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Random bits floating in my normal-sized head that don’t fit anywhere else.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

1. – The worker elves in my village have painted all the streetlamps a cheery shade of Easter lavender, which makes it look a little nice in the daylight, if a little retirement home-esque. It’s not so nice after nightfall, as they’ve neglected to change the burnt-out bulbs. So I’m walking home from my little mart, carrying groceries, when ahead of me I see a looming figure, shuffling slowly. I can’t tell whether its shuffling towards me or away from me in the gloom. I do what I do in these circumstances, which is to walk a wide horseshoe around the source of anxiety. All I can hear is the clomp of my boots and the wind blowing dried leaves. I quickly beat it past the figure-dude-thing, and he-she-it slowly lolls he-she-it’s head towards me and away again.

I do enjoy small town life, but sometimes it can be a little too Amity-ville for my tastes.

2. – I’ve posted before about the intense body-image related anxiety that girls face here. I became most acutely aware of this when I did a survey for a Family Feud style game. One of the questions was “list the top five things that cause you stress,” and inevitably all the boy students would put down “school,” “test,” and “Mom” among other things, not necessarily in that order. The girls had the same answers, except shoved down a bit further on the list. Almost all of the girls wrote something like “body,” “short,” “skin color” or aught else related to their appearance as their number one or two source of stress. This made me pretty sad, that my girls have all this stupid unnecessary baggage to deal with on top of the immense amount of stress that Korean students have to endure.

I still think the girls get a lot more of this than the guys ever will, but I’m starting to think that the boys really internalize this stuff too. Grade 1 pet (who I’m just going to call Tom from now on) freaked out the other day when I got out the roll book, which has a copy of their photos. He tried to cover up his picture. “What’s wrong?” I asked, and he said, “Augh, my face!” Later on, when I tried to video the kids hanging out in my classroom, he and the other boys ran away, shielding their faces with their textbooks. I guess they’ve got to use their books for something.

They definitely notice things to which, as a lazy unkempt American, I am blind. They call the vice principal “W head,” because his hair is in the shape of a W. For some reason we were talking about my main co-teacher, Mrs. One, who will teach them next year (if she stays. Oh please oh please, I hope she stays). I said she was a very nice and good teacher, and Tom said, “yes, but she is very short.”

“Hey now,” I said, “there’s nothing wrong with short people.”

“But she has a normal-sized head.”

Normal sized head? How shocking! I had to laugh…what a truly bizarre attribute to single out for mention. Then he and his buddy Ray talked about how this, in combination with her stature, makes her look like she has a giant head; and then I had to try and stop the conversation because it is really not cool to body-snark about a teacher like that, but I couldn’t stop laughing. I am going to make a mental note about any normal-headed people I see out and about tomorrow.

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I’m All Right

Thursday, November 10, 2011


“Alright” or “all right”? I know that “alright” is not right, but it’s one of those words that is getting more acceptable with time.

My last post was pretty negative. Apologies to the two of you who read this blog! Life really isn’t so bad here…it’s just getting closer to the end of the semester for the students, and they’re getting antsy and harder to control. I’m getting a bit burned out on creating fantastic fun time lessons. The Korean teachers are really feeling the wear and tear. I had a quick chat with the music teacher yesterday, who looked pretty sad. “How are you?” “Oh, I’m not so good.” She was wearing all black, so I assumed someone had died. Not the case – apparently, she teaches at another school every other day, and a student at this other school had cursed her out. She’s a really sweet person, and one of the most popular teachers at this school, so that was pretty surprising. “I don’t understand why. I didn’t do anything wrong to this student,” she said, looking pretty glum. Having had the experience I did last week, I sympathized. The students are just NUTS this time of year, and so they’re really starting to lash out against us teachers, who are the most tangible source of stress for the kids. Hate the game, not the player, y’all!

Today is the most stressful day in the life of a Korean high school student: Suneung. I’ve posted a little bit about this day previously. The juniors take a test that’s functionally akin to the SATs, though it has an infinitely larger impact upon the life of Korean students than the SATs ever have on even the Tracy Flick type students from back home.

This character was so punchable, it colored my perception of Reese Witherspoon for the rest of her career.

The test is six or seven hours long. It’s such a big deal, air traffic to Incheon and Gimpo Airports is actually diverted during the listening portions of the test. My grade 1 pet said that if you don’t prepare sufficiently for this test, “you will live in Seoul Station in a box.” This kid is often prone to hyperbole, but not in this case!

