A long time comming vol. 1

It has been a while, my first goal was one post a month and as I have made new friends and gotten busier at work and finding time to write these or even emails has gotten very difficult. Well, getting motivated to write has gotten harder. This is a general theme post and I feel my initial pains and culture shock have left. I still chicken out pretty often, but that is because I don’t like too much attention and never have so I’m not sure that will change too much. I have got ordering food down though. My everyday life is getting better and better. I finally got a bank account and a phone. I will send an email with that information (phone number not bank account). The best part about my phone is that I got to pick my last four numbers. My number is 010-####-SETH. Korean phones are really nice and way nicer than my phone back home, which was pretty nice.

I have a lot to write and some very funny stories to tell. Most of them involve being mean to little kids. Just know that most of these things… actually all of these thing made me laugh at the time and some things like our Halloween party, or a kindergarten teacher getting mad at a kid and telling him that his birthday is cancelled still pop into my mind and make me laugh now. This is not intended to sound too mean or irreverent about teaching little kids.

The only real professional experience I have had with kids under the age of 14 is with kids with autism. Kids with autism were very fun and just completely a different experience than “typical” kids. I have learned a lot about little kids in general here. First they are wild and sweaty. I walk into class after break and the boys all have hair like they have been playing in the sprinkler. I used to wonder what the hell they were doing; now I know they are just sweaty little kids. Also they cannot be reasoned with. I tried so hard to do the good teacher thing and relate to the students and explain why I needed them to stop licking their neighbor’s hand or something weird. Now I just say “Lets talk about the class rules again.” Or… I learned they are easy to trick. I have mentioned to some of you my reward system. I kind of got this idea from Trevor’s mom. Her class earns paper clips and they eventually earn enough to have a party. When my kids are good they earn seconds. I laugh writing this. They earn seconds. They build them up all week and they can use them on Friday as free-time. Just so you have an idea, I have one class that has been saving them for two weeks has saved 140 seconds for tomorrow, God bless them. I have been doing this for SIX WEEKS! It works, I cannot believe it but it works. They will go through their minute of free time or whatever and say, “Ahhh, teacher, very short.” But come Monday they want those seconds again. I had one girl catch on and I told her she did not have to have free time with the rest of the class if she did not want it and she fell back into the trap.

Little girls are so much easier than boys. Classes with more boys than girls are way harder. All the girls are drawing puppies and color-coding their stickers and hearts. They all have one thing that they love that is a little weird like cows or squirrels. They love princesses and never fight with each other. I know from being around teenagers that changes. Oh dose that change. Little boys are so funny and unstoppable. They make you crazy and make you laugh hard. No one punctuates this more than Eric Choi the first grader. He is actually kind of quiet but he is like a hilarious little Bond villain. Other teachers ask me to stop Eric from talking to their kids. He has got my whole class calling the librarian bad guy. The librarian will walk past my door and even if like three kids see him, they all yell and point “Bad guy!” and Eric holds up one finger and in his husky voice, quietly says “In the world.” Your right, it makes no since. But the kids love it. Now other classes call each other “Bad guy in the world.” English teachers try to correct them, “No, it’s worst guy in the world.” Some how Eric has more pull than we do. We do plays and Eric will have one line. He needs to say, “thank you Jacob,” but I know beforehand when it is his turn he will say, “no thank you bad guy.” He addresses and signs his letters “Dear bad guy” and “Love, bad guy.” I love the fact that he uses the term Love at the end. He misses all the questions on his quizzes on purpose and the class will see his score and shout, “Eric Choi!” then he grabs his chin and does a really funny evil laugh, heh, heh, heh, heh His parents don’t care and I love him so he never gets in real trouble. Obviously this wouldn’t fly in an American school but I am at a private school and I am not even allowed to send kids out of class during class time because their parents are paying customers. (I should clarify that we don't give formal grades, so it is amazing that anything gets done. There are different level classes that are determind by test scores and reading level. The higher the scores the higher level of class. For example, we have 8 first grade classes all determind by the level of the students. We test every month and level kids up and down every six months, we don't actually level down, just threaten). Usually there is so much pressure from parents that the kids are afraid to mess up at all so it is a relief to see a boy like Eric who knows how to be a boy.

I say that because there is a big difference between Korean boys and American. I hate to say it but Korean boys are sissy. They cry way too much and tattletale and whine like crazy. Boys and girls both do this. It is unbelievable; I know they talk to their parents like this because I hear them out about doing it. I can only imagine what my dad would have done if he saw me going, Mooo-ooooo-oooom! and stomping my feet. They really seem to be spoiled from a western standpoint. However it really is cultural. It is much more important to be good at school than cool here. Which is better, I guess. So telling on your friend every chance you get makes since. Being called a Tattletale (usually by me) does not carry nearly the same weight as back home. To us the language in general sounds whinny and to be honest whining isn’t as bad here. So many kids whine. Kids hear are pretty chubby and restless, think some of that goes with the fact I teach at an elementary school until 8:30 p.m. Kids hear aren’t out playing like back home. In English alone kids are expected in general to have about four pages of homework a night, 1st to 5th grade. Eric turned in 2 assignments last month. But usually kids turn in most their homework. They do most of it on the weekends I guess. I teach about 4-8 different subjects a day depending on the class and have to assign all homework a week in advance. It is a lot to keep track of, but I have a system and my lessons are planned for me for the most part.

