Gosh gee golly, I have been one tired lady all week.  On Monday night a few mosquitos got into my room.  Where they came from beats me.  Uncharacteristically there hasn’t been a single mosquito in my room all summer, so why they decided to show their horrible little selves on one of the first cool weeks of the fall is beyond me.  Korean mosquitos have a bit of a temper. Their bite hurts much more than their passive relatives in North Carolina, so I lost half of my sleep that night tossing and turning and scratching and slapping.  I’ve had a sleep deficit all week.

At work we were preparing for Wednesday’s Halloween party. It was an after-school event, and I only had to have one party. Some of my friends had to have Halloween parties each period of their classes.  Exhausting for them!  We played Halloween music (Thriller, some tracks from The Nightmare Before Christmas, and spooky noises), and provided the students with an array of masks, hats and headbands with which they could dress themselves. Only three students brought their own costumes.  Then we herded them into a circle, had them sit down and turned off the lights.  I had a flashlight under my chin. I told them about my dear, dead friend Sam. When Sam was alive he loved to share his food and his money, but now that he’s dead he has another gift. (They, of course, didn’t really understand any of this.) Then we offered them the opportunity to feel Sam’s “gifts” and guess which body part they were.  Ramen noodles for brains, spam for his liver, two skinned grapes for his eyes, a peeled tomato for his heart and, my personal favorite, vermicelli rice paper for his skin.  They were enjoying being grossed out and I walked around the circle with the flashlight under my face making stupid faces at them.  Afterwards we broke a pinata that was left over from my summer camp and which I decorated for the occasion. That was also a success.

While I could see that the students were having a good time, I am never satisfied with the Halloween party. Why? When I first started working at this middle school there was another foreign English teacher who had worked there for a year.  Her name is Jennifer. Jennifer had seven years of teaching experience from back in the states and was a drama major. Those are some big shoes to fill.  She even persuaded the students to dress up for Halloween.  There was a very excellent Joker, some vampires and some princesses.  I don’t have the same work ethic or ability to inspire kids.  She was definitely talented.  She was even my teacher, in a way.  She helped me through the first awkward months without an ounce of judgement showing.  She was also an outspoken Libertarian. I haven’t heard from her since I told her about applying to the Peace Corps.

My friend Phil has been back in Seoul for a vacation.  Last Friday he took me to my first casino.  He’s apparently quite a fan of casinos, black jack in particular.  It was lovely to see him, and he waxed philosophical about life and gambling and the mutability of success and failure, all the while with a self-deprecating grin on his face.   I lost 40,000 won and on the taxi ride back to my neighborhood I had to ask the taxi driver to pull over.  That was a first for me, which should be regarded as phenomenal given the amount of imbibing I’ve done in this city.  They’re incredibly gracious about that kind of thing here.  He gave me some napkins and smoked a cigarette while I did what nature intends one to do after many long island iced teas.

But alas, Molly will leave Seoul this coming Wednesday. We had what may be our final Friday night romp, which naturally ended at a noraebang. Looks like I’ll have to join a gym.  Come back to me soon Molly so I won’t have to fill my time with such mundane things!

And now, some photographic evidence:

Ms. Molly and me

Nice frames you got there, Molls

Silly face

Pig snouts for sale. For the adventurous diner.

Fancy that. After a night of drinks we end up at a noraebang.

Self-deprecation!

Sing it, lady.

No doubt I am singing Desperado. Oh don't you want to go to a noraebang with me?

Some of my middle school girls at the Halloween party. I love the face the girl is making on the far left.

School Halloween party

Pinata time

When you teach in the Seoul public school system you will always have a co-teacher in the classroom with you.  That’s a Korean English teacher.  They run the gamet.  You may have a teacher who is unable to control their own classroom, let alone assist you while you are teaching, who struggles with English, the language in which you communicate, and spends your entire lesson with their backside in a chair.  Or you may have an experienced, delightful co-worker whose control of the students make them a joy to teach and the teacher a joy to teach with.  I’m lucky because I have mostly had excellent co-teachers who I’ve learned (am learning) a lot from.

