kids

Today I did something I've been meaning to do for a while--I took my camera into work and snapped a few photos. My Tuesday/Thursday classes are all really great and pose me no problems; all the kids are really funny, sweet, and smart as hell. Couple this with the fact that I only have 3 classes on these days, and you can see how Tuesdays/Thursdays are a much needed respite from the long, draining Monday/Wednesday/Fridays.

This first class is fresh out of kindergarten. Their abilities to read, speak, and understand English are better than some of the teenagers I teach.


I don't know how the girl giving the peace sign (Cara) is doing that with her feet, but I swear I didn't break her ankles.

This next class is only three students, and a bit older, in the 9-10 range.

Look at all the fun we have.

The boy on the left, Antony (not Anthony, Antony), might be the smartest kid I teach, and he's a baseball fan, so bonus points for him.

One of these days I'll take my camera in on a MWF. I'll get pictures of some of the kids I named after my friends, as well as some shots of my nightmare classes so that you can put a face to the vitriol I spew on here.

yellow dust

So here's something. Every spring, Korean experiences a minor disturbance called yellow dust. Sand and dust from the Gobi desert gets swept up and makes a several hundred mile journey to Korea.

I heard about this a few weeks back, and in my mind I envisioned clouds of dust, a pale yellow sky, and a barely visible sun. As it turns out, it's not quite so bad, not yet at least. The worst effect of it that I have seen so far has been that cars are pretty filthy, with a layer of the yellow dust caked onto them.

That, and there's been a slight increase in the amount of people I see on the streets with hygienic face masks which cover one's mouth and nose. A lot of people wear these masks regardless as a means of preventing illnesses, preventing spreading their illness to others, or as a means to mitigate the effects of living in a country which has as much air pollution as Korea.

a day in the life

I've sworn off alcohol.

Correction: I've sworn off going to bars and spending a ton of money on alcohol. On Friday I turned down several offers to go out drinking after work. I did this because I'm tired of my weekends being a two day journey of getting drunk, sleeping, getting drunk again, and then nursing myself back to full strength so as to be able to endure the next week of work.

So, last night I stayed in and did nothing. The benefits of this were two-fold. For one, I got to stay up late enough to watch some first round March Madness. Also, I was able to wake up refreshed the next morning and go to Dunkin Donuts to sit in the sun for an hour and fill out some report cards.

After completing a dozen or so of 'em, I headed to a cell phone store to put some minutes on my phone. From there I grabbed a chicken sandwich and some fries from Lotteria, my local fast food joint.

At about 4 or 5 I took a taxi with a couple of co-workers, one of which was the "new guy" who has been here for 2 weeks, to a more bustling part of town, where street markets abound, to find some warm-weather work clothes. We walked around for a bit, saw some meat markets with pig intestines for sale, and fish markets with the kind of horrid smell one might expect of a fish market.

While there, we stumbled across the Korean equivalent of thrift stores, pretty much people selling mounds of clothes on the side of the road. I spent 4,000 won on a couple of shirts, a purchase which immediately qualified the day as a good day.

At around 8 I was ready to leave. The three of us stopped by a little restaurant, I had the duk-mandu-guk, and then it was my intention to head home.

But! But the new guy wasn't quite ready to go home. After the other co-worker and I mentioned that we were gonna make our way back home, the new guy decided he wasn't too keen on the idea. I couldn't allow the guy to wander around in a foreign country all alone not knowing what the hell to do, so I decided to stay with him, and we went out for a few drinks. We ended up in a Western bar (Western bar=white people) where a handful of other people were. I met some nice people there, got challenged to a chess game and was ultimately humiliated in said game by a girl, a girl who later admitted to being a former child chess prodigy who was trained by a grandmaster in her youth.

After a few more drinks, while on that precipitous ledge where tipsy turns into full-blown drunk, I exercised self control and called it a night. I took a taxi home, and here I am.

That's what I did today.

report cards

It's been warm. It topped out at a shade over 70 degrees today. I've been looking forward to the warm weather. My Korean co-workers didn't even have the heat on today.

The part of my job that I loathe the most is, by far, report cards. They wouldn't be so bad if I only had to do them a couple times throughout the year, but that's not the case. Once a month I have to fill them out. Once a month I walk into work and am handed a stack of 120 of them, and I get a strong urge to tear my eyeballs out.

Completing one report card consists of awarding the student a grade from A (Excellent) to D (Needs Improvement) in categories that cover their English ability and their attitude. Then, on the reverse side is a comments section where the teacher writes a few sentences about the student's performance. It takes me maybe 2 minutes to fill one out, so it's an extra 4 hours or so of work spread out over a week-span.

Now, while in theory the range of grades a student can receive is from A to D, it's not so in practice. Since this school is also a business, they want the parents to think that their child is a gifted angel. This being the case, the lowest grade that I am supposed to give out is an A-. A few times I've gone as low as a B. In many cases this isn't really a problem because a lot of the kids really are quite brilliant and are great students. But, the way the system is set up, a student who turns in absolutely no homework for the entire month will get a report card that has their homework grade as an A-, just a shade under excellent. A student who pays no attention in class and is blatantly disrespectful to their teacher gets an Attention/Manner grade of A-, damn near perfect.

