Creatings the firsts!

These past two days have been amazing firsts! It all started yesterday when I got my first care package from home. My family was kind enough to send me my absentee ballot, one of my favorite cups (Ole Miss!), garlic salt, and some Twizzlers and Skittles (surprises, both of those candies, but much appreciated). First package!

Today was even more of a great day for firsts! Firstly (Ha!) I used that garlic salt on my eggs this morning and it was more delicious than anything before! Also, I paid my first bill as a resident here in Korea. Now, all I know is that it was a utility bill for 35,750 won (or thereabouts). I’m not sure if it was a water, electricity, or gas bill. Hell, I don’t even know how many utility bills I’ll have, I just know that I have to pay them if I want to enjoy a civilized life. Sorry, no pictures were taken to cast that moment in immortality, so you’ll just have to imagine me as a beaming lad excited by the fact that I’m actually supporting myself (except I’m standing at a Korean bank machine paying a bill I don’t understand a word of instead of sending a check in the mail)! I needed some help with this transaction, which Jesse was so kind to provide: walking me down to the bank (it being on the 1st floor of the same building) and telling me what buttons to press on the machine. I got a receipt saying that my balance was lower after the transaction than before, so I can only assume that I paid the bill. If I disappear in a few weeks and my family starts receiving letters for ransom, then you’ll know that I’m doing this all wrong. In fact, I may be sending money to the wrong people entirely (on the plus side, such consistent and sizable contributions may make me the Korean equivalent of a Don by the time my visa expires).

The other two firsts are actually intertwined. Today, I sent my first letter back to the United States! Phil had to show me where the post office is and we went before school started today. I’d say it was an excellent use of prep time. Having seen the cost of sending a package from the U.S. to Korea, I was expecting something exorbitant. I found out it was roughly 1,250. Won, that is. So roughly $1.13. Now, the item that was so important it necessitated me accidently swiping that on my credit card (yeah, they didn’t tell me the price before I gave them the card) was my absentee ballot! First time voting for President! I don’t know if it’ll get there in time, but I’ve done my civic duty and tried everything I can to make sure that my vote counts (as much as it can in our political system, haha). Yay!

With all of these firsts happening in the past two days, I feel like an actual, human being here in Korea. Now, all I need is my first full paycheck and my first trip around Korea and I’ll have covered all my bases, I think. So this wasn’t much of a post, but it was important to me. Hooray for firsts!

Sh!t My Kids Say Part 1

So my kids have started to amuse me with the little things they say, as I’ve pointed out here. I figured I would start collecting them and putting them down to share with you all. It’s only fair that you get to experience all that I do and get a few laughs out of it too. As Lindsay mentioned, they are “a precocious bunch” and I must add that they love to challenge me in any way they can. Mostly this involves tricking me into saying a bad word in Korean or asking if I know a word in Korean. Never one to suffer insults, I retort with something intelligent about their height or haircut (they all have the same haircut, for the most part). Sometimes I even just ask them questions about things they probably don’t know about, like what “effervescent” means, or what is going on in Syria, or who the Vice President of the United States is. They know the President, so VP is smarter to trip them up… Despite their little moments, they still manage to say things that border between amusing and mortifying. Here are a few, decide on your own where they fall.

I’m now teaching a class called IEWC, which stands for the International English Writing Competition. These are really smart high-school-aged kids who are almost fluent that are going to write timed essays for a competition (HA! NERDS!). The first class I had with them, last Thursday the 25th, we were writing an essay on Intelligence. They had to pick a stance on whether they thought Intelligence is something you are born with or if there are other factors that contribute to an individual’s Intelligence. Both students chose “Other Factors” and started brainstorming examples, details, and other supports. The funny part came when one of the students said that parental teaching styles really mattered. I asked, “How so?” To which she responded, “In class the other day my teacher was talked about how good parents teach good things to the children and they learn good things to make them more smart.”
“Ok, that makes sense(obvious grammar mistakes aside), any examples?”
“Yes. My teacher was talking about the Jewish [sic] whose parents have always teach them to question and think. So the Jews childrens learn this and that is why there are… many… in the world… umm… smart Jews.”
Sheer brilliance, this one. Never have I heard the Jewish tradition summed up so nicely by a Korean kid with such an off-handed air that it was something that is commonly (I can only assume) taught in public school. Blew my mind. I couldn’t stop smiling/chuckling for a good five minutes.

This next one has come up in several classes. On certain days, I have started playing Team Jeopardy with a couple classes to make sure they really understand the material (and so that they can try to win some candy). I never have enough material to fill 5 whole categories, so I borrowed an idea from my coworker Andrew to include a “Random” category. This is usually Avalon-specific stuff. One of the questions I use is, “How many foreign teachers are there up here at Avalon and what are their names?” Well, the kids first get it wrong by guessing anywhere from 5-14 (the answer is 7), but the hilarity ensues when trying to recall all of our names. They can get several very easily: Josh (who they call Ajoshy since that means “old man” in Korean), Phil, Andrew, Jon (me!), and sometimes they call Jesse “Canadian” (He is one of two Canadians up in Avalon… so I guess they’re right?). The problem comes for the other two foreign teachers. After the first time I asked this question in Jeopardy and heard the response, I started to watch in my other classes to see if it was the same across all of them, and I found it was, meaning I think Korean’s are all slightly racist: They stop, look at each other and just start moving one of their hands in a circle around their faces. As if they are covering or wiping it. They don’t ask me anything, but they make this motion and all look at each other with these pained looks on their faces like they don’t know what to say. So I have a class of fourteen little Korean boys and girls in near silence mime-washing their faces for about a minute, looks of consternation on their faces, occasionally rupturing the silence with frustrated grunts and a quick sentence back and forth to find an answer. Eventually one of them usually says, “The guy who… The guy is… His face is…”
“You mean the guy who doesn’t look like Jon Teacher? What do you mean?”
“Teacher! The guy… He *frantic mime-washing of face* not look like Jon-Teacher!”
“He’s black.”
“Yes! Black Teacher!”
“What’s his name?”
“Uh, Teacher, we don’t know!” So you just know he’s black, but can’t say it and don’t want to ask. His name is Chris, by the way.
So after Chris, we always have the last teacher to try and guess. That guessing process isn’t as funny to me, but the answer is since they just say “Girl-people Teacher.” They call Heather “Girl-people Teacher.” Well done, class.

