Tonight is Sunday night. I left San Francisco last Sunday. I realize that crossing the international date line muddies slightly the arithmetic that might otherwise allow me now to mark my first full week in Korea, but even so, it being a Sunday night and therefore possessing a satisfyingly kind of meaningfulness, both for obvious and traditional and probably biblical reasons, but also because it's the night before my first day of full-fledged teaching (more on that later), it seemed like a good time to write again.
In my last email, I had just met two of my then soon-to-be and now current co-workers, Britney and Greg, a couple. The next day was Thursday and Thanksgiving. I wouldn't have remembered this and at no point during the day did it ever really feel like that distinctly American and family oriented and culinarily-specific holiday, but thanks to a thoughtful invitation from Greg and Britney, I the new guy was made to feel very welcome with a lunch about as far removed from turkey and cranberry as one can get.
Having already officiated our friendship on facebook, Britney instructed me accordingly to meet her in front of the cafe in which I'd first met her the day before: Angel-In-Us Coffee. On that note, having now spent a few more hours walking around Tongyeong and a few more watching Korean T.V., I am only beginning to grasp the significance of the English language within Korean commercial culture. Whether it is printed on a teenager's t-shirt or draped across a clothing store awning or sung in a heavily accented commercial jingle for a car or telephone company (I can't tell which), English is everywhere and it is everywhere misused (in said car or telephone commercial, a car, petite by American standards, speaks in a delicate female voice while idling before a mirror; next, a gigantic hand holding an equally gigantic phone, big by American standards, emerges through the glass without breaking it and presents itself to what we the viewer can only imagine to be a startled car; the tagline that follows: "Don't worry, Price!" and it's hard to tell whether "price" is in this case a sentence fragment, a verb, or a person).
Or maybe "misused" isn't the right word. English seems to operate here as a signifier of coolness, a stamp of approval officiating a product's acceptability for a particular target audience. That the sentence or phrase used, if in fact the assemblage of English in use can even be called a sentence or phrase as opposed to an arbitrarily assorted pattern of words drawn just as arbitrarily from a catalogue of American clothing and energy drink advertisements, makes absolutely no sense at all to a native English speaker really doesn't seem to matter. Operating under the same kind of contextual ambivalence that allows or even inspires Americans my age to get Chinese figures tattooed upon their shoulders or lower backs despite having little or no understanding of what those figures actually mean, Koreans use English because the use of English itself is meaningful.
And so we met in front of Angel-In-Us Coffee, which is modeled on Starbucks and advertises "World Best Coffee." As various members of the group began to assemble and then start to move back to where I had come from, back past my motel and then one block further to a restaurant called Shabu Shabu, where more people were waiting, I learned of two anomalies that mark the Tongyeong ESL teacher community: a) it is disproportionately American and b) it is disproportionately coupled. Of the 10 people at lunch that day, there were three couples. And because one of the attendees, my predecessor, Jeff, who will be leaving on Tuesday and thus allowing me to finally move out of the love motel and into his apartment, is, as Britney delicately put it, an infrequent member of the social circle, or as Greg indelicately put it, like that grumpy Uncle who rarely shows up to family affairs but in those few instances in which he does can always be counted on to frown incessantly and make everyone feel slightly uncomfortable, I'll calculate that 6 out of the 9 people at the lunch representing the Tongyeong ESL teacher community were in one way or another coupled up. And all 9, or 10 with Jeff, were American.
More importantly, everyone, even Jeff, seemed pretty nice. All of them are older than me, some of them by more than 5 years, but everyone seemed to be in Korea for the same handful of reasons: to see the world, to make some money, and most dominant of all, to figure things out.
The food itself was, if Britney is to be trusted, not actually Korean food, but Mongolian. Or as I deduced based on the prevalence of Kimchi at the table, a Korean take on Mongolian. Fat curled slabs of what looked to me like bacon were brought out on large platters along with colorful arrays of garlic, sprouts, cabbage, lettuce, and various pickled vegetables. The meat strips were then placed upon the circular hot plate resting in the gas-stove divot at the center of each table to be cooked for an indeterminate, but just to be safe, probably longer than necessary time period. The too cooked meat was then removed from the hot plate at the leisure and in the desired quantity of the patron, who then placed it along with any assortment of vegetables of his or her choosing at the center of a rice discus, previously submerged in rose water until translucent and absolutely malleable. We ate these wraps from 11 in the morning until 1, at which point I, but no one else, had to leave for early orientation at school, the servers replacing our platters of meat and bowls of kimchi and arrays of vegetable whenever we ran out, which was often.
