Filed under: changes, host fam, life in Jeju, miguk fam, skool, stuff, teaching
Korean Minkus* was back in class today. I have to say that a) I really kind of love Class 1J** and b) in addition to KM, it has this really adorable fat kid, another one with these sort of weirdly cute crossed eyes, and one (non-fat) student who clearly speaks English pretty well and uses it to be an asshat. That would be the one who told me that his favorite hobby was “studying” and that I was “beautiful, very beautiful.” (Again, how sad is it that the only kids who tell me that are the ones who are blatantly sucking up?) But he’s funny, and tiny, and I like both of those things.
I’m taking my happiness where I can get it this week, so I was happy to see them, and happy to teach “weather words” today – my goal is to push them out of this semester with the ability to answer basic questions about themselves. Ex. Where are you from, and what is it like? Just to be able to get around. That’s all I’m asking.
In the meantime – I spent tonight painting. Some things about Korea still surprise me, like the fact that the dinky, junky 문방국 (stationery store) down the street sells palettes for $2. As I walked with Host Sister today to the store, I couldn’t help imagining the same goal in Tennessee; first I would have to go to Michael’s or Wal-Mart, but it would be a drive, and depending on traffic and what else was going on that day I would probably have to wait until there was another occasion to go…Here we left; we went into this store that, quite honestly, didn’t look like it should have anything worthwhile, and bought a palette with cartoon characters on it; and then we walked to the grocery store across the street and bought Popsicles. I ate a melon bar.
*My brother has a Shawn Hunter*** jacket – a leather bomber with a shearling collar – and one day my sister and I started calling him and my dad “Shawn and Chet,” which always makes me giggle when I remember it, partially because my father is the opposite of a Chet and partially because Chet is a funny name.
**The people who are sponsoring this yearlong vacation have politely requested that we all dissociate our blogs from: the organization, our schools, our families. So from now on, following Laura‘s lead, my organization is now The Program, the people who run my organization are now The People Who Run The Program or possibly The Powers That Be, my school is now My School, my host family is now made of Host Brother (HB), Host Sister (HS), Omoni (Mom), Aboji (Dad). And Class 1J is obviously not named Class 1J. As of right now my friends’ names are staying in, but that might change. If you actually know me and you want more specific information, feel free to comment.
***Did you know that Rider Strong graduated Magna Cum Laude from Columbia? (I accidentally typed in Manga. That must be why I didn’t.)
Actual names my students have requested to be called, male edition:
Wonder Woman
Raccoon
Mr. Kim
Superman
Dog Baby
Also, I have a student whose name is – no joke – Yoo Suk.
The English teacher dinner meeting tonight was held at a Japanese restaurant – I guess the fact that every English teacher has seen the Powerpoint slide that says “Hillary’s favorite Korean food is raw fish!” has finally sunk in. Not that I was dropping hints or anything. At dinner, I started telling them about my pipe-dream extracurricular – an a cappella English singing group – and they all got really excited. The Korean Lori Hartmann-Mahmud even asked me if I had seen “Freedom Writers” and told me I reminded her of Hilary Swank’s character. If she only knew. It seems to be a bit of a hasty judgment if you ask me, especially given the fact that, despite my vow to abandon Korean in the classroom, I ended up screaming, “Iyagiheyo? Fun OPSOYO!” (lit. “Talking? Fun DOES NOT EXIST!”) to a classroom of rowdy low-level eighth-grade boys. But it is flattering. I’m just not sure how to explain that it’s not that I’m actually a good, passionate teacher; it’s just that I’ve seen Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit five too many times.
I’m going to ask my students about it tomorrow, but I’m not banking on anything. That wasn’t even my original plan, honestly; my first goal was to have some sort of English newspaper or drama or something, but the one thing that my students seem to be unified in is their love of “POP SONG!” (One girl even wrote on her paper that her favorite place in Korea was “Super Junior’s house.” It seemed irrelevant to remind her that because there are maybe thirteen people in Super Junior, it is highly doubtful that they all live in one place.) I can’t even get them to shut up, so I doubt I can get them to voluntarily write about stuff. I might, however, be able to convince them to sing, although not having any choral conducting experience, and not having been in any sort of choir for the past five years, it won’t be easy. I just want my students to do something fun. But half of them go to hagwon (supplementary academy – like Sylvan Learning Center, but for everyone, not just kids who need special help) directly after school anyway. I guess I can dream, right?
