It's All English To Me

A few weeks after the St. Patty's Day incident... or what we might be ironically forced to now refer to as my own very recent and personal ‘March Madness’ (ask me about one the scars by my left eye!), things have been pretty chilled for me the past few weeks here in the ‘Land of Morning Madness’! NCAA basketball ended all of my early April activities and both of my universities’ basketball teams did okay, but didn’t quite finish number one (but you can’t always win! Yeah right!).  So I’ve had pretty much nothing to excite me or to look forward to lately. And as we all know, when I am lacking drama, I tend to go out and make some!

Any who, with the advent of the annual dust storms from China clogging my lungs and making heavy drinking almost a distant dream, I’ve been confined to either home or the gym (of all places), waiting for something interesting to come along. No dice.  But, I’ve been trying to make my work more exciting; yes teaching elementary school students the mystical and mind-numbing ways of the English language!

 

The Science pond freezes over, so we cut class and go play!

 I want to tell you a bit about my students. I know, it is still a shocker for many people to imagine someone of my rebellious nature to be in charge and the sole protector of thirty innocent souls, even if only for forty minutes each day, but I manage.

I teach at a pretty well-established elementary school (with a reputation spanning over 100 years), located at the original center of ancient Seoul, in Jongno-gu (district). This place is a typical elementary school, first to sixth grades, roughly averaging thirty students per class. I teach English as a foreign language, not Language Arts!  We do English, just like mostly everyone reading this did French, Spanish, Italian, German or Latin (even though it’s not even a ‘language’ anymore, in my opinion).  Whatever twisted language you chose to ‘study’ in order to meet graduation requirements and get the hell out of high school!  The constant study of how to make English grammar or rules of speech that tend to have more exceptions than constants make life very exciting for me, on occasion!

Hyoje Elementary School, Field Day 2005 (Awesome!)

Like I said, life has been pretty mundane recently and I tend to look to my students for enjoyment. A point to be made about them and the educational system here is that Sesame Street never fully grasped hold of Korean society, probably why a “Sesame Street Korea” goes unnoticed (if it ever existed to begin with!).   

There is no way you could put some of my ‘characters’ (aka… students) on TV and expect anything to go according to script!  Not that they are malfunctioned or faulty, they just don’t roll like that! I could see it, Big Bird introducing the letter ‘F’ and my students screaming in response, “Big Bird, (explicative) you!”  Then, our tall, bright friend becoming noticeably annoyed and confused, saying “Don’t say that!” and my little future CEOs of Samsung or Hyundai Corporations ripping off strings of ‘f-words’ or the notorious ‘s-word’ to shame old-school Della Reese and half the comedians on Def Comedy Jam!

Or, what do you do as a cast member of Sesame Street, when a snot-nosed first grader walks up to you and starts wailing in some language yet to be discovered by linguists and when you don’t respond (because you have no Earthly clue as to what the little hell raiser is spitting out his mouth), he goes in for an up close and personal embrace to tell you ‘face to face’ so you can hear him ‘that much better’ and understand the archaic moans and groans ejaculating from his mouth.  How could I ever forget my on very special case where a first grader who was schedule to attend ‘Tory English Time’ the next semester and probably had no idea this ‘not yellow’ guy walking around her school was, asked me every day if I were Korean.  

Leading morning exercises at the Jung-Bu District Winter English Camp.

 After a couple of weeks she figured it out that I was not a son of Han, yet then proceeded to ask if I were Chinese.  A few more weeks passed and our little ritual exchange moved from Chinese to Japanese (it should be noted that this was all in Korea and although I had actually been going to my $400 a month Korean classes, she was only six years old; if I couldn’t figure here speaking out, then I really would have no happy of understanding any foreign languages!).  Finally, sometime near Christmas, she asked if I were American!  I was so happy that she’d finally figured it out that I went across the street to the candy store and got her a box of Ppeppero (a very stale, sickening cookie shaped like a thin stick… have to tell you all about Ppeppero Day, a teacher’s stomach’s worst nightmare!).  Guessing she got hip to the ways of global migration in the 21^st century or simply, finally, asked her class teacher or mommy or daddy where black people who taught English in Korea came from!

Us fourth grade hall teachers on the Winter Teachers' Retreat!

One of my all-time favorite ‘amuse yourself’ activities is assessing the fashion fads these children love to wear. I bet you never saw a kid on one of those shoddy 70′s reruns of Sesame Street, roll up on set wearing a t-shirt that said ‘Je suis un idiot.’ (‘I’m an idiot.’ for you people who chose Spanish), ‘Legalize: Smoke weed’, or ‘Wanna _____?’ (fill in the blank…. all accompanied by a generic smiling face).  And there is, of course, the granddaddy of them all, a sixth grader wearing a hoodie that defied all mental logic I could muster to try to understand what in the world the person who designed it was thinking: ‘D-Squared, Chip Chip Motherfucker’!

Hell no!  Bert would ‘make ddong in his panties’ (ddong = poo) if he saw a ten-year old child wearing this type of fashion terror anywhere near a classroom.  There are also the more vocal students, who cannot answer the simple question, “What is your name?” in English, yet have mastered the use of curses and swears to a point that makes me want to ask if they have an American cousin or ‘a friend of mama who looks like me’ living with them. One of these linguistic savants, after going to sit in his chair, completely missed the seat and hit the floor, exclaiming so loudly that almost every teacher on the fourth grade hall rushed to my classroom to ‘help’, yelping at the top of his lungs, “I pain in ass, I pain in ass!”  “Damn right you are…” I reply quietly to myself as I turn my head to hide my snickering.

The constant drama of my day gets so freaky and Twilight Zone-esque, that I often walk into my class, look at the day’s mission impossible on the faces of those little angels and always, without control, eke out a defeated “Shit!” Yet, none of this mental chaos draws my mind away from the wafting ‘sweetness’ of the smell of a garlic infused, traditional kimchi breakfast in the morning, of which I have grown to love, especially when I can smell it on my own breath (or the aroma drifting up from my pores)!

Now with that said, I guess I should get back to work, planning a lesson in an alien language that will only be understood by myself… and I already know how to conjugate ‘to be’; or, at least, I used to be able to! 

(If extraterrestrials do exist, NASA please broadcast this message for me: SEND TELEPATHY PLEASE, SEND TELEPATHY, ASAP!)

- Seoul, Korea (April 2006)