6 Months

It has been exactly 6 months since I have woken in this country. 6 months. Wow. I honestly cannot believe it. I hardly remember my first weeks here, they seem so long ago. Yet at the same time I feel so new to my job and my friends (more like family) here. I haven’t done half the things I’ve wanted to do in this country, but half my contract has passed. If you have kept up with the blog, then I see no need to recapitulate everything I have written. Instead I’ll just talk at you a little longer and wax nostalgic.

6 months ago I boarded a plane as a wide-eyed and foolishly (falsely) over-confident lad bound for the Riches of the Orient. Enticed by tales of gold and adventures rarely seen by my peers, I nervously pledged myself to a full year of cheerful service. I must admit, the first half of that year was less than cheerful at times. Yet life is about perseverance and resolve. In my first taste of the real world, I have seen a little more of what life has to offer. Strangely enough, I have come to find that life in the real world isn’t always so upbeat as life was previously back home. I have begun to see that there are so many people in life who shelter each of us from hardship and pain. So many people who provide us with seemingly unceasing fountains of happiness: Friends, Family, Significant others, and Co-workers, all of whom provide a solid presence and comfort through our everyday trials. At home I had those protectors in spades. Now, having flown halfway around the world and presented with the opportunity to forge new bonds of friendship to support me… Well, the task has been immensely rewarding and all colors of fun. I truly am grateful to everyone here who has made my life easier and helped me reach this point in my life. I am happy, I am dedicated to my job, I am content in my current situation.

Looking back, I guess I can classify these past 183 days as a time in my life where I built. I built friendships. I built confidence. I built experience and built upon my skills. I built my life in my own patterns and fashions in my environs. I have built a foundation for the next 6 months. With my comfort, I want to seize every opportunity and strive for more experiences – travel to more cities in Korea and see more culture, really dedicate myself to Korean language instruction, try to bring as much passion and love of learning into my classes as possible (we can make these kids want to learn, I swear it!). So much to do and so much I have to look forward to. I think if I had to sum up the past 6 months of my life in one word it would be “foundation,” but for the next 6 months I want it to be, “immersion.”

Well, I bore you. Apologies. I will go seize the opportunities that life presents and wring every drop of happiness from them – both for myself and my friends. Then I’ll write about them so you can share in this ambrosia. Now! I must prepare myself for a night in Seoul to celebrate!

Sh!t My Kids Say Part 2

So it’s been a while since my last post about the things my kids say in class. I don’t know if my kids aren’t as funny yet in this new semester or if I can’t remember what they say as a result of my Archer-like existence at all hours of the day, but I’m sure there must be a reason.

Publisher’s Note: Jon is never drunk for class and has never ingested alcohol on school premises. (He just wanted to make a meme!)

However, sometimes these kids say funny things.

For example, this semester I’m teaching a fairly low-level LangCon class where the kids know little English and are only 7 or 8 years old. The young beauties in this class number 6: Chad, Kevin, Kyle, Amy, Sophia, and Alice. They prefer to spend more time touching my butt, making random hand gestures, and throwing shoes at each other than they do sitting in their seats to learn English. My favorite thing about these kids is their inability to form sentences. They cannot say, “I want…” or “I have…” or other “I + verb…” sentences. So whenever they need water or bathroom breaks, they just say “Teacher! My bathroom!” or “Teacher, my water!” I can’t tell them to stop, because they don’t understand. Even simple attempts to fix their mistakes (Making them repeat, “I have. To Go. To the bathroom.”) go un-learned because they have the short term memory of a midge-fly. They get to “I have to…” and they forget “bathroom.” I get them to say “Go to the bathroom,” and they forget “I have to…” I guess I’ll just have to listen to “Teacher! My bathroom!” for a while longer yet.

On the other end of the spectrum is my highest level Avalon class – T3. These kids are upper-level middle schoolers who are some of the most fluent in the school. These kids know such vaunted phrases as “pain in the ass,” and delight in making the snarkiest of comments. One of the girls, Sunni (actually it’s “Sunny,” but she yelled at me that she “isn’t like the Effing weather,” the charming lass), was tasked to answer a question about preference between getting a job at a sandwich shop or trying at a job fair. She had 15 seconds to prepare and 45 seconds to answer the question. She started her answer with “I think that going to the Vanity Fair would be better than the sub-sandwich shop. The sub-sandwich shop is not a good job and the Vanity Fair has more potential…” After 45 seconds had finished I just asked her one question: “Sunny, do you know what Vanity Fair is?” She just looked at me, then her eyes widened. “I didn’t answer correctly? What was I supposed to say?”
“Job fair, Sunny, not Vanity Fair.”
“Teacher, what is Vanity Fair?”
“It’s a popular magazine in the United States for fashion and pop culture.”
“Sorry, Teacher, I watched a movie last night.”
Hahaha. Sunny saw a movie, which meant she confused Vanity Fair with a job fair. Not something I thought to ever say from my professional experiences.

My final comments are from my JA class. There is a student in there whose name was “Jelly Pizza.” I say “was” because she changed her name to “Reina.” My first day in that class, she started running her mouth about everything and anything that came into her head “Teacher, I’m hungry. Teacher, do you have a girlfriend? Teacher, do you know Jesse teacher? Teacher! I don’t think so…” and anything else. She is easily has one of the most effervescent personalities I have ever seen and a fairly intelligent mind to support it. At the beginning of class, I always write the students’ names on the board so I can give points for participation. Since it was my first class with them and I didn’t know all of their names, I played a little game with them where I ask them their names and write nonsensical things upon the board. For example, I ask, “What is your name?” “But, Teacher!…” so I write “But Teacher” on the board and everyone laughs. Well, Jelly Pizza’s real name is Jessica, but she did not want to tell me even Jelly Pizza, so she said “Teacher, you are a cucumber-face!”
“I’m a cucumber-face?! You are a carrot-face!”
“No! No! No! No! I am not a cucumber-face! I mean, not a carrot-face!”
So I wrote all of that on the board. MWUHAHAHA! I am victorious! However, what I find the best part about this is her creativity in coming up with an insult of such devastating impact. She is only 11 or so and has such powerful and energetic spirit that she can use English is such a way… it is incredibly refreshing in the midst of the other “dead spacers” in the school (You know, the kids who simply show up and waste the air of everyone in the room because they don’t want to be there).

As you can see, my kids keep me on my toes. I don’t know what it is, but I seem to have found a new source of hope and enjoyment in teaching in these kids. Perhaps it is these crazy things they say, the familiarity I have gained after 6 months here, or the new/relaxed attitude I have towards my classroom management, but I am beginning to find genuine happiness in this job. Hooray for the crazy sh!t my kids say!