Yesterday’s teaching was terrible, honestly. Today’s went much better, but I ended up crying at a teahouse with three of the other English teachers anyway, because they asked me about my plan for the semester and I tried to explain it and they all got this sort of look on their face like “Weeeellllllll…” I felt a lot less frustrated today with my students, but I’m still really aggravated – reading other blogs, I know that a lot of other ETAs have students coming up to them saying they are beautiful and have small face and blah blah blah. My students absolutely, positively do not care. My job is to make them care, of course – not that I have a small face (I don’t, anyway), but enough to pay attention in class, to want to learn English, to not leave me up there alone and pouring sweat in a room with no air conditioning. If I don’t want to be alone, I have to take them with me. And my co-teachers keep giving me advice, but I have no idea if it’s good or not – they have a lot of experience, but at the same time the Korean educational system is very different from the one I’ve learned, and so my instinctive reaction to a lot of their suggestions is, “Are you sure about that?”
Andy says it’s culture shock. It might be. I hope so, because it’s too early to let this get me down.
Happy Pig
Teck Ki (Tacky?)
Cute Girl
Sexy Geir
Cow
Pooh
Beautiful House
Banana
(x) No, please.
The idea of going back to my classes tomorrow is already disheartening, which is a definite sign that something about my lessons needs to change. Right now I feel like a cog in a giant education factory, kind of like the cheese factory in “Mouse Hunt,” if you’ve ever seen that Nathan Lane gem. I think the major problems are as follows:
a) my students may or may not understand me
b) I have no real way of knowing if my students understand me
c) I don’t know anything about my students
d) They have heard all the stuff I am teaching them before
e) I have to stand up there and deliver a PowerPoint about myself, and I don’t like PowerPoint much, and I know about myself
Tomorrow, lesson modification: they have to fill out worksheets answering the same questions they ask about me. This should make my teaching more interesting, at least. If I can get my hands on some string I might have the kids on Tuesday make nametags. The hammer, however, is not going anywhere. The hammer is the only thing standing in between me and classroom anarchy. I would like to think that this would not be the case if I were teaching in a classroom where I knew for sure that the kids understood what I was saying, but I sort of doubt that such is the case.
Tomorrow I am also cooking for my host family; what, exactly, depends on what I can find at E-Mart. They have requested Italian. I am debating gnocchi. I know for sure that E-Mart will have the ingredients for gnocchi. I also know for sure that I’ve never cooked it before and that it’s a whole lot of work. I hope it goes okay. At least they can’t eat until around 8 PM, because my host sister is doing some sort of extra extra extra school thing, in addition to her actual school and hagwon – something about an at-home math test, or maybe math tutoring. I’m never really sure of anything around here. You know.
Yesterday, after a scooter-buying adventure that almost but did not quite end in Tom buying a possibly stolen moped, the Jeju-sians headed out to Seogwipo, where the beach is beautiful but it does occasionally rain. And by “occasionally,” I obviously mean, as you might guess, “yesterday.” We got a good hour of beach time in before spending another hour wandering around, trying to collect everyone’s soggy stuff, and losing a drunk Drew, who ended up in a hotel lobby with his bottle of Carlo Rossi. Having polished off a fair amount of wine myself, and having forgotten to charge my cell phone, I wasn’t much help. We finally ended up outside of the Seogwipo E-Mart (of course), where I had to buy new clothes so I didn’t look quite so much like a lost street urchin, and meeting Tony for chicken. I like the beach. I like Seogwipo, although not as well as Jeju-si. I like Jeju-do.