After making my way through some preliminary paper work with my director, Pamela, and receiving a full tour of the school--a narrow four story building with a lobby and a teacher's work area at the bottom, and three floors of stuffy classrooms all named after various nations but in all other ways completely indistinguishable from one another except that some have windows that face the dreary back of the building while others have windows that face the dreary front of the building while a select few do not have windows at all but instead constantly blasting heat vents--I sat down with Jeff, my grumpy uncle of a predecessor, to observe him for the rest of the day.
In fairness, Jeff is not so much grumpy as he is reserved and jaded. Having worked at various hagwons (private schools) throughout Korea for four non-continuous years, in some ways I think he has earned the right to no longer give a shit. And give a shit, he does not. He was kind enough to write down his class schedule for me with complete descriptions of each class and its students. "3:00, Monday, Wednesday, Friday Schedule," it begins, "Book: English Playground 3/ Tuesday, Thursday Schedule, Book: Intensive Reading 1." Skim down to the bottom of the paragraph and you will find, "The students in this class are well behaved."
I tried to, have repeatedly tried to, ask Jeff about the difference between Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Tuesdays and Thursdays respectively, but with the same degree of pedagogical enthusiasm I have now repeatedly witnessed in each one of his, soon to be my, 7 daily classes, his response has always been along the lines of "they are different because they are completely different." Similarly, I have learned from Jeff that the books used by each class are determined by an elaborate school-wide protocol established with something or other in mind and to be found in writing probably nowhere, that each class operates on an elaborate cross-word puzzle and sticker reward system of Jeff's own devising, a system which ensures the retention of the remaining hints at order to be found in any one of his classrooms, and a system which I will probably discover on my own, and that break time is either constant and predictable, in constant flux, or something it would be best for me not to worry about to much, depending on when it was that I asked him. But Jeff is a nice guy and Greg was probably not being fair to him. After all, he must have spent an awful long time hand writing this schedule for me.
The classes are divided into blocks. During the first period, Jeff and soon enough, I, teach the students of period 1, a small group of 6 year olds, their numbers artificially thinned by fear of swine flu, which is artificially high in Korea, while Jeff's, and soon enough, my, native Korean counterpart teach another set of students. During period 2, after a 5 minute break during which Jeff and I walk downstairs and sit at his desk or drink terrible coffee or use the bathroom or make copies of crossword puzzles, Jeff, soon I, switch kids with the native Korean counterpart; the Korean, whose name I eventually extracted from Jeff and is Jane, teaches the artificially thinned six year olds, and Jeff and I, soon just I, get a slightly larger and slightly older group of kids who speak English slightly better. After periods 1 and 2 are over, the kids are picked up by their parents or their babysitter to be driven to a similar after school academy, but this time for math, or piano, or taekwondo, but certainly not home, only to be replaced with a new round of children, all of them arriving from their math or piano and taekwondo academies, some of them in uniform, and all of them too tired or too much of the sons and daughters of the moderately to very wealthy to give any of us the time of day.
On that note, I don't know whether it's because of their privilege (as Jeff seems to think, citing the school's high tuition) or because Korean children are just spoiled (as my director Pamela seems to think, herself a Korean) or because Jeff's approach to class discipline involves quietly remarking that the class room has become too loud before resuming his position before the white board and maybe occasionally snapping a children on the top of the head with a paper folder and only very rarely despite its obvious effectiveness, threatening to take an offending child to see the Korean counterpart, who not only has the ability to call the unruly child's parent, but, if the Korean counterpart wishes, to make use of a flat thin wooden stick, and in any event, many of the Korean counterparts really are intimidating regardless and so who can blame the children for falling deathly silent every time one of them passes in the hall only to resume shouting at one another in Korean, or at best in "Konglish," a Korean-English hybrid, and not paying attention to Jeff, and soon enough, me?, but in the sample of children I have so far had the opportunity to observe twice, brattiness is not a variable. With a few exceptions, all of whom seem to be shy to the point of social disadvantage, all of the children are loud, fond of interrupting their classmates and their teachers, and reluctant to do their work. The only real variable is whether or not a given child can be said to be malicious or not. Luckily for me, maliciousness does not seem to be too common a trait, and where it has cropped up, it seems to have done so only in my 4th period class, where it can be found in spades. All of the other problematic students from other classes, whether they be in period 2 ("Marvin and James need to be treated in a stern fashion," Jeff reports in his hand written schedule) or period 6 ("Jon is lazy and only wants to socialize. Luke is often off-focus and can be lazy. Alex can be lazy and is usually off-focus...Tom is generally O.K.") or period 7 ("All of the male students in this class misbehave all of the time"), may be rowdy or even mean at times, but they do not give me that uniquely depressing and unsettling feeling one gets when confronted with a child, a class of humanity we are genetically programmed to think of as fundamentally decent and innocent and worthy of our protection and effort, who is nasty to his or her rotten little core.
