I was the Walter Cronkite of My Middle School!

I have about three months left in Korea. I’m out of here at the end of February.  School is winding down. I no longer teach the third grade students, so my schedule is wide open.  The semester ends sometime in December. I don’t know when, which should speak to the level of responsibility I have at my job.

The speaking tests are horrendous though. Because third graders take their final tests and have to apply (you heard me, apply) to high schools, they’ve already taken their English speaking tests. But I’m in the middle of correcting and grading the speaking tests of the first and second graders. For me it’s a herculean task.  Repetitive and boring and time consuming.  Especially the part where I have to correct the dialogues they’ve written. Some of them are quite funny, but mostly it’s drudgery.

This week I had my last Friday morning English broadcast. I started out loathing it, but I’ve come to appreciate it, begrudgingly. I do like being a nerd and telling the students about NASA and volcanoes. When will I ever have a job that has been do a broadcast again?  I guess my journalist days are over.

Broadcast equipment

Ms. Choi preparing for the broadcast

Broadcast room - Ms. Choi, broadcast students and me shamelessly taking photos of myself on the TVs

That blurry, dark image on the TV is me. My God! I'm famous.

Me and my brave student cohost for that week

Ha! Ms. Choi's expression cracks me up.

A Teacher’s Dinner

Haemul pajeon

There was a school wide dinner last night to celebrate all of the hard work that the teachers put into last Friday’s sports day and Saturday’s festival.  Of course I had nothing to do with any of those preparations, but they are nice and invited me.  There must have been thirty teachers at dinner.  We went to a pajeon restaurant at a nearby university.  It was in an area of town I’d never seen.  I probably had at least ten helpful teachers and the principal inform me that pajeon is Korean pizza, though honestly it is more like a fried pancake.  It’s also made with green onions and, much to my chagrin, sea creatures with tentacles. I’m quite familiar with the dish.  Don’t they know I’ve lived here two years? It’s regularly served in the teacher’s cafeteria, where I eat. I had pajeon in my first two weeks here.

Pajeon is generally served with makgeolli, a Korean rice wine.  It’s pretty tasty.  Probably comparable to sake, but it’s served cool.  It also goes down easy, though I only intended on drinking it when an older male teacher wanted to cheers.  There were so many bottles of makgeolli on our table!    I was seated across from some of my co-teachers, who are so wonderful in the classroom, but didn’t seem so wonderful as conversational partners right then.  Every topic I broached just fell flat, from the mundane to the more interesting.  The restaurant was decorated in a charmingly cheap style.  Like a bar in some poor, tropical country.  The walls were hung with reed mats, there were christmas lights strung up everywhere and an array of plastic flowers and foliage.  I felt terribly sad.  I miss my family, my friends from home, and I have recently understood that I may very well spend this Christmas by myself.  I also think I’ve got a cavity in one of my molars.  It’s somewhere on my lower jaw on the right side. I tried not to cry.  I succeeded.

The waitresses were curt and fast.  So much food.  Like I said, I kind of turned my nose up to the pajeon because of the purple tentacled beasties, but they also served fried peppers stuffed with meat, which, when my co-teacher described it to me, I thought she said mint instead of meat.  It was certainly a meat which I would never be able to place.  Korea does love its mystery meat.

The Christmas lights looked pretty reflected in my milky liquor.  That made me feel better.  I also began to consume bowls of it (it’s served in little bowls) and that also made me feel better.  Ah, a bracing drink.  The principal sat at our table (there were four or five tables) and cheersed us and told stories that I didn’t understand, but which someone translated for me.  A beggar woman came by selling gum and he bought all of it and gave it to us.  He’s a nice man.  The teachers are quite happy with him from what they tell me.  I snuck out for some fresh air, as goes the dubious euphemism, and when I came back I had to change seats and I sat next to the principle. I was having a nice time.  He knocked over his glass of makgoelli.  It spilled into half eaten dishes and onto his seat and on the art teacher.  He left, red faced, and joined another table.  We cleaned it up.

After dinner I went with ten or so teachers for a coffee.  Mrs. Kwan sat next to me and I was so happy that she was talking to me, initiating most of the topics.  I felt like much less of an alien.  She told me the tentative dates for the English winter camp, so I also have a good idea of when I’ll be free for winter vacation, which I intend to spend in Thailand with Maria, a dear friend from home, and that I’ll have even more time off than I thought.

They dropped me off in my neighborhood. The history teacher with the wig drove.  I’m so used to riding in the car with taxi drivers that riding in the car with someone normal driving feels positively too cautious and slow.  Though I hadn’t drank in an hour and certainly wasn’t drunk (not drunk drunk) I had a sour stomach.  I read for two hours with a vague feeling of nausea, and no idea why I had it.  At 10:45 pm some bastards came knocking on my door.  How rude! I think it had something to do with finding out the number of people living in the apartment building.  They had clipboards. I wasn’t prepared to answer the door, but I thought they deserved to be yelled at for disturbing people so late in the evening.  I was sick, as I said, and feeling uncomfortable, so I opened the door with a comforter rapped around me and yelled at them in English. They didn’t seem as offended as I desired.