The middle schoolers don’t have much to worry about – they have the day off, a nice “holiday” in a month that would otherwise be devoid of them. It says on that Korea Bridge article linked above that the 3rd years take their entrance exams to high school, but I believe my school does theirs a bit earlier – my 3rd grade students have been finished with all meaningful scholastic activities since midterms. Still, it’s like a thick fog of anxiety blankets the nation and its schoolchildren. It’s hard to escape that, especially for the grade 1s and 2s, who still have final exams looming in four weeks.

Given all that, I can’t get too butthurt if they write off my class as a joke. They have speaking tests, but these are really only worth 10 points towards their English class grade. That’s less pressure for me, for sure, but also that means I have less power. Recently, a student confided that she has trouble understanding me in class sometimes. I was a bit surprised, as she is one of the stronger students in her English class. I make a point of it to ask whether or not the students understand what I am saying, and usually the smarter kids pipe up with a bored “yes, teacher.” But I’m positive that a bunch of the other students don’t want to cop up to their total cluelessness in front of their peers. Likely, a lot of the behavioral issues I’ve been experiencing in class probably have a lot to do with this.

I asked my grade 1 pet, who is in the terror Thursday class, if his classmates could understand me. “Not really,” he admitted, “but they’re just here for the games.” Sigh. I guess I’d just better give the audience what it wants…

edit: Eli brought my attention to this cute video of students horsing around the night before the exam. I’m happy to see the students weathering the pressure with their senses of humor intact:



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Breakdown

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Last year, I had a bit of a meltdown.  I was teaching a 6th period Friday class, by myself (my co-teacher was stuck dealing with a severe troublemaker from her homeroom class), and it was a grade 3 class.  Also, my brain was slowly cooking at 102 degrees.  I had been trying to teach them idioms, and failing.  The kids just got bored and kept talking, talking, talking…I reached my breaking point, snapped, and shouted, FINE! WE WILL DO NOTHING FOR THE REST OF CLASS! and sat down in a huff. 

I regretted that experience and swore I would never lose my cool again.  I feel like that incident lost me a lot of respect (well, if there was any to lose in the first place.  I think it just plummeted into negative values).  I worked hard to be a better teacher, analyzing exactly what had gone wrong in that situation, and developed strategies to overcome these issues.  For instance, don’t try to make the 3rd graders do anything difficult after exams! Also, don’t have any high expectations for the last class at the end of the week. I got a little better (really, just a teensy bit) at classroom management, and had strategies for controlling their behavior.  I even pitied the other foreign teachers who had just arrived, and were having serious issues with bad students.  I felt good about the fact that I have a good bond with my kids, and that I can actually teach them things.

Well, sometimes if you’re feeling too good about life, you need a big ol slap in the face to bring you back to reality.

This past week, Ive just been doing Halloween related stuff.  It’s my favorite holiday, and many of the Korean students love it as well.  They love candy and they love creepy things. So I pulled out all the stops, particularly for my grade 1 classes.  I decorated the classroom with cobwebs and spiders and such, had them do toilet paper mummy races, and make their own jack o lanterns by drawing faces onto orange balloons.  The coup de grace was the murder mystery lesson; my riff on the mystery boxes containing the eyes and other body parts of a witch (actually peeled grapes, cold oily spaghetti, etc).  I had the students guess what body parts were in the boxes, and then come up with a story about what had happened to the witch.

This lesson had gone over like gangbusters with two of my grade 1 classes.  By the time I got to 1-1 at the end of Thursday, however, a few of them had already talked to their buddies in the other classes, so of course they shouted teacher! Box 1 is tofu, box 2 is noodle, box 3 is grape!  Wonderful.  Those were the kids that were paying attention.  Most of them were excited about the boxes (they’re still kids, after all) but they still didnt do the work, and just rolled their eyes at me whenever I came by and made them do their worksheets.  One kid even said a bad word to me in Korean, because I wouldn’t give him candy.  The whole lesson was a huge struggle to get them to be quiet enough so that I could even hear myself talking.  Mind you, there were two adults in the room – myself and my co-teacher.  It was kind of demoralizing.  