I actually dressed down on Friday and wore a pair of cargo pants (the ones I look damn good in, thank you) and my black polo shirt, untucked. I’m cool like that. During one of my classes, GB210, I had stretched and my undershirt came slightly untucked from my pants. I didn’t expose myself in any way to the class, and it was my side anyways, but they saw the waistband of my boxers. To this, one of the kids, a little snot-head dingus who never pays attention and only disrupts class named “B,” suddenly yelled, “Teacher! I see your panties!”
“Um, what was that, B?”
“Teacher, I saw your panties!”
“B, these are not panties, this is a pair of men’s underwear. Panties is the English word for women’s underwear (in Korean, panties means underwear for both sexes, which I had found out just a few weeks ago, so I was prepared for this).”
“Wait, Teacher are you a this-kind of criminal?” He opened his phone dictionary and started searching while the rest of the class kept laughing. “Teacher, are you a this?” He showed me the translation: sex criminal, rapist.
So my kids think I am a rapist because they saw the top of my boxer waistband. Korea, right?

The final one I am going to post about this week was how two kids in one of my classes, JB 403, have a tendency to be tremendously un-gentlemanly and insult two of the girls. Phill [sic] and Steve are merciless towards Jenny and Chelsea, to the point where Jenny and Chelsea have responded every once in a great while by turning around and delivering a Hulk-smash on one them (Go girls! I mean… no violence in my class!). I am caught in this moral dilemma of letting the girls beat the snot out these bratty boys and having to be a teacher that does not tolerate violence. So whenever I “see” it I chastise the kids and send one of them outside with a stern warning, but I can’t discipline what I can’t see, right? Well, the part about this situation/class that makes this relevant to this post comes in the form of what Phill thinks is an insult. You see, usually everything is said in Korean. However, this week he seemed to translate it into English and just started yelling “Blood hair!” at Jenny. He said this roughly 40 times in the 50 minute class. Just started yelling “Blood hair! Blood hair!” This must be a literal translation from Korean to English since this makes no sense to me. Just crazy 10-year old kids.

I hope you enjoyed this little post and I’ll try to remember all the stuff my kids say from now on.

Election and News about Home

There have been many invasive posts both on my facebook and on my newsfeed about something that may or may not being going on back at home right now. I am now vaguely aware that, just like four years ago around this time, all of my friends are suddenly experts on the political system, the political actors within said system, political ideology, and how to solve all the problems – real and imagined – that our country currently faces. Based on what I’ve seen, people seem to equate the President and Presidential power as the sole determinant of whether or not these problems get solved. Many people also think that political decisions should be decided on one issue and where a candidate stands on one issue, rather than evaluate the entire candidate, his/her philosophy, where that person stands in the political system, and what I would like to call context. Although that might be a little too generous, seeing as many people simply vote by a party or simply their perceptions of what a party is. In addition, everyone in America suddenly “wakes up” and decides to have an opinion (ill informed as it is) and refuses to participate in a calm, reasoned discourse. Rather, most prefer a screaming match, an emphatic contradiction, or, failing that, simply professing blind ignorance of any and all issues in some primeval display of measuring power and influence over your misguided attempts at figuring out these issues on your own. If they simply say something enough times, with enough force, they will enlighten you and bring you to a higher state of being (which actually means they have to force you to agree with them). Clearly this is the only demonstration they can make about how much smarter they are than everyone else. Overall, an unpleasant experience. Also, one that infuriates me. Oh, I do plan on voting as soon as my absentee ballot gets here and I also have a small bet going with a buddy on this election. To be fair, this is my first time being able to vote for President, so I am very excited!

As for trying to find other news of U.S.A., well that is buried somewhere farther underneath all the political. Last I saw, the Giants and the Tigers are in the world series, meaning I care about baseball about as much as I care about the NFL, back-alley bar fights, and the NBA (trick question, since the NBA and bar fights have the same actors and bar fighters have slightly more integrity). I also saw something about the NHL still in a lockout, the economy is still an economy, and everyone and his mother is obsessed with Gangnam Style. I didn’t say that I heard news worth reporting.

As you probably know by this point, the way I get most of my news is through BBC World, Al-Jazeera, Google, Skype, and Facebook. The last two of those are for my “social life” of all you back at home and have been invaluable for alerting me to the most important of details. For example, I found out that Chase and Katie are apparently engaged. That’s huge! Congrats! I also found out that many of my recently-graduated friends went to Elon last weekend for something called a… what was it?… “Homecoming?” Many of you are settling into jobs, or flitting around the world and experiencing life, or knocking the Hell out of grad school. See? I pay attention!

As for news from home, I can share that mom and dad are shopping for houses in Louisville, Kentucky. I don’t know what that necessarily means for our RI residence, but I’ll let you know when I know. I don’t know what is going to happen and I know that I don’t have any control over what happens, but I think it is fascinating that all of this is happening. Well, I find it fascinating that this is one way that I am reminded how life goes on for other people. You mean I’m not the center of everyone’s world and that my consultation isn’t needed for every decision in my family’s life? Inconceivable! Oh how the mighty are brought low! I guess this means that Dad is doing well enough at GE that they plan on staying for a while. As for David, I guess he is still doing well at Elon (no one has told me whether or not he has been “asked to leave and reconsider his life priorities” as President Leo would say). Julia is understanding that college isn’t as easy as I made it look (being the perfect older brother and all), but she is still sticking with it. Oh, and her ACL has healed to the point where she can jog now, even if she can’t do sports. So everyone is alive and healthy (last I heard), we are going through some potential family relocation, and I’m still the favorite child.

Wow, this whole news thing is looking pretty good. To be honest, I only talk with family and people from home about once a week. If I can bring up this almost-dead horse once again, not having a constant means of communicating with you all really inconveniences me. How else am I to learn all these little details about your lives so that I can one day control you? To my coworkers and former professors who are reading this, I promise that I don’t actually do that… If any of my friends from home say otherwise, they are liars! The veritable embodiment of benign non-interference, I am.