But I have had to also learn to control my anger toward the impotent teachers.  I am not saying I have mastered that yet.  When a teacher fails to control the students the brief time I have with them and spend reprimanding them is frustrating and probably ineffectual.  When I am calling for everyone to wake up, pay attention, and the Korean English teacher’s mouth is agape and does not follow my lead, I get pissed.  When, from across the room, she watches me try to quiet chattering students who are right in front of her and she doesn’t contribute and pointedly looks the other way, I get super pissed.  Limp fools!  Where is your backbone? Where is your sense of duty?  Tee hee, duty.

One of my favorite English teachers is also one of the teachers who I’ve had problems with in the classroom.  Poor thing.  She seems totally beat this semester.   Our first class this Monday was a low level boys class.  All of her classes are low level, no wonder she looks unhappier.  There are three or four boys who muck it up for the rest of the kids.  I can’t teach until these handful of boys sit down and shut up, and I don’t think anything but an act of God could do that.  I see the bored faces of the potentially good students and feel bad for them all.  Well, the ringleader of the annoying boys lit some paper on fire in the classroom while I was teaching.  Then his pal turned on a fan on the wall to disperse the smell of smoke and the ringleader tossed the singed paper out of the window.

At least this isn’t the US.  It would be so much worse.

The ban on corporeal punishment, which was to begin in October, already seems to be wildly failing.  The older, male gym teacher in my office still regularly whacks the boys with a stick.  Not to say that I don’t see the benefit to myself if I was allowed to wail on the little fucks who won’t shut up and who light fires in the back of the classroom.  Stress relief!

My friend Amanda who has taught in Korea and in the US told me that yes, it is much worse in the US.  Especially because they can talk back to you.  Maybe there are some benefits to speaking a language most of your students can’t understand.  She also said that the favorite topic of the teachers at her school is the kind of mood lifting drugs each takes to deal with the stress.  Damn.

It’s fun to talk about the outrageous stuff that happens at my school, but mostly my students are really good kids that I really enjoy interacting with.  And I really enjoy my job.  Also, to people unfamiliar with corporeal punishment, it seems like the halls would be filled with wailing and fear, but that isn’t how it is at all. My objection to it is that it legitimizes a kind of violence that I think is bad for a society and for individuals, and also that it isn’t an effectual form of punishment.  Teenagers value their time way more, and if you took that from them it would be a much better punishment I think.

My Students Today

My first week of lessons are all introductory lessons.  Always a breeze.

Or are they?

I had a high-level second grade boy’s class. This is my first time with these second graders.  After the blah blah blah of telling them the rules which I inevitably will not be able to enforce, I had them ask me questions.  Whatever they wanted to know about me, and for their minimal effort they’d get a point.  One cheeky kid asked me how much I weighed.  Another kid, more serious, asked me serious questions.  One of the questions was “Do you like teaching?” I said, totally deadpan, “No, I don’t like students.”  Normally my feigned grumpiness is received with laughter. The class was dead fucking silent, the kid who asked looked totally shocked, and my Korean co-teacher busted out laughing.  I apologized and explained that it was a joke.  God damn.

I also had a low-level girl’s class.  I taught these student’s last semester, but they were not in a leveled class.  I thought they were a high level class when I started the lesson.  When I realized they were low-level I changed my expectations and was less happy with my results.  Surely I’m dampening the classroom by being so…tentative.  Not expecting much.  Then again, they plain just don’t know what I’m saying.  We played a game where one student comes up to the front and I tape a picture of a celebrity to their back.  The student doesn’t know who that celebrity is, but the class does, and the student must ask the class questions to find out.  I taped a cartoon of Kim Jong Il to the back of a student.  My Korean co-teacher Min led her along.  The girl found out that it was a Korean leader, but she couldn’t come up with name of the South Korean president, let alone the whack job in the North.  Well.  Well well well.  She’s fourteen years old.  My goodness.

Teaching can be so weird.