The particular straw that broke this camels back dropped right after class.  At the end of class, I had instructed them to clean up their tissues and any other trash that had accumulated during the (highly messy) class.  Afterwards, I was busy with some of the students who were scheming candy from me, and I saw that a bunch of them had rushed over to the boxes.  Then they left, and  I saw it : a big pile of spaghetti that had fallen on the floor. OH NO THEY DIDNT.  I grabbed the two last kids to leave the classroom – the big kid that had said a bad word to me before, and his buddy from the remedial class who had wandered in and had like no clue at all what was going on, and dragged them back over to the boxes. PICK THIS UP, I yelled, seething. I might have even yelled at them to eat it (I had made a rule earlier that if a student takes any of the body parts out of the box, they have to eat it, to discourage messes).  The boy who had cursed at me earlier, a huge beefy kid who would grow nicely into a high school quarterback if he lived in America, looked at me with genuine fear in his eyes, grabbed his buddy and ran.  He picked up the spaghetti, but the mental damage was done.  One of my many unfortunate tendencies is to cry like a cantankerous infant when I am angry, so yep, that’s what I did.

(I really, REALLY hate that, by the way. It is SO not intimidating or badass.  Mostly, like a friend on FB pointed out, anger-crying just obliterates the worth of any message you are trying to get across and makes you look like a crazy.)

After they left, some students ran in from another grade 1 class, yelling trick or treat!  Then one of them saw the dark, evil look on my face, said sorry and ordered his companions out of the classroom.  I just kind of stewed for awhile, pissed about the rudeness of the class and crying and ripping down the cobwebs and other things.  I had officially lost it.

During cleaning time, my students were quite nice.  One kid who is normally kind of a knucklehead in class was really sweet to me, standing around my desk and fending off other random students hunting for candy.  Another kid, who is in the remedial class and whose English level is low, asked his buddy to help him translate the question he had for me: “are you okay, Teacher?” He’s been a little darling since then, popping his head in during class breaks and saying “hello teacher! Have a good day!”

Happily, Friday went a lot better.  I see only grade 3s that day.   At the beginning of the year, I would have never expected that I would be relieved at the prospect of only teaching 3rd graders post exams.  Bizarrely enough, ever since their middle school grades have been finalized, they have been angels.  A far cry from last year, where I was counting down the number of times I met with the grade 3s through the end of the semester.

My two pets are in that disaster grade 1 class.  Actually, I like a lot of the students in that class, and it used to be one of my favorites.  I dont know what happened or where I went wrong.  Their homeroom teacher yelled at them on Friday, telling them they had sent the English teacher home early, bawling. (Oh, wunderbar.)  The worst thing is that I can’t really point to one incident or student to explain why I was so upset, so the students dont really understand what they did wrong.  According to my pets, the general story is that some girls threw spaghetti on the floor, which made me cry.  I don’t know exactly why the girls were implicated, though I have complained a lot about the girls in that class before, so perhaps my coteacher just assumed that to be the case.

I think I needed to snap – its been hectic, what with Eli leaving for a few months (he’ll be back, but after the harsh Korean winter) and every single night this past week Ive stayed out late for social obligations: Eli’s going away party, potluck, etc.  Also, I had missed lunch that day to prepare those stupid mystery boxes!  Lack of sleep, lack of food, and lack of student respect makes a girl go c.r.a.z.y…

I’m a little nervous about seeing that class again on Tuesday, and I think the students are, too.  I haven’t really seen any of them except for my pets, and even they were a little nervous about coming in to my classroom, peeking their heads in the door cautiously.  I have decided to stop teaching them fun lessons, though, and have them work from the textbook for awhile.  It seriously bites to invest a lot in lesson plans, only to be met with indifference and rudeness. I do feel bad for the students who still care and participate – my pets, many of the boys in class and a handful of the girls.  It’s not their fault their classmates are sociopaths.

Seven more weeks until the end of school….

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Notes from the Field

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

I’ve really been neglecting this blog. I know this because yesterday I was scanning my blog entries from this past year, looking for anecdotes I could use in my writeup for the school yearbook. Yes, plagiarizing my own blog. It would have been a lot easier to do this if I’d posted with more frequency than a solar eclipse.

One kinda big thing: Eli is not renewing his contract with the worst elementary school in the shittiest little “town” in Korea, so he’ll be going back to the States in two weeks. He’ll spend the holidays at home, avoiding the Korean winter, and then he’ll come back and hang out with me for my next year – possibly getting a hagwon job, or maybe even just lingering around on a tourist visa. It really hasn’t sunk in that he’s leaving. I’m hoping this time the temporary separation will be a bit easier, as I’m somewhat established here and have a good social support group. Still, it’s going to suck to be once again on the other side of the planet from him.