The comments section that I fill out is equally meaningless, mainly because I'm writing in English to parents who can't read or understand a word of it. Pretty much every one that I write reads like this: (Student's name) is a bright student with a strong willingness to learn. He/She has shown good improvement in the area of (pick a category at random). I would like to see him/her work on (pick a category at random). Great Job!

If the kid is a real pain in the ass and never does homework, maybe I'll stick something in along the lines of: At times, (student's name) struggles to focus in class, and needs to be more diligent toward homework.

So, report cards are pretty much a tedious and mind numbing task of kowtowing to the parents and reinforcing their belief, no matter how false, that their child is smart enough to perhaps someday cure cancer.

I can do about ten of these in a sitting before my brain starts to hurt.

names

So all of my classes got switched around. It's been great. One of my new classes consists of all new students. They are 6 year-olds, and at the lowest class level in my school: Phonics 1. This means I'm teaching them their ABCs. "A" is for "ah," "ah" is for "apple". That kind of stuff.

It also means that none of them had English names prior to meeting me. As I've mentioned before, at English school all the students get English names. So, my first day with this new class I got to name 12 Korean children.

For some of these kids their names will last for as long as they go to this school, and in a couple of years they will probably not even remember what they were called in English. But for others it will last. A lot of Korean adults that I have met here also have an English name that they picked up some place or another. So, if some of these students continue along the path of English education, or, say go to America someday, they are probably going to say that their name is the one that I gave them. It's a weird responsibility for me, one that I probably didn't take seriously enough.

Because I named one kid Rocky.

And another Otis.

The rest of the new phonics class consists of a Dave, James, Randy, Jenna, Chad, Liz, Jen, Katie. In other classes over the past 3 months I've handed out a Pete, Luke, Andy, and Matt. I also named one Dylan, because I'm me.

There's a few other names I've given that I can't remember right now, probably because they don't really have any significance or relevance. It's not rare for me to get to name a kid, so if you read this and you don't have a Korean namesake, I've still got 9 months worth of naming to do.

Oh, and in the category of students who I didn't name but wish that I had (like Tupac), I now have a kid called Doogie.

100

It's been 100 days since I stepped off a plane in Seoul, South Korea. I don't really have much to say about it, but it seemed like a milestone worth noting.

scooters

There's a ton of restaurants here. There's so many restaurants here that one wonders how they all manage to stay up and running. Everyone I know, including myself, lives on top of a restaurant. I guess Koreans dine in/order out a lot.

Since there's a bunch of restaurants, there's an exponential amount of delivery drivers. Deliveries aren't done in cars though, they are done in these:

Walking the streets for any amount of time here I'm bound to see a handful of guys tearing through town on these scooters. From what I can tell, the requirements for this job are, 1. Can you operate a scooter?, and 2. Are you willing to sacrifice your well-being and the well-being of all those around you in order to deliver food?

These guys must not be paid by the hour, because everyone of them is in a constant, frantic rush. They come out the door of the restaurant with a box of food, slam it into that compartment on the back, and take off like a shot.

Now, in Korea driving is like a chaotic ballet of some sort. It's a hell of a lot different than the States. For one thing, there's some intersections that have no stop lights or stop signs at them. Four way intersections, on busy streets, with nothing to mediate or designate right of way. How do they do it? Well it's simply a matter dropping the speed a few mph and giving a few toots of your horn as if to say, "Watch out I'm coming through!" There's no order to it.

There's even less order when it comes to the guys on the scooters. These guys drive like they're playing GTA4. There's a little congestion up ahead? Hell, just drive on the sidewalk. The other day I stepped out of a convenient store with a pack of smokes and almost got taken out by a scooter tearing down the sidewalk at about 20mph, and it wasn't the first time. Even if these guys come up to a red light, it doesn't stop them. They creep out into the intersection and gun it through a gap in the traffic.

So since I've gotten here I've just been waiting for one of these guys to slip up. Everyday I would look for it, expecting and anticipating it, sighing when one of them would come this close to losing it. But Saturday around noon I got to see the payoff.

I had planned on only stepping out to grab some food to help nurse a hangover, but on the way back I bumped into a few people I know and found myself standing on a corner for ten minutes talking. Being around lunchtime there was plenty of delivery guys racing around, and the intersection I was at had no light or stop sign. Just as I was saying my goodbyes a delivery driving came tearing down the road. His plan was to take a left at my intersection, but as he went into his turn another scooter coming from that way was also entering the intersection. So the one turning left had to try and straighten out so as not to sideswipe the other, but he couldn't. He and the scooter hit the ground and slid on their left side, sparks flying, and slammed into a parked car, into a white Lexus. It made a hell of a sound.

The guy was fine, though he probably felt like an asshole standing there with everyone staring at him. The owner of the car, who works at a glasses store across the street, came running out to check the damage. The rear bumper was torn up and hanging off, so he wasn't too pleased. The driver stood around for a minute or so, gave the guy his information, and hopped back on the scooter and took off again.

I felt bad for the guy, but that's the risk they take I guess.