Chapter 53: "In Which Several Things Are Discussed at Random"

A friend once complimented me on this blog, saying that it was written very well in that each post had a topic, and my entries wasn't really suffering from randomness or blogger ADD (not her words). This will not be one of those posts. If I'd been a good blogger, I would've blogged three or four small entries this past week. Instead, you're going to get a really big one.

Here is an outline of the following content:

I. My poor middle school children
A. What happened last Monday
B. Brief rant on school-obsessed Korean culture
II. Why it's important to count off for spelling
A. Student makes minor spelling error
B. I get pwned by her vindictive classmate
III. My eye gets scratched and infected. Owie.
IV. I do grownup things!!
A. Make a decision about a large purchase
1. What is the quality of the brand?
2. What is my budget?
3. Is it pretty and shiny enough?
B. Make said large purchase with funds earned from teaching the little buggers who fuel the
content of this blog.
V. Exciting plans for the coming week

And here we go!! (I almost don't want to keep going in detail, now that I've outlined it so prettily for you.)

So my last class on Mondays and Thursdays is a class of middle schoolers. It's from 8:20 until 9, everyone is tired, and I personally admit, the class is extremely dull. They take a listening quiz, then we rewind the tape and do dictation and writing. Very little personal interaction, which makes it an easy class, but really boring.

I felt especially bad for them, because they nearly always do my homework, they don't do horribly on the tests, and they're relatively attentive during dictation. We do solid listening and dictation for about 35 minutes, and then the boys who sit on either side of me start to complain with "Teacher, stop." and "I'm sorry, I can't." Their two favorite phrases. So I give them their homework assignment and let them stop. Three of them close their books and bury their heads in their arms for a power nap, and the fourth one did homework from another class. How hardcore is that? I mean, when I was 14-15 years old, I didn't powernap on my breaks, nor did I do extra homework! They've likely been at school or outside classes since 8:30 or 9 in the morning, and chances are they're heading to more lessons after the English is finished at 9:45. More evidence to how there will probably be a rise in Korean youth suicides in a couple years from all this work.

On a funnier note, I was teaching the Class of All Girls yesterday. They were doing an exercise in which they had to read definitions and choose the correct word from a word bank. There were like 18 of them, so it was a little intimidating, but they're the cutest little working machines ever, so I had faith in them :-) About ten or fifteen minutes later, I've got 4 10-year-old girls piling around me, each one trying to get me to check her work first (for some reason it's like a trophy to have the teacher check the workbooks with her coveted pens). I check the littlest one's work, and she's got almost all of them right, except for one, "suffer," which she wrote as "supper." It was a silly mistake, and understandable since Koreans substitute the "f" sound with a "p" sound. I let it slide, till another girl just threw a hissy fit that I circled it instead of marking it wrong. I was a little shocked, since these two aren't enemies or anything. I said that it was okay, it was just a simple mistake, she had the right word in mind. This is what my angry student said:
"TEACHER!!! IT'S WRONG!!! IS APPLE SPELLED A-P-P-L-S?!? NO!!!!!"

Not the most logical response to my excuse, but her singular ability to argue her point in articulate English won. Touché, my emphatic Korean child, touché.

Third, somehow I think I scratched my eye. I went to the doctor today though, and he said it was infected from something, not scratched. Oh well. He gave me four pills to take 3 times a day for two days, two kinds of eye drops, and an ointment. More prescription drugs there than I've had since sophomore year of college.

Despite my grotesquely running red eye, I had a lovely time at Exco today, a large convention-center place full of electronics! One of my Korean coworkers went with me to help me look for a camera, as mine is on the severe fritz. I wanted a Canon, the same as what I have and what another foreign coworker has, but her model was a year old at least, and they didn't have any more for the price that she bought hers for ($230). I didn't want to pay more, but it just wasn't there. And I wasn't about to leave without a camera, not after the trouble I'd caused my poor coworker, making her take me shopping and to the eye doctor and all.