Teaching is going all right. My anniversary of teaching came and went without much fanfare. One thing that’s changed since last year: the amount of student traffic in the English Zone has increased exponentially.

Here’s my routine now: I go to school a solid half-hour earlier than my posted “start” time, since my grade 1 boy pets arrive on the bus around that time. They hang out in my class and chat before my morning conversation class. During lunch time, I have approximately fifteen minutes to zoom over to the other side of the school, wait in line, and hoover down the contents of the metal lunch tray (which is SO much more edible than it was when I first started). Once finished, I book it back to the English Zone, where my grade 1 girl pets are waiting outside the door, demanding “Quiz!” Then it descends into chaos, as I write the day’s riddle or logic puzzle on the board. Some girls start barking random answers and declaring “I don’t know!” and “Another quiz!” while the others cover up all available white board space with marker scribblings trying to work it out. Occasionally grade 2 and grade 3 students will wander into the fray, with questions of their own.

I prep for lessons during class periods in which I am not teaching (luckily, I still have those). I often have to eject the special ed student, Timmy, in order to use this time, which I feel kinda bad about. But otherwise I wouldn’t be able to get anything done!

Overall, things are still going well. The behavior of the 1st graders has gone quite a bit south, though my favorite of the 1st grade classes is still generally pretty good. The class I have the most trouble with actually has a lot of my favorite students in it. One issue is that for both times I meet with them, it’s either the last period of the day, or the next-to-last. That was one of the first lessons I learned – whichever class I have last in the day is just plain going to suck, no matter who it is.

But the main thing is that almost every single girl in that class has no fear at all of any teachers whatsoever (save maybe the gym teacher). All the girls were five minutes late to my class today, which, according to one of the boy students, was because they were protesting my co-teacher. She is not very popular among the students, to say the least, but she does play the role of “bad cop” nicely. A few of the girls lingered behind in my class to solve a riddle I had put on the board, and when I mentioned that they’d better get going to their next class so as nto to be late, one girl said, “it’s okay. Last class is our homeroom teacher. We not scare.” What do you do with kids like that?

The grade 2s are good, for the most part, excepting one class which has a pretty bad reputation for noise and discipline issues throughout the school. That class also has some of my favorite students from that grade. Not sure what their deal is exactly, but once again, individually, the students are fine.

The grade 3s are suffering from hardcore senioritis, but they’re still trooping along, and vastly superior in temperament to last year’s hellions. We’ll see how they act come December, though.

Bullying and social isolation is on the rise, or I’m noticing it more. One of the grade 2s used to be really energetic and enthusiastic, raising his hand in my class a lot, and generally had a very sunny temperament, but then he got a low score on his English test and got booted to the remedial class. Then I didn’t see him for the rest of the semester, but he worked hard, got his grades up and now he’s back in my class. In my class, though, he sits by himself, and I can tell a lot of the stuff goes over his head. I try to slow it down for him, but it’s tough, as the other kids in the class are pretty good at English, and have had a lot more practice listening to me. Today he just sat off in a corner with his head down. My co-teacher mentioned he’d been having some issues with his friends, and one knucklehead helpfully chimed in from across the room – “it’s he’s fault!” I decided not to force him to do the worksheet today, but I wish there was something more I could do to make him feel better and more confident about English again.

Then there’s Jerry, a kid in the “bad” 1st grade class. He’s shunned by all of his classmates, and they often crack jokes about him. If I show a pig or a doofy looking dude in a ppt, as is often my wont, then one of the students will point and shout his name. Even my pets give him a hard time. Today, when chatting with them, I mentioned that they weren’t being very nice to Jerry and that they should really lay off, which was met with protests – “but he started it! He was being weird and a jerk,” etc. I wish I could figure out how to protect students like Jerry. I can’t stop everyone from picking on him – most students wouldn’t be able to understand me if I lectured them all about tolerance and empathy, even if I could come up with the right words to convince them to be a little less shitty to a fellow human being.

Off to bed, and then to another day in the field. Hopefully more coherent and interesting updates to follow. Really, my life is only 99% consumed by school – there’s an exciting 1% that I will write about someday!

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