The semester is winding down here in Korean public schools, and with it come all sorts of weird schedule changees, pizza parties and miscellaneous other things. Tomorrow, my classes are canceled on account of this marathon 4-period long assembly in which they’re trying, AGAIN, to get the students to eschew curse words in favor of polite language. The only thing this will accomplish is to give some of the teachers a brief respite from having to deal with these potty mouth monsters for half a day, but it’s certainly welcome.
Today, after 7th period, all the students convened in the gym for a concert. “Oh, the students are performing again?” I asked my co-teacher, thinking it was a little repeat of the smashingly entertaining school festival we’d had in September. “No, it will be parents.” Zuh? I guess the parents of some of the 7th and 8th graders started a band, and decided to entertain the kids, in a mandatory way. One of the 9th graders whined to my co-teacher that she didn’t want to go, and my co-teacher responded, “You must.” (Of course, she bailed – convenient business away from school, I suppose).
I strolled in a few minutes after 3:00, as it is a Korean teacher’s prerogative to arrive fashionably late to everything (especially class). A few of the 9th graders strolled in with me. Henry, who is probably my favorite student ever, is this kid whose favorite trick used to be playing guitar with his teeth. Then he did it too often, I guess, and when I asked him if he was going to do that for the school festival, he rolled his eyes and went, “Teacha! Very very hurt! Pain!” (I guess he’d been asked one too many times.)
I sat at the back, with the few other teachers who hadn’t made other excuses to duck out, and the homeroom teachers, who were tasked with getting the restless students to stop hitting each other for a few minutes. The parents walked on to the stage and picked up their guitars. Yes, they were a rock band. I expected something like a choir or a classical concert, or something – actually, I really had no preconception of what a concert by parents staged in a middle school would really look like. There is just no similar analogue to that happening in the States. I just…can’t even picture it, as a hypothetical. Even the one girl I saw who kept slapping her friend with a folder every five seconds – even she was a much better audience for the parents than any middle schooler would be back home.
Anyway, the parents picked up their guitars and immediately launched into a song, an old-ish Korean rock song that I have heard so many times since arriving here. Henry, who sat behind me, groaned really loudly. “Every band always THIS song!” he said, and made a motion as if to strangle himself. He would alternately rock out with his buddy behind me, and then complain loudly about how boring the parent performance was. He was awesomely catty and bitchy, and I was nearly in tears from laughing at this kid. At one point, he leaned over and whispered, “wait a minute – soon, friends coming, and we burn this place down! YEAH!”
These are the only parents who should be allowed guitars. (Yes, I may actually be sadder about their divorce than I was when my own parents split up. )
The parents’ concert was really fascinating and bewildering, from my perspective. One of the students’ mothers sang a poignant, hyper-emo ballad, in English, and though she sang well enough, it felt a little awkward: yo lady, what are you doing baring your soul to these monsters? I guess it’s different when you birthed one of said monsters, but still, the other ones don’t have familial obligations to sit politely through your show. At one point there was a brief intermission with a magic show, and Henry just could not stop freaking out about how bizarre it was. “Magic show??! In concert?! Why? Very very mistake!” and between the weirdness of it all, and Henry being hilarious, I just about died laughing in that gym, and it really turned around a day which had been kinda shitty. I am definitely going to miss these 9th graders when they graduate and go off to high school, especially Henry.
Henry, by the way, invited me to a concert that he and his buddies are putting on, at the end of the month. He’s going to play guitar (not with his teeth), and he promised me two American pop songs, “so you can understand and enjoy!” and kept insisting that it would be a billion times better than this totally lame parents’ concert (aww, poor Moms and Pops! They honestly weren’t bad at all – it’s just that you surrender any semblance of “cool” when you birth a child). Henry talks a big game, and I’m totally looking forward to it. In all sincerity, really, I can’t think of a cooler place to be on New Year’s Eve.
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