The whole point I’m writing this to you is because I’m discovering more and more about the habits I’ve formed. I’ve become more aware of what certain activities and people I valued and relied on before I crossed the Pacific Ocean (first and foremost, my Pulse app. After that? Probably just the ability to text Teagan about the video games we were playing in the rooms next to each other). That cliché about “not knowing what you got ’till it’s gone” holds true, I guess. Still, it’s amazing that suddenly not having something can reveal little things about who you are. My desire to stay current on news was very strong for the last year I was in the States, but I didn’t really care about talking with friends. Not that you were boring, just it all seemed stupid with the “Oh, guess who XYZ slept with this past weekend?” and “I hate my Biz-Econ-Ethics-of-Self-Congratulations-We-Made-a-PPT-All-By-Myself-(and my groupmates) Class.” Now go five weeks where your primary means of communication is facebook and realize that you have more free time than Willy at the end of his movie… Suddenly I want to know what life is like in Boston working as a bean counter, or in Raleigh as a geek, or back at Elon as a nerd (Ha! NERD!), or in X-City at Y-University going for your Master’s with your part-time job. Conversely, if I look at a news site for more than fifteen minutes I lose interest.

Basically, we live in a developed world of (at least potential) constant interaction through internet and cell phones. Many people like to go off the grid for a little while and get away from it all if they feel hounded by this constant interaction. Others thrive on having their hands on the pulse. I’m finding that I may be one of those in-betweeners: I won’t use it most of the time, but I like the option there if the mood strikes me. I want to be able to directly contact the people I’m thinking of, not wait for a scheduled Skype date or a response to an email or facebook post. Call me pushy. If, while reading this, you are struck by a sense of guilt at having not updated me on the news of your life, maybe you could get on that? Maybe send me an email? Facebook? Comment on the blog? I’m not hearing a noOOoo… *WooooOOOOP woop woop woop woop woop wooop*

Burnt Dog, New Tricks

I have been a little confused lately because of two conflicting phrases: You can’t teach an old dog new tricks and Learning is a lifelong endeavor. As you may or may not know, I don’t consider myself blessed with anything approaching a fully functional brain, especially as it concerns memory (hint: no memory). However, I want to learn more about everything in life (I’ve referenced all the languages, skills, musical instruments, and general information in another post) and I don’t know how feasible it all is. Between these two innocuous sayings and my ripe old age of 21, what am I to think about possibly educating myself in all the things I’ve never done before? Can I learn anything new? Sure I can try to keep mentally active by doing crossword puzzles and the like, but I’m more and more curious about whether or not I have used up all my limited brain capacity to learn on the boring stuff from school. I guess I got thinking about this the other week when I went to a seminar about how to teach at Avalon. I can’t say that I understood most of what they were talking about (or I thought it was stupid, not sure which one), but I do want to learn how to teach. This teaching stuff is all uncomfortably unfamiliar to me and I wish there was some way to make it all easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

You would think that based on those sentiments I would try to learn something useful: how to manage kids, various teaching pedagogies, what nerves you can hit for non-lethal takedowns for class control, etc. You get the idea. (Un)Fortunately, a coworker of mine, Heather, recently shared a lovely site called coursera.org where professors from “Top Universities” in the world offer free classes about various topics, ranging from the introductory to the advanced. Inspired by my recent brush with intellectual insecurity and beginning to feel that maybe watching whole seasons of shows in a day or two isn’t the best use of my time (I still stand by my decision to watch Better off Ted, Newsroom, Supernatural Season 7, and Beast Wars Transformers, though – Castle is queued up next), this website suggestion seemed a curious coincidence, nay – a conspiracy!

Thusly seized by the moment (I must admit that I didn’t seize it, nor The Day), I browsed the catalog and signed up for several courses. The first class I joined started on October 15 (so I started a week late, big whoop) and covers an introduction to the Python programming language. Yeah, pretty cool stuff, right? I figured, “Hey, I got a good handle on SAS in three months, I can get a good handle on Python in the same amount of time. Plus, I can make myself silly little games and learn more about math!” Ok, I wasn’t as excited about the math part, but I like to think that I am quite logical and that I can understand equations. Did I forget to mention that I’m awesome and a genius, possessing so much awesome inside that a lesser man would burst? So this should be easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy! Well then I started taking the class. Let’s just say that Python is not Awesome and clearly is immiscible with Awesome. But Awesome ever prevails, it never falters, so I’ll keep you updated on my progress and blow your minds with the programs I create as I make them. Feel free to bow before me when you see them. Or if you are so awesome that you already defeated the evil Python (HA!), then please share your tale, wizened warrior, with a young challenger (a.k.a. *gulp* help?)

I also signed up for a course on Community Change in Public Health and a course in Cryptology. The Community in Public Health is an homage to my college studies in public policy and public administration, something I did fairly well at. Might as well keep current (and the course is taught by a professor from John’s Hopkins, so it can’t be too bad) and take a course that plays to my strengths (read as “not math”). That class just started a few days ago and I feel pretty solid in it. The Cryptology course starts in a week and a half and is something that I think would be really cool (although, again, math and equations – yuck). I hope I don’t stretch myself too thin over the next few weeks. I do have to stay on top of my actual schoolwork (at my job), keeping in touch with everyone at home, a social life, sleep, and improving myself in order to be the most Awesome person ever (I got my eye on you Barney Hakeem-Olajuwon-Thomas-Jefferson-NPH-Tesla Stinson!). One of those will slip, and I’ll just use it as an impetus to find purpose in life (I got my eye on you Barney Hakeem-Olajuwon-Thomas-Jefferson-NPH-Tesla Stinson!). Yes, I repeated that.

Awesome with a side of awesome?

I highly encourage everyone to check out the coursera.org site if they have the time. Maybe you’ll find something interesting! Join me in learning ALL THE THINGS! *Achem* Please, join me in discovering all that life has to offer through your own gifts and talents.

Life

Sorry that I haven’t posted in a while. I haven’t really been in a writing mood, apparently. Actually, it’s more the fact that I can’t think of anything worthy of posting. Life is pretty hum-drum here: wake, watch TV, work, watch TV, repeat. The weekend changes it up insofar as watch TV is replaced with going to the bar/club/noreabahng.