1. American music played: Azure Ray (host mom likes, natch)
2. Teaching today, I realized that I sound like Will Ferrell talking to Sean Connery on “Celebrity Jeopardy.”
3. New KFB post…check it out on the sidebar, kthx
I am too stupid to use Korean phones. Despite the fact that my own cell phone allows me to videochat, despite the fact that I am a college graduate, I had to have my twelve-year-old host brother call Severance Hospital today. After repeated declarations of “Hillary-homestay. Hillary-homestay!” the man at the desk apparently told us not to call back. Ever.
I’m sure all good readers of this blog are sick of Sick Posts, but the fact remains that I am still a miserable pile of bacteria. My antibiotic supply ran out today, and while I am better, I am not better – I am still sick-ish, and one can only assume that in the absence of drugs, I’ll go back to being a consumptive old woman, so. Also I apparently pulled some muscles in my back coughing, which means that it now hurts to do any lung-related activity. My host mom and dad have been after me to go back to the doctor, and finally today my co-teachers sent me home early and took me to a clinic here. At which point my host father said, “I told her to do that yesterday.”
My father gave me drugs before I left; unfortunately, they’re MIA – I can only assume that they got lost in the packing process. So I have a new supply of a different antibiotic, as well as what I think is Advil. Everyone here seems really concerned about the Advil. “Ibupropen? You have taken before?” “Ibupropen? You can buy at pharmacy?” I tried to explain that you can buy ibuprofen at the American equivalent of Family Mart, but they seem to think that it’s a variant of hydrocodone. I got some from the 약국. I’m kind of surprised.
(Note for Dad: The doctor I saw today is friends with the doctor I saw in Seoul Meanwhile, that doctor is supposed to get back to me tomorrow. Also, he’s the parent of a student at my school, so I ended up getting the medicine for $7.)
I had a really cute moment with my host fam last night though. They told me from the beginning to call them omoni and aboji, and that they wanted their kids to call me nuna and oni, “big sister.” But the kids haven’t yet, so I told them again last night that they could and should, and they got really excited. We also played an epic series of Uno games in which Host Brother told me that he was “very clever” and that he won once in a blue moon. Tomorrow I’m going to the grand opening of Lotte Mart. Maybe I shouldn’t be so excited.
PS. My female students think my brother is gorgeous. My male students think my sister is gorgeous. And my mom.
I took pictures today of all the artistic renderings of me that my students drew today, but I can’t figure out how to upload them online. I guess it’s my own fault, since I gave them a worksheet with a relatively formless image of yours truly, but still, was it necessary to label me as wearing a “cheap dress”? Or to draw me holding a chainsaw in one hand and a bloody skull in the other? Or to illustrate the flamethrower laying at my feet? Or to write “nice (?) hat”?
Anyway. My vice-principal asked me if I liked makgeolli, aka rice wine you drink by the bowl, when I finished with my classes, and of course I said yes, and of course I ended up sitting in a makgeolli restaurant being force-fed rice wine and blood sausage. Mmmm. My poor co-teacher had to go along to supervise, since she knew, I guess, that the male teachers with me would insist that I have large eyes. (This is a compliment. Apparently.) Then I came home and drunk-talked to Drew for half an hour and now I’m here, feeling exceptionally lazy. I have stuff to do. I think. I would rather go watch Korean television.
Filed under: fondness for analogies, host fam, life in Jeju, music, okay seriously Korea
Good thing it’s around midnight and I still have a PowerPoint to complete for Classes 1-4 tomorrow. In college, to be honest, that would have been a decent track record. But now I am a functioning adult – I am – and so I should be doing these things earlier, even though the rush of excitement I feel about tomorrow is the same feeling I’ve always had before the first day of school, from age five to age now.
Again, full disclosure: I would probably have made more progress had I not arrived at school this morning, achy and congested, to find that my computer was entirely in Korean. This made making a snazzy presentation difficult. It actually made making any presentation difficult, since I couldn’t understand any of the commands. After half an hour of trying to explain to the other teachers that I just wanted my computer commands in English, I did NOT want to type in Korean, I did NOT want to read English-language websites, and I was NOT having trouble accessing Microsoft Word, I was able to move on to asking if I could go home and work on my laptop, where all the commands are in beautiful, blessed English. After deterring me for another half hour with hollow promises of repairs by the computer teacher, it was finally discovered that the computer teacher was too busy to fix my computer that day. But then, of course, it was time for lunch. Not time to go home and get some work done, time (of course) to eat. They told me that if I was not feeling well that I should order some mandu with them, so I did. Then they got me some Tylenol and told me that I should eat some noodles before taking the medicine, and that we would be eating both noodles AND mandu, despite the fact that I didn’t really want any mandu in the first place, much less noodles + mandu. Eventually I managed to talk them down to just noodles, although the moment I came home my host brother and sister were like, “Hey, do you want some mandu?”
