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 ;_;