The biggest news I have is that this past Wednesday marked one month here at Avalon, teaching English to little children here in Korea. I’ve held a job for a month without getting reprimanded and/or fired! Although, I hear that employers wait a month to see how the newbies do before they start publicly humiliating you or generally letting you know if you suck. So, yay? In reality, this month has been very exciting. Between teaching, meeting new people, settling into a new country, and finding things to do that constitute “living life,” I can honestly say that the past month has been one of the most memorable. To be fair, I can’t remember anything before college and only bits and pieces of that (something about graduation, people?). I take what I can get though.

The teaching part I’ve pretty well covered in previous posts, so unless you want to hear more, I’ll just skip that. No, never mind, I am going to mention that some of these classes drag me down to the gates of Hell and make me wish I could give these kids something more than Daily Bridge (detention). It’s very difficult when these kids have little to know intrinsic motivation and I have no manner of extrinsically motivating them. I’m trying a new tactic of being nice, happy, and crazy in an effort to sweeten the class to buy their interest (and pumping them full of candy to actually sweeten class). Yet, since I am more familiar with scaring kids straight, maybe being able to fail the kid to make their schoolwork more personally relevant would help, but I’m at a loss for how to make that happen. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thankfully, the kids who are smart and pay attention make up for most of the baddies.

Ok, enough about that. I don’t have much to tell you about life in Korea or my social life. This week, two of my co-workers – Jesse and Heather – and I started teaching ourselves Korean. We are working on writing in Hangul (Korean alphabet), memorizing phrases to get around, and sometimes even speak. We haven’t started learning the mechanics of the language or grammar and so forth, but that to will come to pass. Jesse has really taken the lead on this endeavor of ours and given us some direction for the short-term until we can figure out a more traditional approach. This means that Jesse, Heather, and I are gathering material on our own and prepping some worksheets twice a week (hopefully that’ll increase) to learn about topics like travel, ordering food, shopping, etc. Jesse took the enlightened approach to this and suggested we learn some practicalities before we start in on the traditional learning. I’ll keep you updated on what I learn.

Other than that, it is situation normal. Hopefully I’ll get a phone this week and get connected to the world again, which’d make keeping in contact with you guys a lot easier. I’ll try to make my next post a little more exciting!

My schedule

In my haste to tell you all about my life. I forgot to tell you about my schedule in Avalon and what I actually do! All this time I mention my students to you, yet I have neglected to actually tell you anything of substance about my job and what my daily routine actually is. To remedy that brief oversight, I am going to break down the Avalon system as I understand it and give you all my schedule. This is partly because I’d like you to know what I am actually talking about and partly because I am proud of my ability to color coordinate my life on a sheet of paper. I’ll start with the basics and work my way up from there.

Where I work in Cheongju can be conceptualized as a franchise. They have headquarters in Seoul and have obligations and dues towards the Avalon/LangCon company. Right there, I come to a second point: Avalon and LangCon are separate organizations, but act in concert. LangCon is a private enrichment school for lower-elementary children while Avalon is a private enrichment school for upper-elementary and middle school students. I know even less about LangCon than I do about Avalon, so I won’t make stuff up for you (refreshing that I choose not to for once, hm?). Up in Avalon we have different programs for each of the age groups. For the upper elementary-aged kids we have the Champ program and for the middle school students we have the Ivy program. Within each of the Champ programs there are three main divisions and there are three classifications within each division. The divisions for Champ are, in ascending order, Dash, Jump, and Glide (D, J, and G respectively), and they are subdivided into Base, Intermediate, and Advanced (B, I, and A respectively). So, a Dash Advanced is abbreviated as DA, a Glide Basic is GB, and so forth. The Ivy program has four different divisions: Horizon, Mountain, E is… something, and T is for… T? Sure. Horizon and Mountain are subdivided on the same B/I/A scale, but E and T are subdivided based on 1, 2, and 3. So, Horizon Intermediate is HI, Mountain Advanced is MA, and E2 is E2. Hm, anticlimactic. The kids graduate from one to another through some method that I don’t know anything about, but I imagine it has to do with performance and intelligence.

Each level has its own quirks, pace, and areas of focus. For example, while the E level is doing mock TOEFL preparation, the Horizon kids are working out of a book with lessons such as “The Making of a Sand painting” and “What is ecotourism?” It sounds really impressive, and it is when you realize these 13 year olds can do four or five pages of all English text, listen to a teacher who only know English, and think through it all in English. Makes me feel lame!

Congratulations, you now know the levels. But it isn’t like I just walk into school and each class has one book that we work through each day. The school is divided into a 3-day group that comes Monday, Wednesday, & Friday, and a 2-day group that comes on Tuesday and Thursday. Each group will come in for a three-hour period, during which that class will have 3 1-hour lessons. One or two will be taught by a foreigner and the others will be taught by a Korean. The students have classes in Reading (RC), Grammar, Speaking (SP), Writing (WR), and Listening. I don’t know the abbreviations for the others cuz I don’t teach them. Sorry. Each subject has its own book, which means each kid brings 3 books to school every day. We foreigners only teach Writing, Speaking, and Reading. So they will have each class once a week, except that there are two reading classes a week – one taught by a foreign teacher, one taught by a Korean. The only difference between the three- and two-day classes is that Wednesday is a “Wacky Wednesday” of secondary programming. We teach out of special Wednesday-only book and alternate between two schedules every week.

I think I have explained the system and schedule well enough to introduce my week without too much confusion:

Oh the life…

Color coordination across similar divisions and yet enough variance to determine the different day? Yeah. It’s kinda like that.

The format for each of those cells is as follows: level, room, class type. So GB 4AUD WR means Glide Basic, room 4 Auditorium, Writing class. The two parts that you may have questions on are the split box on Wednesday and the IEWC on Thursday after my E2. The split box is because on Even Wednesdays I teach my JB403 class again and on Odd Wednesdays I teach GB210 instead. The IEWC class is a new addition starting on the 18th for the International English Writing Competition where I will help students write essays. As you can see, I mostly deal with the younger kids: JB and GB. That is kind of difficult in terms of behavior (them being mentally older than me) and communication. However it is also nice because I have half the planning then if I had more dispersion across the divisions and classifications.