But in the interest of complete truth, I will admit that I went downtown exploring with HS and HB today, as we had previously planned, when I had foolishly believed that my morning might be productive. After they left for hagwon I stumbled upon an underground fish and vegetable market, where the fish were so fresh that the market didn’t smell and huge pyramids of Jeju tangerines decorated the stalls. I felt like Alice in Wonderland. Then I emerged back into the downtown, went to the wrong Pizza Hut, and finally made it to meet the Jeju-si crew, where – much to my surprise – I almost cried in relief. I told my host mom that I like Korean food better than pizza, which is largely true, but tonight this was the best pizza I had ever had, despite the fact that it was accompanied by really gross and partially frozen lasagna. The crust was filled with cheese and sweet potato. I suggest you not knock the combination until you have tried it.
The operative word around here seems to be “maybe.” As in, “Maybe the computer company is very busy, so they will maybe come tomorrow, or maybe Monday,” or “Maybe that is cuttlefish,” or “Maybe my mother will pick you up.” The element of terrifying uncertainty that’s already inherent in having your language brokenly translated by a twelve-year-old is amplified by such statements; will my host mother be there, or won’t she? Is it squid, or isn’t it? The only explanation I can come up with is that “maybe” is somehow synonymous with “to be,” or that here on this island, nothing is for sure, not even the identity of dried seafood. But it still seems to fit, somehow; after tonight, I have hope for this year. Will it fly? Maybe.
I don’t know if I could drive a car
Fast enough to get to where you are
Or wild enough not to miss the boat completely
Honey, I’m thinking maybe
You know just maybe
– Liz Phair, “Shatter”
I met a Korean student today who was wearing – no joke – a Betsy Layne t-shirt. KENTUCKYYYYYYY
– “Praise You,” Fatboy Slim
– “Satellite,” Dave Matthews Band
– the entirety of Sufjan Stevens’ “Michigan” album
– Ralph Stanley
To be fair, the first two stemmed from the fact that Host Brother was working on his English vocab, and two of the words just happened to be “praise” and “satellite.” Also the fact that I will use any excuse. I played Sufjan when we returned home from seeing “D-War” on Saturday night and I was eating instant udon with my host brother and sister, and my host sister requested “soft” music. (My host mom, or omoni, liked it so well that I made her a CD. Incidentally.) As for the bluegrass…well, that’s what I brought them, so. I don’t speak Korean, so this will have to do.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about compromise, and not compromising. I am so happy to be on Jeju with these ETAs, specifically. I am. And I cannot wait to see them. But – at the same time – I am very happy here, happy to be settling in, to continue to get to know my host family, to befriend my teachers, to know the beaches. I miss my friends in other cities, but I’m not leaving Facebook wall posting for everyone I see. I think I’ll be okay for the next six weeks, in other words. But I can’t help but wonder: is this wrong? Is the absence of dependence just a masquerade for the absence of connection? I am content here, at least so far. I know I shouldn’t be doubting myself. But I am.
Last night I also watched an episode of “Scrubs” with HB, who seemed to think it was funny, probably because of Fat Albert’s double cameo appearances. At the part where Dr. Cox explains, “Kelso’s not just some harmless guy pushing my buttons, Carla. He’s a pod person,” I found myself laughing out loud for no particular reason. I seem to be prone to inappropriate displays of emotion lately; for example, right now I am thinking about Coldplay’s song “Yellow” and Joanna Doiron’s house, two things which have no obvious connection, and even though I am lying in a room filled with giant yellow flowers on the walls, I’m in, as they say, a glass case of emotion.
Intrepid Girl Reporter 