And so I ended up buying a Nikon, which I'm not sure is quite as good a quality, but it sure is spiffy, and I take pretty good care of my electronics. You guys, this camera is SO TINY. Ironic that I said "tiny" in caps. But it's so widdle!! And thin!! Very svelte, and the thing that sold me was the ease of using the various menu options. It's 7.1 megapixels, and it's got a screen that's 2.5 inches. In fact, I think I'm going to look at it right now...It was $250, but they sell them as a package deal with software and hardware, two batteries, a gig memory card, and a case. My cool coworker even told the guy to give me a USB card reader for free :-D

This probably sounds a little spoiled of me, but I haven't ever gotten myself something kind of expensive like this. I always wait for Christmas and ask for a thing like this then. But I needed a camera, and I'm no longer working part-time jobs that only pay enough for food and my credit card bill. I'm feeling very elated also that I don't have any consumer's guilt. I get wicked bad consumer's guilt, y'all ;_;

FINALLY. My mom is coming to visit tomorrow!! As I type this, she's flying along to St. Paul/Minneapolis. I'm not currently either city, but stay with me here. She's catching another flight to Tokyo, and then one more to Busan, where I will be this time tomorrow night, hopefully hailing a cab back to the train station with her, and not wandering around looking for the other foreigner in the airport ;_;

Chapter 52: "Sadly..."

I'm very slightly ashamed to say that I never learned how to play Crazy Eights. My sister and my dad knew, but I never played it. This is sad, I know.

What is even sadder is that I learned how today when my non-fluent Korean kids taught me.

And the most saddening thing: Why couldn't anybody just have told me that it's the same as Uno???


Quote from a student:

Me: "Hey Terry."
Terry: "Yes?"
Me: "Why don't you punch the girls in your class? You're in Tae Kwon Do." (Boy is wearing TKD uniform)
Terry: "I will go to jail."

Profound. Later that day, when I asked him for his homework, he showed it to me and said, "Here is the evidence. I am innocent." What a cute kid :-) And he's only 10!!

Chapter 51: "In Which I Recount One Harrowing Rafting Trip"

This past Saturday and Sunday I went on a rafting trip with some people from my church. It was supposed to be an exciting trip, but little did we know that the drive up would be more exciting than the actual rafting...

We left at 8 o'clock Saturday morning for what was supposed to be a three hour drive north. We had rented a small charter bus-van-thing and we were all in good spirits, chatting and laughing and listening to music and such. About an hour or so into the trip, the driver goes off the highway and starts taking smaller back roads. We were then in the mountains, taking hairpin turns up and down on two-lane roads in a vehicle not built for mountain driving and a driver who was a total n00b. It was inevitable that some of us (including me) were going to start to feel a bit woozy. So one by one we started to move towards the front of the bus to get a better view out the front window. The driver was muttering to himself, and it was soon revealed that he was driving in the wrong direction.

The view was lovely, but the beauty was definitely lost on me and some others, as we were turning rather green. Eventually one of the guys told the bus driver to pull over because he had to puke. The bus driver pulled over to the side a bit, even though it was on a turn and there was no shoulder. This was fine, because in Korea, shoulders are for pansies. The sick guy got out and one of the girls climbed out with him to see that he was okay. It actually turned out to be really good that the guy had to throw up, or else the girl would not have seen that our front tire was on fire.

We fled the bus in much the same way as any foreigner will vacate their flaming Korean mode of mass transportation-- very quickly. This a picture of where we stopped to barf and consequently escape our fiery demise:

This is a picture of our bus:
It turned out that it was actually our brakes that were on fire, because the driver was riding them too hard on the sharp hills. We reluctantly got back on the bus for the rest of the trip. It wasn't long before we heard some protests from the back and realized the heater had overheated and had burned one of the girls on the leg. But we didn't have to pull over for that one.

We backtracked several times, but FINALLY we made it to the rafting place. We ate our lunch, changed, had an uneventful afternoon of rafting (except when one guy fell over in the middle of the rapids), and rather warily took the bus back to our pension, where we were going to spend the night. This is the pension:
And a view of the landscape around the pension:

1. And my homies and I:
   

The pension was immaculate, the food was decent, and the only drawback was that the floors we slept on were heated, and it wasn't cool enough to be sleeping on heated floors. It was quite uncomfortable. But the showers had hot water and good pressure, so it was exponentially better than the pension experience from the mud festival.