So most days my classes start at 3:50 and I don’t stop until all 6 classes are done. That means I better have all my materials prepped and printed before I start my day. And I better not get hungry. Prep is heaviest on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday because that is the first time I teach the classes I have two of (GB210SP on Monday = GB403SP on Tuesday, etc.). Thursdays used to be the best day because I had so many breaks and I ended on the E2 class, which is not overly taxing and the closest I can come to talking to the kids on an equal level. With the addition of the IEWC, we shall see what happens, though, and I look forward to it.

“Such a schedule!” you gush approvingly. “How organized!” others of you cheer. Then somebody, I think it is O’Hagan, says “You deserve a promotion!” Now usually I don’t agree with my friends, but you are right. Thank you. With this organization at my disposal, I am free to use my time more effectively to prep for my classes. A very efficient machine of creativity and productivity, I am. From the moment I enter the building anywhere from 1:30-2:15 PM until classes start at 3:50, I am furiously thinking, reviewing, editing, creating worksheets, and mentally getting myself presentable to teach the hell out of English to these kids. Then I teach, take an hour at some point to cram food into my stomach, and am forced to leave at 11:05 PM. I try to use the last few free minutes of each day to prep for the next day, but on Fridays and such it is actually difficult to focus so I decide to not hamper my future efforts.

Woof. I think that was a little too much information for you wasn’t it? Well you asked… Let me know if there was anything I left out and I’ll try to add it in the comments.

Avalon Update

Well hello, all one of you reading this! I am sorry for the delay in posting, but it has been a fairly interesting week and one in which I felt more than a little distracted. Too distracted to write a post and inform you all about the life and times of a American in Cheongju? Maybe or maybe not, that is your call. I’ll just summarize my distraction in the following manner: I haven’t gotten much sleep, work has been very entertaining and worth my dedicated time, I’ve been watching some TV, and I’ve been thinking a lot on the direction my life should be headed. Oh, and sometimes I’ve been out with my coworkers until the wee hours of the morning celebrating our mere existence on the planet in such esteemed company as ourselves (party, w00t). I’ll try and just give you all a quick update on the past week without dragging you all down with all of those aforementioned musings on where my life might be headed, as God knows it’s scary enough in your world without adding my insane thoughts.

Biggest news first: I got paid yesterday for my first two weeks of teaching. I have finally graduated to the real world and have had a steady, respectable job long enough to collect one paycheck (well, deposit since it is a direct deposit payment system). Feeling accomplished? You know I am! I really really wanted to post this yesterday if I had earned over 1 million won, but it wasn’t true: “Three weeks in Korea and I am a millionaire!” Instead, you’ll all just have to wait until next month and I’ll hit with that same joke. That small disappointment aside, the work is tough and demands a lot of mental preparation on my part, mostly because I have problems figuring out how to talk to people long enough to keep their attention, I tend to lecture when I talk, and I have no idea what the kids are saying when they look at me and talk to their friends (I think the first two are related to each other and the third is simply being a CRAZY foreign teacher). I still like it and I enjoy some of the little dynamic I have with a few of my classes when we can laugh and watch Teacher do crazy imitations of dinosaurs, listen to teacher make up stories about students wanting Teacher to die by throwing a desk at him (never ‘Student wants to kill teacher’ always ‘Student wants Teacher to DIE and throws a desk at him. The students really like the world “die” for some reason), and exacting some public punishment. What was that last one you ask? Public punishment sounds evil! Well then, let me introduce you to two of the fun methods I have employed in the past week to get my students to participate.

When students act up in class or talk back or mimic Teacher or don’t put their phones away or aren’t paying attention, or really anything that may cause me to teach less effectively, I bring a tactic I learned from Ustetha Shereen in Arabic class into play. By this, I mean I make them stand up, walk to a corner or the front of the room or the aisle in between their classmates, and have them raise both arms straight up above their heads. Then they hold that position for several minutes or until they participate. If I think that holding up their arms isn’t enough, I tell them to do that while balancing on one leg. Some of these kids have great balance, others don’t. What ends up happening is that every one of them tries to cheat and lean up against a desk or put their feet down while I am writing at the board, but I just tell them to move to a different part of the room and start over. The other students love this since they get to laugh, the student who is getting “punished” actually is laughing too and paying attention to what is going on in class, and we manage to get quite a bit of work done since everyone wants to talk and tell me something that is going on in English: Teacher! Kevin keeps putting his foot on desk! Teacher! Phil and Steve are falling over all the time! Funny! I think this is awesome for the kids to try and communicate in English about things that you can’t really teach in books and this helps diffuse a ton of the tension and boredom in the room.

The other method was one that I tried out this past Tuesday with my quietest class. It is a low-level middle school class of 14 year olds and if I am lucky, two of them will speak in a class without my calling on them. That doesn’t mean that two people will keep talking, that means that I will hear a person speak on their own roughly two times a class. Otherwise, I have to call on them and pull the words from their mouths like a dentist does a cemented, rotten tooth. Oh, and on Tuesday we had to combine my class with another one since there were so few students (last week, this week, and next week is a “Holding” period for many in middle school since they are studying for their big Mid-Terms which has something to do with getting into better high schools. So they are studying at home and not coming to Avalon). That meant I was supposed to only teach 1/2 of the lesson (can’t get too far ahead of the students who won’t be here) and that one of the kids had never seen my face before. Yet they were all truly quiet, all of them seemed sleepy, and I needed something to do to snap them out of it. So I had them all stand up, form a line, and I walked them around the school asking them to give me a sentence using a phrase we had talked about in class. No one asked me a question or gave me a sentence for a good 10 minutes. This whole time I am walking them through the halls, through the teacher’s room, and back through the lobby hoping that me telling everyone that they would not speak would finally encourage them to speak. It didn’t really accomplish anything except now they think I am crazier. What finally ended this debacle was stopping in a hallway, having them line the wall, and I made them raise their hands above their heads while standing on one foot. I told them that they could not change position until they gave me a sentence. To be clear, these sentences needed to use the phrases “run a fever,” “take one’s temperature,” “suffer from” and “sickness.” They wouldn’t even say “I run a fever” for five minutes before I started walking them nor for the five minutes that we walked until I had them stand along the wall. Woof, brutal.