Those kids are in my 4th period. While all of the other classes have so far called me "Ben-Teacher," a bit of Konglish which is apparently allowed to slip by at the school, despite Britney's valiant effort to rid it from her classes, within seconds of seeing me all of the children in 4th period decided to start calling me "Pinocchio-Teacher" on account of my nose. Jeff eventually corrected them. I thought to explain that Pinocchio's nose is long and thin and anyway, Pinocchio was most certainly not a Jew, but then I remembered that they're all 8 years old. The class itself was relatively boring. Jeff, having explicitly given up on this class, as opposed to all of his other classes, on which he has just given up in spirit, simply distributed crossword puzzles and spent the rest of the class talking to me. I was able to earn a bit of reprieve from the kids by taking off my glasses, something which they found amusing but thankfully not in what I interpreted to be a more positive way, but either way, 4th period is going to be an uphill battle.
That night we all went bowling. The bowling alley is only a few blocks from the school (and my motel) and seems to be fairly popular amongst the Korean men who, in typical Korean fashion, excel at it freakishly with custom designed wrist guards and matching shirts and 280 point games (similarly, Greg told me about the time a few of his Korean friends invited him to go hiking; he showed up in some dusty boots and a jacket, they showed up with $300 windbreakers, ergonomic walking sticks, and some minor navigational equipment; recreational activities are to be taken seriously here). It was at the bowling alley that I also had my first sip of soju, Korea's most distinctive national beverage.
It is repulsive. At 1,400 won a bottle, it tastes very similar to watered down vodka with the added flavor of formaldehyde, an ingredient which Jeff actually insists is included for cost-cutting purposes. After two games at the bowling alley, my first considerably better than my second, we then moved to a bar, an institution which in Korea, a fact that I did not discover until glancing at the clock on the wall too many hours later, will remain open until its last occupants leave. And so we finally left at around 4 in the morning. I staggered back to my love motel where I ate some more yogurt (I cannot cook at the motel and most of the food items at the market are completely foreign to me) before going to bed. The next morning I woke to a terrible headache, hung around the motel for a few hours under the impression that Leon, my life manager, was going to take me to the hospital at 11 for my state-mandated battery of tests, before going back to school at 1:30, to follow Jeff around once more. The day was much like the last except that we used different books in all of the classes as determined by something somewhere, and all of the children were a little bit less bewildered by my presence and therefore a little bit louder.
In the stairwell on the way up to the dreaded fourth period class, Jeff and I came across Ally. Wearing a matching all yellow jump suit, she immediately began laughing and jumping up and down and shouting "Pinocchio-Teacher!"
"Oh yeah?" Britney said coming up behind us, "Well you're Banana-student!" she said pointing at Ally's jumpsuit.
I can't tell you how comforting it was to know that I have someone willing to defend and protect me from an 8 year old. Britney is my knight in shining armor. You should have seen the look on that little girl's face.
Tomorrow is Jeff's last day and, with him there to walk me through as much as he might want to, I'm finally going to be doing some teaching. There is of course no real reason to be this nervous about it, to be so intimidated by the prospect of judgment before 100 or so 6-12 year olds, but of course I am. Today, Sunday, it rained for the first time since my arrival. In the early afternoon, I took a cab down to Mike and Christine's apartment (another couple, another two Americans). They'll be leaving next week (unfortunately; they're both very nice) and so after everyone had time to talk (I met 10 or so new people, many of them coupled up, all but two of them American) and eat, an auction was held. I ended up coming away with a book, two CDs (one of them bid upon ironically for 10 won, 1 cent), and my big-money item running at 8000 won, a set of computer speakers. They should serve me well come Wednesday when I move into Jeff's old and my new apartment, a place about which my grumpy uncle of a predecessor has had nothing but negative things to say.