I didn’t have time to write you a short letter so I wrote you a long one

While getting ready for work today I listened to a new podcast.  It’s a kind of sketch comedy from what I gather called WireTap.  One sketch stood out.  It was the correspondence between Kafka’s Gregor Samsa (of Metamorphosis) and Dr. Seuss.  Samsa wrote looking for a cure to his curious condition of being a gigantic bug, and Dr. Seuss responded in that Dr. Seussian way (Something about I fear I’m useless as you remain Suessless).  It wasn’t necessarily the funniest thing I’ve ever heard, but god damn it was fucking awesome.  Such a clever, unexpected combination.  It’s a part of the CBC Radio.

Today was my second day back from vacation.  During my vacation I accomplished nothing of use.  I went to many a noraebang, played an awful lot of darts, met many people who I will likely never meet again.  That’s all beating around the bush.  All of those activities were accompanied by copious amounts of late-late night drinking.  They’d be unenjoyable if they weren’t.  One night Molly and I tried to continue our drinking and the only bars open in Itaewon were on Hooker Hill.  It was daylight. If you were thinking we left quickly because it was scummy and scummy men wouldn’t leave us alone and thought they had the right to touch us, you’d be right.  Listen, we’re wholesome girls who just like to drink a lot.  Innocently.  I never used to stay up this late drinking.  I only did it once as a teenager, and I did a lot of substances as a teenager.  Nothing to the point of a problem, I was just fooling around.  My point is is that I think we don’t value our time here very much, and we egg each other on, and we do have a lot of fun too.

Some things have changed at work.  There is a new restriction against physical punishment.  (See, hitting the students has always been technically illegal, but not enforced.)  Well, all physical punishment is out.  No more standing with their arms above their heads, squatting in uncomfortable positions, or whacks with a stick.  Some of the teachers use a recorder, you know, those musical instruments kids played in elementary school. The plastic bastard cousin of the flute.  Instruments of art as punishment.  I’d prefer to whack them with a really big, bristly brush.  Or spray paint them.  This new prohibition was announced at a meeting which I did not attend.  I then talked and talked about my knowledge of punishment in American schools.  Lunch detentions, after school detentions, suspensions.  Sending the kids out into the hall, a staple I remember well, is frowned upon here.  The kids could run away, they’ve said to me.  In my earlier teaching days I’d send the kids into the hall and make them leave their shoes inside.  They aren’t running away without their fucking shoes.  Definitely not in the winter.  I never used much physical punishment anyway.  I only ever made the kids stand up with their arms above their heads. I once, probably in my first month of teaching, whacked a male kid hard on the shoulder who was doing something dangerous that nearly took out three girls.  I still haven’t stopped feeling ashamed of that.  Really, really ashamed.  Moving on.  It will be interesting to see what the teachers will arrange.  I think it’s great.  Not necessarily because I think a whack or two is the most destructive thing for students, but because they don’t take it seriously.  It isn’t real punishment for them.  I can’t help but feel that taking time away from them is far more effective.  Plus I have seen too many instances of adult Koreans hitting each other.  It’s upsetting.

On a related note, in my first months here I saw a male teacher roundhouse kick a male student several times, break his sandals, and smack him in the head during a student field trip.  I took this sneaky photo of this teacher’s atrocious behavior and then stormed away to smoke a cigarette and think about hitting the fuck out of this teacher.  (The student’s crime? Wearing sandals when he should have been wearing sneakers on the field trip. Notice he only has his socks now)

What a fucker. This photo didn't really capture all the fuckedness of it. Fuck is a word we use when we are being fucking lazy thinkers.

Another change, and this less welcome, is that instead of seeing my kids once a week (which was scant time with them anyway) I now see them once every two weeks.  This even more effectively demotes me from kind-of-teacher to babysitter.  I also have to teach the dreaded second grade, along with the first and third graders.  I feel positive about teaching again, despite professing a few posts back to being an anti-teacher.

Tonight I finished reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the seminal feminist literature published in the early 1960′s.  It wasn’t so long ago, only a few decades, that a woman was discouraged from doing anything except getting married and having kids.  She was considered incappable of anything else, and if she strived for it she was unfeminine, insane, would probably become barren from the stress.    There was a disturbing chapter where Friedan linked the rise (rise?) in homosexual men to the effects of overprotective, smothering mothers.  I haven’t yet finished an introduction she wrote for the book in 1997.  I’m hoping she recants that.  Yeah.  Anyway, it was informative.  For a long time I’ve shunned reading much related to feminism because I didn’t want to be angry, or see the prejudice.  I tried to name myself apathetic on a lot of things because I wanted to be above it all, and cool, and, well, you know.  All those dumb things some of us think we should be when we’re self-absorbed teens and early twenty-somethings.  Not to say I’m still not self-absorbed.