A little unorthodox? Sure. Effective? Sometimes. Really fun for the class and Teacher? Yes and yes. I’m trying to find ways to keep the kids paying some form of attention and participating, even if it is using English that the book doesn’t cover. For me, that is a little more important than what the book says. Sure the book may be designed by people who know how to speak English well enough to pass the stupid TOEFL exam, but it is so boring and books don’t get you interested in the language. They make you good test takers and are good for working on, but not good for speaking and listening and experimenting with the language. If these kids can understand me when I speak and use words that they know (I can’t use “appropriate” even, so I if my posts get even more small-worded as the months go on, I declare it a hazard of my job and I’m sorry (I can’t even say “apologize”)), I feel they should be smart enough to talk with me and learn English. Maybe that’s me being an optimist and unrealistic, but I’ve been called that before. Maybe?

So that has been teaching for my past week. I still have little idea what I am doing, but I think the kids are starting to get comfortable with how my classes work and the fun we can have. Before I end this post, I just wanted to share with you something that came up in my E2 class last night. This class is for kids who are fairly advanced in English, to the point where they are reading essays, breaking them down into Thesis, Topic Sentences, Details, etc. and analyzing them so that they can write their own essays on the material. Geniuses! We teach out of the TOEFL preparation book and usually it is fairly boring and doesn’t have much content to keep you entertained. However, the unit my one student (the other two are in the aforementioned holding period) and I were working on was about writing a preference essay on big companies or small companies. One of the sentences in the TOEFL example essay was, “There is nothing more motivating than feeling a sense of being needed and appreciated.” I just had to stop for a minute and think on that while Chris continued with his analysis. This sentiment just really resonated with me this week since I have been feeling a little culture shock, immersing myself in some cerebral media (Steppenwolf and “Newsroom”), feeling a little isolated without a means of contacting home, and thinking on where my life could head in the near and mid-range future (spoiler alert: I don’t really have any strong motivations and I am very uncertain). Yet it seemed that the blue TOEFL book had an interesting perspective to offer. A cosmic serve for me to return? If anyone wants to talk about something like this, I’d be more than willing. I don’t get much of a chance to go on my “Jon talks” and just debate and argue (not contradict, necessarily) and explore a topic with someone. I miss being able to do that with my friends… *achem*… you.

And on that bombshell I say, “I hope you enjoyed the update on Avalon. Thanks, for reading! Talk to you soon!”

Chuseok Break Part 3

The Mists of Gonju at 8:30 AM

I decided to change it up and lead you in with a picture. Please return to contemplating it and seeing all that it has to offer you, even finding hidden symbolism for your life. The mists obscuring the sky (symbolic of the unknown future) but letting the light through (either the light of God if you are uncreative, or the promise of a bright future if you are equally uncreative and also not-religious), the river of life running through it all, nature on one side and man’s constructions on the other (set in opposition through which life wends, touching both and of both yet neither), and so forth (Whoa, way too philosophical in here. I am, like, waaaaay the deepest, man.). Now return to the present and notice that the time for that shot is somewhere around 8:30 AM. That’s because Erin, Heather, and I took the 7:05 bus from Cheongju to Gonju operating under the information given to us by a fellow teacher that the bus ride would take 2 hours. It didn’t, so we had an hour and a half to kill. We used that time to wander the streets and see what we could before we were shackled to the strictures of the guided tour. It was a good choice because we got to see that lovely time of day that I shared with you at the top of this post and many fun parts of the city:

Nut festival!

This counts as a fun part. Cuz look how happy that nut-boy is.

After wandering and getting even more exercise in (I am so healthy here!) we made it to the museum to meet up with the Adventure Korea tour that we signed up for. The first two parts of the tour were through a museum of the Baekje Kingdom which existed from roughly 18BC-678AD (or so we understood from the guide, you can check the Wikipedia if you really want) and through the replica tombs of one of the Baekje Kings. Not much to say about that except the following shot was probably the highlight of this first segment:

Korean juice is torture.

Having heard of grape drink and purple drink, I was shocked by this grape squeeze and this apple squeeze, but now that I think about it a little more, I think the best exhibit (still can’t compare to the image of squeezing grapes to bottle/can and drink their blood) was the following:

The Buddha from straight ahead.

The Buddha from the side.

Well done on the Buddha.

Then we were off to eat our lunches (packed) back at those tents from the first picture and exploring the little stalls, food stands, and music presentations going on around us. Very lovely. Finishing our lunch, but still feeling a mite peckish, Heather and I made an amazing discovery: 1,000 Won fried rice cake/pancake with sugar and ground chestnut filling. Wicked sweet, wicked cheap, wicked good. A perfect topping to the meal (No pictures because we ate them too quickly). It also proved a great segue for our minds to get extra psyched up for chestnut picking! Hooray for pretending to be agricultural laborers for an hour! Erin and Heather had been playing this up for the past week and how they would be getting “3 kg” of chestnuts and how jealous everyone would be come Christmas time (If even one more person sings “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…” in my presence before December F****** 1st, you will lose all respect I have for you, permanently). And now we were going to realize the dream of chestnut acquisition yuppies everywhere: GET ALL THE CHESTNUTS!

We whiteys pulled up to the chestnut farm (immigrant workers bussed to the farm…), handed bags, and told to go fill them (if we wanted). The bags did not seem able to hold a full 6 pounds, which several members of the group commented on. This seemed to be a point of some embarrassment for the leader as she looked at us all sheepishly and told us that there had been a mistake (always passive voice “there has been,” never “I made” or “they sent me the wrong information”) and that it was 3 pounds (1.5 kgs), not 3 kgs. Erin and Heather were a little demoralized by this development, but recovered well and we continued to hike up the mountain to pick chestnuts. Oh yeah, the chestnut trees were planted on the steep slopes of a mountain, not in a field. So we got even more exercise! Disclaimer: I will not be held responsible for the havoc that my perfectly sculpted gluteus maximus will cause when you see it after all my cultural and nature excursion-adventures. Seriously, I’ll be akin to a Greek God. The other thing they didn’t quite tell us was what to be prepared for in terms of “picking chestnuts.” A nut is a nut, right? They grow on trees, you pull them off the tree. Right?

