Chapter 38: "The Foreign Sasquatches"

This weekend I was in Busan with some friends, and Saturday night we were all chatting it up in a restaurant down by the beach. Of course, one of the favorite (and funniest) subjects came up eventually....our strange students. When I first arrived and was shadowing the teacher I was replacing, I remember seeing that the little kids had a complete fascination with his bushy arm hair, and I had to ask the guys at the table if they had the same problem of kids trying to pull it. Loosely quoted from one of the guys:

"No, they don't pull it, but they'll come and try to pet me. Like, I'll be in the middle of teaching class and I'll feel this little hand touching my arm, and I look over and there's some little kid stroking me."

Most fortunately I don't have bushy arm hair, and thus do not have this problem. Nor do I have the problem of little boys trying to stick their fingers up my butt (the "kancho" for anyone who's familiar with the Japanese counterpart). Guy teachers commonly deal with this though, and I am thankful every day that I am a woman and my biggest problem of that nature is getting a boob high-five.

Chapter 37: "Korean Class...THE MOVIE"

And now, what none of you have been waiting for......:



Me candidly filming the all-boy class, from about a month ago. This is what I do.....all day....five days a week.....

Chapter 36: "Loss of the Street Cred"

My reputation as an actual adult took a severe blow this evening as two of my students witnessed me doing the Happy Dance™ with a bag of potato chips in the teacher's room on one of the security monitors. Ah well. At least I wasn't picking my nose or smelling my pits.

We followed this incident with a lesson in how to abuse the pronunciation of common English letters and words. The Koreans, much like the Japanese (more famous), tend towards some very grievous pronunciation errors, especially when using the sounds of b, v, f, l, and r. They also add extra syllables in words for no apparent reason. They add "-u" (oo) and "-e" (ee) most frequently. One of my students was kind enough to correct my pronunciation, to make it more Korean. He helped me in particular to butcher the letter "v" which in Korean-accent, is pronounced "buwee."

Don't ask me how they can tell what the letter "b" is, because I just don't even know.

Anyways, I learned how to say "messagee" (message) and "telepon" (telephone) and my students told me to go practice at home. It was pretty much the funniest thing ever, because they won't speak English to me otherwise -_-

Chapter 35: "It's Getting Hot in Here..."

Ok, I just have to say that I'm really angry with myself.

To take a hot shower, I have to adjust a thermostat on my wall to "hot water" or whatever it is in Korean, and take my shower. Simple. The hard part is remembering to turn it off when I'm done. Because I can't figure out the timer on the thing, and the thermostat switches over to regular heating after about an hour or so.

I cannot tell you how many times a month I take a shower before work or going out, forget to switch the heater off, and come back to a stifling room who knows how many hours later. This is not the weather for the heater. GAAAHHH!!! *stomps over to aircon to switch it on*

Chapter 34: "It's so prettyyyy....I want to touch it!"

So, I take a water bottle to every class. It's kind of my comfort object, and also enables me to drink four or five bottles a day without really paying attention. Sometimes I bring juice, but usually just water. Anyways, I do believe now that there is nothing a Korean child desires more than my water bottle.

If you are sitting next to Joanna-Teacher, you will feel an uncontrollable urge to take her bottle from her when she's not paying attention. If it's cold, you'll put it on your neck or on your head or down your shirt. You'll pretend that you're going to drink it, just to freak Teacher out. You'll beg and beg for a drink of hers instead of going to the water cooler yourself. If you are younger, you will even put the cap end in your mouth, and gnaw absently on it while doing listening exercises, until Teacher sees what you are doing and takes it away again. If you are older, you should know what the younger ones have been doing to the water bottle and not touch it at all.

All in all, my water bottle gets handled and sucked on by about twenty different kids during the day. It's no wonder I get sick. On the bright side, my immunity is probably so high now that I'll never have a cold again.

PS. You might pause to wonder why Korean kids think it's perfectly normal to ask for a drink right out of someone's personal water bottle. People are sanitary here, but at the park yesterday I saw an old grandmother sharing an ice cream bar with a little toddler. She bit into the bar, made a yukky face, took the bite out of her mouth, and put it into the kid's mouth. So that might be what it comes from.

Chapter 33: "Class Change! The REPORT."

And my first Monday with the new schedule is OVAH!! This means I've met pretty much all my students. It went thusly:

First class was the class of all boys (no more girl) that I had last term. This class includes the Smart Kid and Child Abuse Boy. They're just as insane as always. Today we were reviewing the months, and I was having each of them say the months backwards, just because they can. They were doing it, but as they are all little 8-yr-old boys, they must do it at the top of their lungs. We were having fun, but the head teacher came in anyways and told them to be quiet. She looked a bit shocked at what was going on. I control the class pretty well, I think, but like I said, they're insane.

Next was a new class that I have MWF. They seem pretty obedient, but not so quiet. They're maybe 9 or 10 years old, and their level, while lower than the first class, isn't bad for their age. But they have this cute talent. They can pinch their noses shut (maybe this is just something Asians can do) and suck in really sharply, so their nose stays pinched shut. Then they cross their eyes and flap their hands. They look like some weird sort of bird, it's hilarious.

Next was another new MWF class. I know a few of these kids from my very first term, and they're nice. There is one girl who said hi to me every time she saw me in the halls, so it's easy to remember her. I also have Mute Girl, who cried in my class on my very first day of teaching (wasn't my fault). There's one boy who cracks me up in there. His antics. I'll be writing a lot about them I think, because he's such a goofball.

After that (sorry, this is my long day) I had another new class, which, when everyone is in attendance, will have like 9 or 10 kids. Oh my gosh. That is a lot of little buggers to handle. They behave pretty well. I guess they are also 10-11 years old. All the boys wanted to do name-changes too. One boy wanted to name himself Plevin (rhyming with another boy's name-change to Kevin). I tried to tell him that Plevin is not a name. But he could've been saying "plumbing" for all I know. Their accents are quite thick.

Next was the class I loathe the most, because of those irritating 12/13-yr-old girls who insist on speaking Korean in class, no matter what I do, and laugh at me and talk about me in Korean openly. Brings me right back to junior high, except now I can't even understand what they're saying. So, when I heard that the entire class, except one new girl, was on a camping trip, I nearly cried. It was the best day of my life.

The next class was one I had last term, but with some new girls that I already knew from a different class from last term. It's five girls now, all of them as sweet and nice as they can be. Btw, one of them was the girl who threw up in class, but now that I know her and she speaks up more (and is not ill), I can't bear to dub her with a nickname that pertains to barf -_- The one drawback to this class is that they all want to be my friend and not study, so they're harder to control. I'd rather just babysit them and not teach. They're the type to swarm me and braid my hair. There's no way I'll be putting any of them out in the hall this term ;_;

The final two classes are those poor junior high classes that I teach from 8:20 till 9:45. And that's late, my friends. They're so subdued, it's not like it's hard to keep them in line. But I feel like I have to do a Three Stooges routine to get any sort of reaction out of them. Granted, it is extremely boring material. However, one funny thing did happen in the last class. We had a word test, and they boys' grades were baaaad. So I told them to copy all their mistakes five times. One boy didn't want to, he only wanted to copy them 3 times (wouldn't you, if you had fifteen words to copy?). We haggled for a bit, but he wouldn't go up. And since the kids really have no incentive to do any homework at all, I can't exactly say, "Do your homework or else." So we did what all great and powerful leaders and dictators do to come to decisions of grave importance. We played rock-paper-scissors. He won.