I finished my book (The Secret History, by Donna Tartt) I don’t know how many times I’ve read it now.  I love that book.  Well I finished it and fell asleep and nothing ever became of my nausea.

Look at this Culinary Monstrosity

The solid gray Seoul skies are back with a vengeance.  Boo, I say.  I can love a dramatic sky that has white clouds and dark clouds and sunshine, but what we have today is a uniform dreariness.

I’m in Itaewon. I came for the Mexican food.  Oh, I always do.  In North Carolina I thought there were too many Mexican restaurants but now I can’t get enough.

Here is something terrible:

The worst Korean street food

I think the Koreans are giving us Americans a run for our money in awful junk food.  Spam, as all of us here know, is given as a gift on the Korean holiday Chuseok.  (For the uninitiated, Chuseok is a feasting / worshipping your ancestors kind of holiday.) Even if a few french fries don’t significantly add to the already bulky caloric value of a corn dog, there does seem to be a terrible symbolism here.  Like a fried twinkie.  Like if someone ate that corn dog with french fries on it and followed it with a fried twinkie that unholy meal would usher in the apocalypse.

Korean McDonalds has a delivery service.  If I get mowed down by one of those boys on a moped delivering Big Macs, well, fast food was going to kill me one way or the other.  I hate that motorcycles and mopeds ride on the sidewalk and weave through pedestrians here.   When I trained in taekwondo I used to fancy that if a driver got too close to me I could smack them in the helmet.  Take that, helmet!  Ah well, the joys of living in a foreign country.

Comfort Zone lets me down and an NSET’s educated (though not formally educated in education) opinion on education

Comfort Zone, a restaurant in Hyewha, is one of my regular weekend haunts.  It has an appealing atmosphere, a  staff who speak English, and western style food that, if not quite the best around, is at least quite inexpensive and significantly closer to my neighborhood than Itaewon.  I’ve never said a word against it, but this is the second weekend in a row that there credit and debit card machine hasn’t worked.  How a business can go nine days without fixing something as integral to their pocket books, I don’t know.  They’re chill and have just added it to a tab for me because I didn’t have cash.  I’ve worked my fair share of service industry jobs back in the US, and a malfunctioning credit card machine is fixed in hours at best, within 24 hours at worst. Your boss wants to kill you (even though you are blameless for the fickleness of technology) and the customers want to kill you too, just because you’re the messenger.  Just another case of the rampant incompetence I see in this country.  (Disclaimer: I don’t hold anyone personally responsible for it all.  As much as I gripe about these things in my daily life and in my work life, I work with several extremely competent and amazing English teachers.)  Take away: I like this place.  Fix your damn machine.  They are new to modernity and all of the systems that come with it, a fact which I was more apt to remember when I thought I would be able to join the Peace Corps.  I was even pissing in the squattors with relish.  Look how adaptable I am!  Ah well.

The students take their all important final exams starting Thursday.  (This exam is the only grade that matters.  It’s especially important for my 3rd grade students who will be applying to high schools soon.)  I don’t have a lesson plan for Monday and it’s Sunday night.  Boy I’ve been here before.  On Tuesday and Wednesday I have to continue the speaking tests, so I wasn’t motivated to bust my balls making a useful review for the students.  I asked Ms. Choi about the material they would be tested on which we’ve covered in my class.  There are two questions.  Two.  I’d mentioned to the impeccably dressed and forever nervous Mrs. Kwan that I would produce a review for our classes, but with Ms. Choi’s information looks like a review shan’t happen.

Elizabeth has referenced something on her beautifully designed journal implying that I shouldn’t disdain the Korean educational system for passing students no matter what their grades because grades don’t motivate students.  I emphatically disagree, though I can only draw on my experience in one Korean public middle school and my own experiences as a student.  Here is the quote she snagged from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance :

The student, with no hard feelings on anybody’s part, would have flunked himself out. Good! This is what should have happened. A large amount of money and effort had been saved and there would be no stigma of failure and ruin to haunt him the rest of his life. No bridges had been burned.