WRONG!

So that brown, shiny nut in the center of that sea-urchin-tennis-ball-from-Hell is the Chestnut. The sea-urchin-tennis-ball-from-Hell is exactly as it sounds. Painful as sin and it will draw blood if you so much as graze it with bare or regularly-clothed flesh. You have to peel off that sea-urchin-tennis-ball to get to the chestnuts inside (anywhere from 1 to 3). Then, you have to inspect the nuts themselves (ha) because if there is a hole in it, that means it has maggots and you just lost a finger for nothing. Actually, you are supposed to find the ones that have dropped and are partially opened, then use your feet to pry them apart to get to the nuts (insert joke about Rex Ryan here). I just went around and used a stick to hit partially open ones out of the tree and take the nuts out of those. Not a bad gig, but fairly painful because even after they have fallen, the husks (the sea-urchin-tennis-ball-from-Hell) are sharp enough to go through the sides of shoes (Erin was wearing sandals too, so she was way up proverbial creek). We all managed to wrest as many nuts as we could hold from the vicious Korean Chestnut gods and made our way down the mountain full of pride. As we were leaving, we noticed that there was a giant kiddie-pool-sized tub of chestnuts where everyone could fill up their bags if they had not succeeded in trapping their own wild ones. Yay…

At this point we headed back to those tents from that first shot (far more people hustling and bustling now though) to prepare for our march through the fortress dressed as Baekje warriors! As there were 3 hours until the march started, we were brought to a little mock village across the river for some more cultural experiences and to find dinner. Not much to say about what we did: made some rice cakes, ate dinner, and dressed in “traditional Baekje royal garb.” This photo here is of Heather and Erin all accoutered in said garb.

Heather (l) and Erin (r) in royal garb of the Baekje culture (or so they told us).

At this point, it was 5:10 and we were a little tired (having been up and going since 6:00), but more importantly we had found out that we would not be wearing the warrior garb of the Baekje times. Instead we would be wearing just a jacket. Somewhat disenchanted, we decided to save ourselves the 2.5 hours and catch the 5:45 bus back to Cheongju so we could detox and get ready for school tomorrow. Oof, the break went by already? I don’t get another all year? Aight, I’d say I enjoyed my break and can live with myself. Here’s hoping I can survive the next two days to the weekend and the next week to payday without spending any money I don’t have… Thanks for reading! Hope you liked hearing about my break. As a reward I will give you a rare picture of myself, instigated by and approved by myself:

His Holy Highness, and Emperor of Eminence, Defender of the Realm and Protector of the Downtrodden, The Tiny-Headed Indefatigable Leader of Ineffable Wisdom!

Chuseok Break Part 2

Ok! So you made it to the Tuesday of Chuseok Break a.k.a. Chuseok Break Serial no.2! Congratulations on making it through no.1. If you didn’t read prt1, I understand how much you value this friendship and you can take a giant step back and literally go… back to prt1 and read that. Or if you are the impatient sort, here’s a recap: I spent Friday night doing Karaoke and drunk playing Call of Duty with a coworker of mine (Mason), then did the same thing Saturday, went to a spicy dinner Saturday night with a bunch of us foreign teachers, then Sunday and Monday proceeded to play all the video games with Mason (Halo, Call of Duty, Skyrim, and Dungeon Siege III). In my post I also talked about cheap food, solved global poverty, and explained the meaning of life, but you were too concerned with your 9AM job “start-time” to read it. Thanks. There, now you are all caught up to Tuesday, Oct. 1.

So on this most auspicious of days, Mason and I were forced to deviate from our normal course of action (video games and sexual jokes/solving the worlds’ problems) in order to familiarize ourselves with some Korean history and culture in the form of the Sangdangsanseong (Sangdong Fortress). Joining the dynamic duo of Heather and Erin (2 other coworkers of ours just returned from an exciting weekend in Seoul, we made a midday start to walk around the fortress and get some exercise. Now, to get there we could have walked for roughly 2 hours along the dangerous roads of Cheongju, or take a taxi. We decided that we’d taxi there and if we felt that we could walk back, we would add that to our exercise. Well I hailed a taxi cab (it being the first one we had seen in roughly 5 minutes) and we piled in to start our adventure (like a herd of turtles, as my family would say). The first thing we noticed was that our driver was sitting way leaned back and shifting in his seat a lot. Then we noticed that he wasn’t able to keep his foot on the pedals. Then we realized he had a severe case of something akin to Parkinson’s Disease. I’ll spare you all the gory details of that trip in favor of summing up: we arrived at the fortress safely, but scared out of our minds. Now at the fortress, we wanted to begin our nice 4 km hike to see some beautiful vistas and soak up the ancient Korean wisdom residing in the very stones we walked upon.

The Hike!

We beasts in human form were going to conquer the hell out of this hike: Mason is a rural Canadian, Heather is a volleyball player, Erin is Ms. Makes-all-the-adventures, and I know how to lean on shoulders/convince others to carry me. Seriously, Mason did this hike in flip flops and a beater. Instead of telling you about what we saw, I’ll just show you since a photo is worth 1,000 words (2,000 of mine if you include my tangents and verbal stops).

All hail The Great Welcoming Turtle of Sangdangsanseong!

Our pagoda’d point of path-taking!

Pretty painted picture of pagoda posterior (interior)!

View back to our start point from part way up the trail.

The Cheongju vista.

Look at that little cairn along the path. Funny.

The thumping Three Musketeers.

The 2nd Pagoda’d Gate. And Mason’s right side.

All hail the fire-extinguisher toad!

Happy Dragon says _____!

