ago I resigned from my job there. The problem was the number of students applying for the college was decreasing year by year. Also, the majority of colleges nowadays are aimed at making a profit much like in the business world. The owner of the college seemed rather cold toward the professors in my department when the number of applicants for our English program reduced to a shadow of its former self. That's when I made up my mind to leave the college.

Happily, I was offered the chance to teach in a middle school owned by my employer at the college. That's how I came to return to the job of homeroom teacher. How safe and sound I felt when I arrived at the middle school! I thanked God for giving me a second chance. It seems that God would like me to be humbler than ever and serve the students as Jesus did his disciples in this school founded by missionaries.

When the new school year began last March, I welcomed 34 students to my class. To my surprise, the data I received on my new class showed seven of them were from single-parent families due to divorce. Back in my school days, some of us were so poor we went without anything to eat during lunch breaks. I think the quality of life now has improved materially, but spiritually or morally it seems to be deteriorating. Students today feel hunger not for food but for a parents' love.

I felt sorry for those students and I made up my mind to love them as my sons. I also decided to accept everything positively. I wondered if these feelings were shared and understood on some level by all of my students, but they followed my instruction well enough to receive compliments almost every day. As the author of the book ``Whale Done!'' suggests, the power of positive appraisal and compliments really works.

My small amount of love and care for them was rewarded in no time with strong cooperation and unity among the students and good marks in the school tests. Especially Bae, the ``banjang'' (class leader in Korean,) has shown strong leadership by willingly undertaking hard chores such as cleaning the classroom and tidying the rows of chairs and desks after school.

Kim, one of the seven from a single-parent family showed a vast improvement in all his studies. Three of my boys, including Kim, took first, second and fifth place in test results. After a while, when I suggested all of the students work hard to get better marks in the tests, they made use of the brain pool in my class, made up of those students who excelled in their studies, off their own bat. The top students got together and came up with mock tests for various subjects.

To my joy, my class's results differed greatly from others. My class's average score was in the 80s and that of the second best class was in the 70s. My boys outdid other classes by more than 10 points. That's when I thought I had found good presidential material for the future. They somehow reminded me of the leaders of our country in 1960s-70s, who tried their best to build the basic economic foundation for our future.

I want the banjang and his think tank to be the future leaders when they become old enough. I pray they can play a role in leading our country to head other countries in terms of its economy, culture, education, politics, science and technology or whatever field they choose by as decisive a margin as they did in the school tests.

The writer used to be a faculty member in a college in Masan, South Gyeongsang Province. He is now teaching in Changshin Middle School and can be reached at eleichc@hanmail.net.