A rebuttal: Firstly, this is way out of context so I’m not terribly sure to what age of student they are referring to.  Moving on. Grades are not arbitrary.  Ideally they should be a reflection of what one has learned but also, and probably even more, the effort and responsibility one puts into the assignment.  (I’ve been on both sides of this fence.  I’ve been a student with good grades and with bad grades.  It was never about my intelligence but about my work ethic.)  Work ethic is something you have to teach.  You have to teach organization and responsibility, because those are life skills too.  Ahem, even I could use a few refresher courses about organization.  Besides, a grade in itself can also be a reward, because at best it is positive reinforcement.  If a student’s grades are low, that should be a sign to their parents, their teachers and themselves that they have to alter their habits to keep up and actually get something like an education while they are at school.

You are doing a student a disservice by promoting them into higher grades when they can’t perform decently at their current grade.  They haven’t learned responsibility or the material which will be built upon by the higher grades.  It’s ensuring that students who are behind or get away with being remarkably lazy will continue to do so, or be unable to get their work together.

If a student isn’t motivated by the material, does that mean there isn’t value in learning it?  Of course not.  Emphatically of course not.  There are things to be learned in material we don’t find interesting because we aren’t omniscient beings and don’t know what can move us.  Maintaining a narrow world view is nothing to be proud of.  Plus one can learn things from a teacher or a material that one didn’t expect.  That’s true for everything in life, so there.  It’s also good to learn to attempt to understand and care for things which one doesn’t have an immediate passion for.

Failing is failing is failing, grade or not.  There are things I’ve failed at when a grade has never been possible, and it feels like crushing failure.  A bridge has been burned.  In work life and personal life those failures can be more monumental to overcome because unlike school,  you may not be given an extension.  A friendship, for instance, doesn’t have summer courses.  Education will give people many many many extra chances.

I do agree that motivated students would be motivated if there weren’t many grades or many reviews.  But educational systems don’t get to pick and choose.  They can’t, nor should they, only take the brightest and most motivated students.

I’ve said it before, there may be a thousand flaws in school systems, but god damn I believe in education.  It’s a beautiful thing for an individual mind, and it’s essential for a nation’s development.

Sandwich Fulmination*

A grievous crime has been done to my sandwich!  Why is there cheap cheddar cheese on my tomato, lettuce and mozzarella sandwich?  I object!  I profoundly object.

*Yeah, I’m studying vocabulary for the GRE

Robot Dance

The other night three of my friends and I grabbed some expensive and delicious Indian food.  Molly and I split the most expensive meal on the menu.  There was salad, samosas, chicken tandori and prawn tandori, chicken makhani, nan, rice, drinks and a dessert.  Like I said, the most expensive meal.  Katie and Jessica ordered reasonably.  But when it came time to pay, the Korean waitress (it was mainly staffed by foreigners, maybe Indians) gave Katie and Jessica a bill that was 30,000 won more than mine.  Between Molly and I, the bill was 52,000 won, but they were asking Katie and Jessica to pay a total of 70,000 won.  Katie and Jessica obviously wanted to find out what the glitch was, because the amount was absurd.  Katie borrowed the Korean waitress’ calculator and added up all of the items.  The total, via the calculator, was accurate.  About 40,000 won.  But the calculator didn’t convince the Korean waitress.  At this point I would have been tearing out my hair and spitting on the waitress, but Katie has the patience of a saint, or an elementary school teacher, which she is.  I don’t know how many times Katie added up the items and the amount came out the same- 40,000 won.  Now, I should probably say that we come to this restaurant fairly regularly, and you can just tell that this waitress isn’t attempting to scam anybody.  This is how the people work in Korea.  You are taught one way to do something, and one way only.  You charge people the amount the computer says, conflicting evidence and reality be damned.  Jessica, who speaks the most Korean of all of us, tried to convey as much as possible to this waitress that the total just didn’t make sense.  It probably took fifteen minutes to get it all sorted out.  And I thought I was bad a math.

It’s an example of the frustrating way this culture has taught its people.  And it teaches the hell out of them-they’re in class from 8 in the morning to 10 at night, or later.  They are churning out robots at an alarming pace.

Here are some more robots: outside of the five stores that have about seventeen floors of repetitive and intense retail stalls, there are stages.  Outside of every one of them.  Sometimes on these stages there are DJ’s and teenagers or twenty-somethings who volunteer to be a part of a dance contest.  They play the five current k-pop songs and the super shy dancers (didn’t they WANT to do this) copy the dance from the music video.  I witnessed it last night.  I bought some pants at one of the stores, Doota, bless them with their small but still existent stalls for larger sizes, and Molly and I watched these shy dancers.  So weird.  On more than one occasion I’ve seen stages that have been erected for the soul purpose of having singers do covers of the latest k-pop songs blasting from every store.  Weird weird robots with bad music.

As much as I like to disparage this kind of crap, Korea is one of a kind so far.  Starting after WWII they built themselves into a world power out of nothing.  Nothing.  Sure, Japan and Germany had to build themselves back up.  But they’d already been world powers.  They had people who knew how to do it.  Go Korea.