I am allowed to be much more physical with the kids here. Back home I would just high five and the occasional hug coaching. Here I grab a kid and pick him up and run off down the hall with them during a break and all the other kids will chase me screaming. Walking from class to class teachers usually have three or four kids hanging off them. One teacher sits right by the door in the office and will open it up, jump out and grab a kid, pull them into the office and shut the door. It is really fun.

This kind of atmosphere that is at our school allowed us to have the kind of haunted house that we had on Halloween. Halloween was a fun day. The kids all dressed up. The girls were all in homemade Disney princesses or witch costumes and super cute. The boys were super heroes or Harry Potter, but a little off. There were wizards with guns shooting spider man who was blocking the bullets with his sword and shield. They gathered in the library to watch a movie and face painting. Then we would send about 10 kids at a time to the haunted house up stairs… they had to walk down a long dark hallway to the door. We had scary sounds playing and some Korean teachers where in the back of the haunted house banging their shoes on a table and screaming and when the kids got close to the door I would start banging it open and closed. They would crawl into the haunted house and it was totally back and they had a maze to crawl through. The maze was mostly made up of little cubical dividers covered in black sheets. There were cobwebs with a few dim floor lamps. There were teachers with scary masks and face panted strategically placed to jump out and scare the kids. An example was one teacher was playing dead and laid very still. When a student would come close she still wouldn’t move. She would let kids almost touch her before she would open her eyes and grab them. The worst/ best part was what we started to call the gauntlet. We had one part of the maze where the kids were crawling under a table in a pitch-black tunnel. There was a teacher lying on top of the table with his shoulders and chest hanging over the tip of the table. So he would allow the kids to crawl right underneath him before he would turn on his flashlight, and start screaming. His face was painted to look like he was bleeding out of his eyes and mouth. To get a way the kids would have to go under another table positioned right next to it with another teacher who was in the same position except he was facing the students and they had to crawl underneath him to get away. What would usually happen is they would freak out in between the two and just scream and hug each other in little princess wizard balls. So the teachers were yelling the students are yelling, shoes are banging I’m slamming the door and kids in the hallway start to not want to come in. Then a teacher dressed like a ghost in all back with a white mask and her long black hair hanging over the mask would run out into the hallway grab kids and drag them in. Our librarian, the “Bad Guy in the World,” lived up to his reputation and brought a big super soaker style water gun and was shooting kids in the face as they were going through. It was a crying, screaming, wet mess. I am guessing we scared over half the kids stiff and they sat and screamed until we pushed them through and we made roughly thirty kids cry. The “bad guy” was sure to take pictures of all the crying kids too. The real kicker that makes me look back in amazement is one girl was in between the two monsters frozen and screaming. She got so scared that she threw up. It was the saddest thing. We all deal with things differently and I can’t help to laugh. It is like dumb and dumber when Jeff Daniels pelts that girl in the face with a snowball. You are like “Oh my gosh,” but you are laughing. Our parents complain all the time, if a kid does not win a game of hangman moms call and complain (not really). I cannot believe they do this every year.

I stay very busy at work. We do report cards every month, and grading all the work the kids do. I was able to set up pin-pals for our students with some students in the states and I think my workload is fixing to grow as those come. Some times it is confining teaching because my lessons are all pretty much planned I’ve always liked that part of teaching. Now, it would be real easy to just show up give work and not invest my self at all. Especially since I feel guilty every time I tell a 9 year old who has been sits in a desk 8 hours of the day to go back to his seat. But to be honest I do not know the system real well and I don’t know what the other schools and academies are like, I don’t know what their family life is like and a lot is lost in translation. I do know that Korea has the largest teen suicide rate in the world and giving out all the work I do makes me uneasy. I had a 3rd grader terrified to take a vocab test a few weeks ago and I eventually heard that her mom was going to hit her if she missed one question. Hit may mean anything but she was nervous to say the least. There is no social services here or anything to document something like that. We make the tests hard and everyone misses a few. I did my best to give her all the answers through clues and hints. The society here in general puts a lot of pressure on everyone from the adults to the children. Trevor and I talked about it and he has a great goal that I have adopted. First, I can be as effective as I can be teaching English as that is my job but the kids need to learn it is okay to make a mistake, especially here, where everyone is expected to be the superior person. I had a class today that was not answering any questions from the book because they openly said they did not want to get it wrong. I finally had started answering all the questions myself, except I was answering them all wrong. Just to show it was okay, finally I had a kid raise his hand and say "I'll give one a try." That ranks up there as one of my favorite teaching moments. I was finally thinking I am doing a good job over here. I have a lot more to tell that is not so self-righteous, but this is probably getting a bit more of a commitment to read than you expected so I will give a volume II soon.