As we went a-wandering…

Boom. Korean Fortress. Perfect views, strenuous exercise, and fun to do in a small group. Now it was time to head home, but there was nary a taxi in sight. We could try the bus or walk it back. We waited for the bus and found it bursting to the gills. So we decided to hike. Down a mountain. No biggie, there are roads and it was a beautifully sunny day out. Plus, if we got tired we could always just call out to one of the hundreds of thousands of taxis that are always driving around. That was the plan anyways (ha, foreshadowing!). We started down the mountain and began to realize something: no taxis coming up this way. Then we realized something else: any semblance of a sidewalk had disappeared. So Krazy Korean drivers are whizzing by at roughly 60-100km/h (which is somewhere between 100-3000 mp/h for us Americans) and we are walking in the breakdown lane. So we are walking and walking, mildly freaked out by the close proximity of all these high-speed death-machines, when we see a tunnel up ahead. Sorry, no pictures are available to document the horror, you just have to take my word for it. 750 meters of tunnel, times 2 separate tunnels equals roughly the scariest highway walk of your life. Especially when you see tire marks at head level on the side of the tunnel 1/2 way through. We four Americans (“white people,” as I like to call us foreigners) are just strolling along the side of the road for 2 miles getting laughed at the entire time and fairly certain that we are about to get trucked at any moment.

But we made it through (which involved some sprinting across the highway and jumping a jersey barrier to safe sidewalks) and made it back into civilization:

We survived the highway and saw this beautiful sight.

“Such fun! How does one conclude such a fun day, Jon?” you ask in your curious voice. “Well,” I reply good humoredly, “you stop at the store to go grocery shopping and buy the following: 3 dozen eggs, 1 kg of potatoes, 1 kg of pork, some broccoli, orange juice to mix with the vodka that Mason bought, and 3 kg of noodles.” In other words, you acquire the means to eat and drink your pain away (3 KG OF NOODLES! THAT’S 6.6 POUNDS OF NOODLES!). Then you go out to eat dinner with your friends who survived the harrowing ordeal with you anyways because the local version of fish and chips (fried fish and rice) is 4 bucks and no one feels like cooking. Whew. So many activities! So much culture, history, adventure, and productivity! All accomplished while on break, no less. This was only the precursor, too, since Wednesday was meant to be the highlight of the entire break: the Baekje Festival in Gongju. Set up through Adventure Korea, Erin, Heather, and I were set to partake in some chestnut picking, fortress seeing, cultural experience-having, and warrior-dressed-marching fun! Such culture! And pictures to share, some of which even document my existence! Quick! You don’t want to be left behind at part 2, you want to charge to part 3!

Chuseok Break part 1

Sorry that this post is so late. I’ve been a whirling dervish of activity in the past few days and haven’t found the energy when I’ve internet access, or if I have energy then I have no internet access. Aside from the few of you smart enough to figure out that blogging is nothing more than internet-publishing, yes I guess I could have written posts when I had the energy and then posted them when I had internet. However, because I’m a recent graduate, a bit of my procrastination and if-conditions-aren’t-perfect-it-can-wait mentality have overruled those logical thoughts (me not acting logically? Hmm…). Relax, the four of you who are reading this, I still value you enough to tell you all about my glorious times. There will be three parts or so to this Chuseok (pronounced Chew-sock) Break blog serial. So buckle up, and get ready to be appropriately awed by my conquests and incredible adventures (It’s in the freaking title of my blog, so, yeah, I will use it!)!

Chuseok started way back on Friday night. A bunch of us (read: all) were ecstatic to be leaving work and went to go blow off steam in our own fashions or prep for our big trips. Some were headed to Japan, some to far-flung reaches of Korea, and others of us were staying in the local environs (I was staying in Cheongju for the most part). Regardless of where we were headed, many of us chose to partake in some norebang (pronounced: noray-bong. Means: Karaoke) a.k.a. “bongin” and drinks. Getting off work at 11 means when you go, you go for a whiles into the morning. So those of us strong enough, did, and rocked adoring crowds of the-other-coworkers until roughly 4 AM. Kickin! I do feel bad about one of my songs being the last, but it was Scatman John’s: I’m the Scatman. Come on. Pretty awesome. If you don’t know it, treat yourself to 3 and a half minutes of upbeat hilarity.

At this point, I joined one of my coworkers, Mason from Canada, to his place to get some video-gaming on. At 5, his land-lady told us we were being too loud (yeah, ok, old lady. 5 AM is suddenly too early to be shouting BOOM-HEADSHOT over Call of Duty?). I trudged back through the icebox that was Korea at 5AM and went to bed. Wonder of wonders, I slept till roughly 2 PM. Does that sound like me? Does anybody know the last time I slept past noon:30? No one? Didn’t think so… At this point I joined Mason for some fast food for lunch at Lotteria and we went back to gaming for the weekend. We rotated through Skyrim (he played, I watched and made the appropriate oohs and ahs whenever something pretty happened), CoD, Halo, and Dungeon Seige 3. Nothing varied from Saturday to Monday: wake up, get food, go game with Mason, get dinner, game with Mason, go home, repeat (ah, break, you remind me of college!). There was one exception: Saturday night for dinner a group of us went to go get dalkgaobi. It is chicken, thick Rice noodle the size of a cigar, and vegetables in hot paste that you cook yourself at your table and everyone noms all over. I don’t do spicy food very well, so it was: bite, 1/2 glass of water, bite, other 1/2 of glass, refill, bite, 1/2 glass of water, etc. Difficult, but delicious. A fun meal had by all.

Actually, I want to revisit that Lotteria food establishment for a minute so that you all understand. It is like a McDonald’s/other American fast food chains in the same way that Europe is like Africa. It’s close, and there are a lot of people who go from one to the other, but everyone knows there is a difference and hates McDonald’s. And McDonald’s doesn’t technically have edible food, just plastic food-shapes and tears of shame. Lotteria serves things like “Bulgogi” which is Korean BBQ flavored beef, the European Frico Burger (which has a fried cheese patty, a burger patty, red pepper, olives, lettuce, tomato, and I think even more), shrimp burger, fried chicken, mozz stix, ice cream, and more. And each meal is anywhere from 4,500-7,500 Won. That’s roughly $4-7. So for $4 I got a bulgogi with fries and a Pepsi (Pepsi! Not Coke! Justice!). Ah, Korea! It isn’t traditional Korean food, and doesn’t compare to the Dalkgaobi, Mando (dumplings!), or diner food I had over the weekend at other establishments, but it does in a pinch when everything else is closed. And everything is so cheap! Food is cheap! I can sing that from the heavens!

First tale told. So now you are all caught up from Friday to Monday. See the other posts for Tuesday shenanigans and Wednesday shenanigans. Just a teaser: they are cultural! Picture-ful too!