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!
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| 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!
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| 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.
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| 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 21st century or simply, finally, asked her class
teacher or mommy or daddy where black people who taught English in Korea came
from!
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| 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)