An hour ago, there was some very audible, splashy fornication going on in the motel room bathroom upstairs, but it seems to have subsided now. And since tomorrow I will actually be going to the hospital with life-manager Leon, I ought to use this opportunity to go to bed. I'll write more in a few days after I've had time to face down these kids.
In fairness, Jeff is not so much grumpy as he is reserved and jaded. Having worked at various hagwons (private schools) throughout Korea for four non-continuous years, in some ways I think he has earned the right to no longer give a shit. And give a shit, he does not. He was kind enough to write down his class schedule for me with complete descriptions of each class and its students. "3:00, Monday, Wednesday, Friday Schedule," it begins, "Book: English Playground 3/ Tuesday, Thursday Schedule, Book: Intensive Reading 1." Skim down to the bottom of the paragraph and you will find, "The students in this class are well behaved."
I tried to, have repeatedly tried to, ask Jeff about the difference between Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Tuesdays and Thursdays respectively, but with the same degree of pedagogical enthusiasm I have now repeatedly witnessed in each one of his, soon to be my, 7 daily classes, his response has always been along the lines of "they are different because they are completely different." Similarly, I have learned from Jeff that the books used by each class are determined by an elaborate school-wide protocol established with something or other in mind and to be found in writing probably nowhere, that each class operates on an elaborate cross-word puzzle and sticker reward system of Jeff's own devising, a system which ensures the retention of the remaining hints at order to be found in any one of his classrooms, and a system which I will probably discover on my own, and that break time is either constant and predictable, in constant flux, or something it would be best for me not to worry about to much, depending on when it was that I asked him. But Jeff is a nice guy and Greg was probably not being fair to him. After all, he must have spent an awful long time hand writing this schedule for me.
The classes are divided into blocks. During the first period, Jeff and soon enough, I, teach the students of period 1, a small group of 6 year olds, their numbers artificially thinned by fear of swine flu, which is artificially high in Korea, while Jeff's, and soon enough, my, native Korean counterpart teach another set of students. During period 2, after a 5 minute break during which Jeff and I walk downstairs and sit at his desk or drink terrible coffee or use the bathroom or make copies of crossword puzzles, Jeff, soon I, switch kids with the native Korean counterpart; the Korean, whose name I eventually extracted from Jeff and is Jane, teaches the artificially thinned six year olds, and Jeff and I, soon just I, get a slightly larger and slightly older group of kids who speak English slightly better. After periods 1 and 2 are over, the kids are picked up by their parents or their babysitter to be driven to a similar after school academy, but this time for math, or piano, or taekwondo, but certainly not home, only to be replaced with a new round of children, all of them arriving from their math or piano and taekwondo academies, some of them in uniform, and all of them too tired or too much of the sons and daughters of the moderately to very wealthy to give any of us the time of day.
On that note, I don't know whether it's because of their privilege (as Jeff seems to think, citing the school's high tuition) or because Korean children are just spoiled (as my director Pamela seems to think, herself a Korean) or because Jeff's approach to class discipline involves quietly remarking that the class room has become too loud before resuming his position before the white board and maybe occasionally snapping a children on the top of the head with a paper folder and only very rarely despite its obvious effectiveness, threatening to take an offending child to see the Korean counterpart, who not only has the ability to call the unruly child's parent, but, if the Korean counterpart wishes, to make use of a flat thin wooden stick, and in any event, many of the Korean counterparts really are intimidating regardless and so who can blame the children for falling deathly silent every time one of them passes in the hall only to resume shouting at one another in Korean, or at best in "Konglish," a Korean-English hybrid, and not paying attention to Jeff, and soon enough, me?, but in the sample of children I have so far had the opportunity to observe twice, brattiness is not a variable. With a few exceptions, all of whom seem to be shy to the point of social disadvantage, all of the children are loud, fond of interrupting their classmates and their teachers, and reluctant to do their work. The only real variable is whether or not a given child can be said to be malicious or not. Luckily for me, maliciousness does not seem to be too common a trait, and where it has cropped up, it seems to have done so only in my 4th period class, where it can be found in spades. All of the other problematic students from other classes, whether they be in period 2 ("Marvin and James need to be treated in a stern fashion," Jeff reports in his hand written schedule) or period 6 ("Jon is lazy and only wants to socialize. Luke is often off-focus and can be lazy. Alex can be lazy and is usually off-focus...Tom is generally O.K.") or period 7 ("All of the male students in this class misbehave all of the time"), may be rowdy or even mean at times, but they do not give me that uniquely depressing and unsettling feeling one gets when confronted with a child, a class of humanity we are genetically programmed to think of as fundamentally decent and innocent and worthy of our protection and effort, who is nasty to his or her rotten little core.