We had a lot of fun taking pictures in the pitch dark though. Here's some:
This one isn't really what it looks like, but if you've got an embarrassing picture, show it off!!
Catchin' some air.
On Sunday we went paintballing. I've never been before, nor have I ever aspired to, but I guess I can now cross it off my list of things I don't care if I do before I die. Here's a picture of us in our gnarly uniforms. (I'm on the far left, Mom) I got shot once in the hip, it stung and I have a little baby bruise from it, but it wasn't much drama.
And finally, a lovely picture of us leaping for joy in front of the pension. What a great holiday!!

The trip home was blessedly uneventful. Our driver was a pro, we were on the highway the whole time, and I was sitting backwards and didn't get carsick once! We stopped at one of those awesome rest stops and ate lunch and got back mid-afternoon. The whole trip home was three hours, just as it was meant to be -_-;;

Chapter 50: "TERMinal Illness"

Well, not terminal, considering it'll end one way or another in 3 months. But yes, this is the part of the show where I come out and tell you about my new classes. And they are big, let me tell you.

It's not all bad. I've realized that I will likely be teaching the Class of All Boys (no girl anymore) until I leave. When teach them I feel like I'm president of the funny farm, but I think I'll miss them when I go home. I mean, you kind of form a bond when you teach the same little boys five days a week, for a whole year. Hey, I'm just like a regular teacher!

I have two low-level classes, which may be lovely or terrible; the jury's still out. The lower one is full of adorable little kids, probably about 7 years old. They're cute, but it's a really hard class to teach, because I have to drag out the material to make sure it takes up the full term. The same with the other low-level class, which is a level about that one. I've taught those two books a couple times now, and really, some days it feels like I'm viciously beating a dead horse. Maybe this term I'll make up my own material in addition, just to give the kids something else to do.

I still have that class with those two nasty girls, although one is clearly nastier than the other. I was a little surprised when I walked into the classroom and they all acted so excited to see me...I thought the dislike was mutual. I also managed to get the Other Class of All Girls (and One Boy), which was a happy day for me and them. The bright side to this is that I'm teaching three classes the same material, all in a row. Boring, yes, but the book is a little difficult and full of material, so I'm never hemming and hawing while trying to decide what to do next in class. In fact, the book is so full of material that I don't have to give speaking tests!!! Oh glorious term!!

As with last term, a little rain fell on this term, figuratively and literally. Figuratively, because all the little antichrists are still in the Class of Little Antichrists, and they're ready as always to make me go prematurely gray. Or bald. Literally, because it's been raining almost every day since two Saturdays ago. It is raining as I type this. My laundry has been hanging wet from the humidity since Sunday.

That's about it. I should mention that I think my eyebrows are falling out. Not that anybody will notice, because my eyebrows are thick enough to be little wigs for my eyes ㅠ.ㅠ

Chapter 49: "A Frightening Prospect"

We've discovered something disturbing about our Korean cell phones. When you send a text out, it asks you to confirm the "sending number" which is, of course, yours. Or is it? Yes, my friends, you can actually alter the number so that the person getting the text thinks it is from somebody else.

The possibilities are endless. Just last night, I got a text from my boss saying, "Joanna-Teacher, you're fired. You have until Monday to vacate your smelly apartment."

In other news, I've gotten my new schedule for the next term, and it's looking fairly pleasant. I got the Class of Nice Girls again, and I'm almost positive I have the Other Class of Nice Girls as well, I class that I had the term before last. I also have a lot of classes of older kids who I've already been teaching for two terms. They're not always my most joyous classes, but they are far from the worst, and as they say, better the devil you know than the devil you don't.

I do, however, still have the Class of Little Antichrists, but I think it's just once a week. Gah, I can't stand them. I don't have a roster for my classes, just my schedule, so nobody knows which kids are in what class. It could be that all of the bad kids have been kicked out, in which case, huzzah! OR it could be that they've all been collected into one group which I have to teach, in which case, *headdesk*.

The boy with the excuses (see previous entry) has left, so while that particular class will be exponentially more peaceful, I will truly miss him. He was quite the comedian.

I'll update again in a few days with a better report on all of my new classes. This is the last full term I'll have before leaving! I've been here for almost seven months, can you believe it?