Speaking of me, my hair is pretty damn long these days.  I came to Korea with a pixie cut but it’s down to my shoulders now.  I forgot what a pain in the ass longer hair is.  Styling and all that.  It feels gross sometimes because now when I shed hair the hair is more pronounced and when I shed hair on myself it feels creepy, like bugs.

Speaking of my other obsessions (besides my hair) CHRISTIAN BALE.  Oh my God.  I came to this coffee shop hoping to rewatch American Psycho but I forgot my headphones.  Because I can’t, though, lets just put this right here.  Beautifully done.  So funny, so creepy, and that is one beautiful man.

I tried to make another video this afternoon, but you know, I really should stop putting embarrassing videos of myself online.  My mac’s video making software is trying to protect me by not working.

Pictures of my Summer Camp’s Pinatas and my Depressed Students

My middle school English summer camp class with their finished pinatas. They're not thrilled about having their photo taken, except for the boy in the middle.

Scary clownish pinata

This one looks like an Easter egg. Dig those fancy bows that girl made.

Inexplicably this girl put her candy on the outside of her pinata.

I love my pinata. A lot.

Here's a photo of one of our English classes. Notice something that doesn't belong? We've got Sydney, London, Washington DC and Paris.

Parlez-vous anglais? Je suis une teacher de English gosh darnit.

Unhappy Campers

Teaching the English summer camp is more tedious this time around.  There are seventeen students, and many of them don’t understand me.  I feel so awful that they don’t understand me.  How alienating for them!  Their lack of comprehension isn’t doing any wonders on my personal appraisal of my teaching ability either.

Ms. Choi has been lamenting the students’ obvious boredom with the reading material I’ve given them.  I agree!  They are bored, and four of them are totally lost.  I thought it appropriate to reminded her that I wanted to choose a comic book (pictures are enlightening and engaging for ESL learners) or a small novel which had annotations in Korean.  I was overruled, however.

I still miss the elementary school kids.  They were such a sunny spot in these English camps.

The pinatas we’ve been making haven’t suffered any disaster so far, like the balloon popping prematurely or someone knocking one off of the table.  Unless a student decides to brutalize theirs before they’ve been decorated I think we’re in the clear.

I’ve been spending my ample free time after camp doing nothing of use.  (Oh, only a month ago I was dying for direction and ready to pursue something.  And what now?  I’ve been watching all of the Joseph Gordon-Levitt movies that I can.  Mysterious Skin was awesome.  Watch it.)  Consuming is much easier than creating anything of my own, but I know which one would be more engaging and fulfilling.

I’ll have my summer vacation in a week a half.  I don’t know if it will be possible to go to Shanghai.  I’ll need to renew my Korean visa, which probably won’t give me time to get a Chinese visa.

Try not to spew cliches when reprimanding students!

While cleaning up after the first part of our pinata project I sort of shouted “I’m NOT your mom” at the teenage students who limply and ineffectually cleaned up their work space.  I had to tell several kids several times to keep cleaning.  Fuck having kids. Who’d want to spend their time nagging pissy, ungrateful, teenaged fucks?  I’ve enough trouble getting myself to do the dishes.

I found the major reason why the Peace Corps never got back to me.  I had the wrong email addresses.  I forwarded them yesterday, and I know I got at least one of the email addresses correct because I received an automated “out of the office until” message.  So cross your fingers that they reaffirm my rejection quickly.