Those kids are in my 4th period. While all of the other classes have so far called me "Ben-Teacher," a bit of Konglish which is apparently allowed to slip by at the school, despite Britney's valiant effort to rid it from her classes, within seconds of seeing me all of the children in 4th period decided to start calling me "Pinocchio-Teacher" on account of my nose. Jeff eventually corrected them. I thought to explain that Pinocchio's nose is long and thin and anyway, Pinocchio was most certainly not a Jew, but then I remembered that they're all 8 years old. The class itself was relatively boring. Jeff, having explicitly given up on this class, as opposed to all of his other classes, on which he has just given up in spirit, simply distributed crossword puzzles and spent the rest of the class talking to me. I was able to earn a bit of reprieve from the kids by taking off my glasses, something which they found amusing but thankfully not in what I interpreted to be a more positive way, but either way, 4th period is going to be an uphill battle.
That night we all went bowling. The bowling alley is only a few blocks from the school (and my motel) and seems to be fairly popular amongst the Korean men who, in typical Korean fashion, excel at it freakishly with custom designed wrist guards and matching shirts and 280 point games (similarly, Greg told me about the time a few of his Korean friends invited him to go hiking; he showed up in some dusty boots and a jacket, they showed up with $300 windbreakers, ergonomic walking sticks, and some minor navigational equipment; recreational activities are to be taken seriously here). It was at the bowling alley that I also had my first sip of soju, Korea's most distinctive national beverage.
It is repulsive. At 1,400 won a bottle, it tastes very similar to watered down vodka with the added flavor of formaldehyde, an ingredient which Jeff actually insists is included for cost-cutting purposes. After two games at the bowling alley, my first considerably better than my second, we then moved to a bar, an institution which in Korea, a fact that I did not discover until glancing at the clock on the wall too many hours later, will remain open until its last occupants leave. And so we finally left at around 4 in the morning. I staggered back to my love motel where I ate some more yogurt (I cannot cook at the motel and most of the food items at the market are completely foreign to me) before going to bed. The next morning I woke to a terrible headache, hung around the motel for a few hours under the impression that Leon, my life manager, was going to take me to the hospital at 11 for my state-mandated battery of tests, before going back to school at 1:30, to follow Jeff around once more. The day was much like the last except that we used different books in all of the classes as determined by something somewhere, and all of the children were a little bit less bewildered by my presence and therefore a little bit louder.
In the stairwell on the way up to the dreaded fourth period class, Jeff and I came across Ally. Wearing a matching all yellow jump suit, she immediately began laughing and jumping up and down and shouting "Pinocchio-Teacher!"
"Oh yeah?" Britney said coming up behind us, "Well you're Banana-student!" she said pointing at Ally's jumpsuit.
I can't tell you how comforting it was to know that I have someone willing to defend and protect me from an 8 year old. Britney is my knight in shining armor. You should have seen the look on that little girl's face.
Tomorrow is Jeff's last day and, with him there to walk me through as much as he might want to, I'm finally going to be doing some teaching. There is of course no real reason to be this nervous about it, to be so intimidated by the prospect of judgment before 100 or so 6-12 year olds, but of course I am. Today, Sunday, it rained for the first time since my arrival. In the early afternoon, I took a cab down to Mike and Christine's apartment (another couple, another two Americans). They'll be leaving next week (unfortunately; they're both very nice) and so after everyone had time to talk (I met 10 or so new people, many of them coupled up, all but two of them American) and eat, an auction was held. I ended up coming away with a book, two CDs (one of them bid upon ironically for 10 won, 1 cent), and my big-money item running at 8000 won, a set of computer speakers. They should serve me well come Wednesday when I move into Jeff's old and my new apartment, a place about which my grumpy uncle of a predecessor has had nothing but negative things to say.
An hour ago, there was some very audible, splashy fornication going on in the motel room bathroom upstairs, but it seems to have subsided now. And since tomorrow I will actually be going to the hospital with life-manager Leon, I ought to use this opportunity to go to bed. I'll write more in a few days after I've had time to face down these kids.
No comments:
Post a Comment