bad metaphor

I’m midway through my second week of teaching winter camp. Overall, this will be the sixth camp I’ve taught. When I first started out last winter, I was kind of baffled by the whole concept of “camp” here in Korea. It’s not an overnight trip to some woodsy location with a cabin and some bonfires like it is back home; it’s…extra classes, in the same old school building. If my mom had suggested to me that I go back to school, over summer vacation, for extra schoolin’? During my rebellious (and, admittedly, slightly pathetic) wanna-be grunge Wicca Hot Topic phase? Unless that camp had been hosted at the local mall witch store, there’s no way I would have gone willingly.

Thanks to the intrepid souls over at waygook.org, and to channeling my own depths of dorkery, I was able to get through last winter okay. I did finish exhausted, however, and thrilled not to see that batch of students again for another month.

Thankfully, I’m feeling like I’m slowly but surely getting better at this job – just in time for budget cuts, natch – and last week was probably my professional peak, in terms of being a super-awesome-cool English teacher. I did a detective / murder mystery themed camp, of which there is a gigantic thread over at waygook.org, and of that megathread of posted materials, I used maybe…1%. I have unfortunately developed this sick aversion to using other people’s materials these days, even though it would save me so much time and sleep (what an idiot I am).

The one time I did end up using someone else’s stuff, though, it ended up being way too difficult and the students, who had loved every second of camp up to that point, started complaining bitterly. It was shocking, the change in attitude, and I sincerely felt bad about totally harshing the kids’ mellow* by introducing this extremely difficult, not-fun activity that was vastly different in tone to everything else we had done. It was my fault: I had been utterly wiped after prepping a week’s worth of materials, that involved: 1) creating a semi-realistic looking crime scene, complete with tape, hair extensions and blood; 2) requesting voice recordings from my friends back home as actors for a murder mystery “investigation”; and 3) taping envelopes with secret codes all over the damn school, pissing off the lurking security adjosshi who patrols the building after hours. So on Friday, I just went with a cryptogram activity posted by another teacher. I had incorrectly guessed that the students would be game for some crazy Da Vinci Code cracking nonsense; well, maybe they would have been, if it hadn’t been super hard and badly formatted. I actually sincerely regret that because it was the one sour note of a completely and utterly awesome camp. The kids were way into it, I was into it, and we were all a little sad when it ended. With my co-teacher’s help, I went through the feedback left by the students (in Korean, so they could give more detail), and a frequent comment was that “this camp was not a waste of time.” Though perhaps a bit clinical and cold-sounding in translation, this is probably the nicest and most validating complement I can get from burned out Korean middle schoolers. These kids guard their free time with the tenacity of dragons.

This week, I’m midway through a Superhero themed camp with my 8th graders. I chose the theme last summer, during the conclusion of my Greek mythology camp. One of my loyal camp attendees shouted out, “Marvel and DC!” and so the theme was decided. It’s going a little less swimmingly, as the students have been out of school longer and so the 8th graders seem to have forgotten a lot of English in the interim. Plus, I’m just not that jazzed about superheroes. Murder is definitely more up my alley (I guess that’s why my students love me, ha). I’ve been doing my best to bring up my own enthusiasm level, by showing up the first day in my Halloween wig and some Wonder Woman style bracelets fashioned out of foil tape. Still, I have to admit that I’m not feeling it as much this week. Hopefully the students don’t pick up on this.

Once this week is finished, then…I pack my bags and hop on an airplane, bound for…home. Home. Where is that again? Even though I talk regularly to my friends and family through the magical ether (net), it still seems like a distant memory. That was another life, a life in which I wasn’t staying up at odd hours pasting hair extensions to a papier mache ball dripping with fake blood, for the sole purpose of provoking a reaction from 13 year olds. Who was that person, who lived in Lawrence and used to go out to bars, and do things, and have actual conversations with other adults? What was she like? I guess I’ll find out in four days.

*for the record: these kids were not that kind of mellow. In case any education officials are reading this blog. Everything’s legit up in my English Zone!