At work I’ve been steadily plowing through testing all of my twenty-seven classes.  The principal bought all of these dried bamboo sticks for the teachers.  Thems for hittin’.  Good thing I brought mine to my last class of the day.  First grade boys, with the infamous sexually aggressive Subin, and only seven of 33 did the preparation work for the test that they’d been assigned.  Little MK took the ones without the work into the hall and whacked their palms with my new bamboo stick and reprimanded them verbally.  At one point Subin kept saying “boobs” to me, and I told him to shut it, though all I actually said was “that’s not funny” and looked away.  After coming back from being punished he walked past me at the podium and blew into my ear.  Jesus!  Seriously, how has this 12 year old kid learned to sexually harass the female teachers?  Little MK says that he is a major problem and that, in her years of teaching (maybe 7 years?  I’m not sure) she has never had a kid who behaved this way.  If he persists, he is one the track to become a sexual predator or having the shit kicked out of him – well, only if he goes to Itaewon, the foreigner district.  I’m considering taking him out of the next class if he pulls this kind of shit again and yelling at him until he cries.  But it’s also hard to make myself care enough, either.  Like I’ve said, Korean women are so permissive to creeps.  I hope it’s just some demented stage that’ll he get out of in a few months.  Or that it isn’t even demented and that I can read about it in a child development book, and he’ll grow out of it and be a normal dude.

So, why did this class perform so so poorly?  Of all of the classes doing this work, they were by far the worst.  As I’ve said before, if you have consistent trouble with kids performing an assignment, as a teacher you have to look to yourself.  Have I not prepared them?  Is the work over their heads?  But the Korean educational system throws a major kink into the works by passing students no matter what their grade.  You heard me.  No matter what their grade.  I think they will have trouble getting accepted into a high school, but that isn’t a reasonable goal for students.  How can an elementary student understand that?  That’s a really long term goal.  I think they are doing their population a huge disservice.  While I’m giving them their grades, I can take a gander at their midterm grades.  Students fail, abysmally fail, like below 50′s, very very often.  It’s horrendous, and all systems are flawed, I definitely haven’t worked in the American educational system so I don’t know what’s wrong with it, but I can tell you that not holding students accountable for their work is fucking the students over.  They also are sort of tip toeing around another thing.  I think they are trying to tell me that I can’t give students zeroes.  If they don’t do one iota of the work – don’t finish the worksheet, hell, don’t even try to answer a single question,  and can’t perform the dialogue or answer one question, why do they get any points?

Screw this peninsula.

Nude Student Strikes Again

Subin (the nudist) predictably spent my entire lesson, where I explained the test, asleep.  But luckily I still had a male student in that class pull his shirt up twice and show me his nipples.  My God, why?  This class has gratuitous, teenaged boy nipples.

I’m in the process of testing twenty-seven classes.  Twenty-seven!  I only had one planning period today, plus another solid hour of extra-curricular English Cafe and make-up speaking tests, so I was pretty much shot.  Ms. Choi was breathing down my neck for me to chose and rewrite a news article for the English morning broadcast.  I’d asked her to confirm that we were indeed doing the broadcast on Monday, but she said it was cancelled.  I didn’t find that we did have to do it until Tuesday afternoon.

My Open Class

My open class was today.  The verdict?  They didn’t like my lesson plan, but they liked my visuals and the way I interacted with the class.  My language was clear and appropriate for the student’s level, but that I should have let them speak more.  Apparently I talked to much at the beginning.

I was being reviewed by an official from Seongbuk district office who I’ve met on several occasions, and another English teacher (I assume) whom I’ve never met, both women.  The English teacher said my lesson plan was “not kind.”  (A lesson plan not being the actual lesson itself, but a form you fill out that details how the lesson will proceed, etc.)  I totally take offense that they expect me to be a professional at writing a lesson plan, a thing which they’ve never trained me to do.  I took offense, but decided then was not the time to inform this English teacher (whose English seeemed really strong) that an inanimate object (like paper) cannot be describe as kind or unkind.

The English teacher also was very surprised at the high level of participation from the kids.  I guess that is a good thing?  Or maybe she was suggesting that I bribed them?  Pshaw.

I don’t feel like I’ll get the position.  Is my contract only being considered based on the score that two people have given me who I’ve never worked with and have only seen one class I’ve taught?  I don’t know.

I won’t find out the district’s verdict for another three or so weeks.  So, if I’ll be going home, I won’t have even a full two months notice.  Seems kinda shitty.  Oh, my old vice principal Mr. Yoon was there too.  It was nice to see him again.  He was a funny guy.