Wow, my life pretty much since I arrived a little more than more than a month ago has not slowed down in the least! In fact my work schedule only seems to be getting more engrossing (next week I teach the after school program- an additional eight hours a week). I'm at my main school (Dogo Middle School- just learned the Korean word for middle school today incidentally) that I teach at Monday-Thursday from 8 am- 4:50 pm and with a few exceptions I'm able to get off a little earlier. Leave it to me to leave the States to essentially get a full time job! Oh and teaching even four days a week is a full time job for all you skeptics out there- when I'm not at school and I'm in/around my apartment I'm usually doing one of these things: Making lesson plans which I'm still learning how to do; cooking one of four dishes that I make that doesn't taste all that great but more importantly are healthy (I make real easy stuff like brown rice with eggs/tuna/chicken and the classic bread and peanut butter aka a peanut butter sandwich; cleaning my apartment because I think cockroaches are attracted to dirt or food or water or all of the above. (Btw, I really hate cockroaches of all the various kinds of insects I find in my apartment- maybe it's because they're the most plentiful and not the plentiful in a good way like, 'Thanksgiving dinner was plentiful'. I'm not all that scared of them like spiders or clowns but I really fuckin hate them because I seem to find at least one every damn day. Sometimes I'm like, "come on, really? How'd you get inside the draw and why were you chillin in there dude!? There's no food/water in there! You little friend have to look in the fridge where I keep all the food that I open now. Now I have to kill you not because I don't like you but because if I don't there maybe more of your annoying buddies hanging around my place". When I'm not cleaning/killing cockroaches/eating/lesson planning/exercising (I go to the nearby university to do this which is by far the worst gym I've ever been, save my eight grade middle school gym that I worked out in p.e. as I went through puberty), I'm writing emails/facebook/news for the five minutes that I have before I go to bed. Friday thankfully, is my mercy day which I teach two 40 minute classes at Sinchang Elementary school. My first day teaching elementary was last week btw, and it was awesome! Some of my middle schoolers have that adorableness still in them but it's really funny seeing a class full of munchkins. The main teacher is in the room with me when I 'teach' (more like sing songs and get to make a complete fool out of myself for 40 minutes) in case they have too much chocolate or something. My experience here is that the students in general (both middle and elementary) are incredibly more well behaved than in the States. Could it be because this is my first time teaching or maybe it's because they hit the students with long sticks (it really is not as bad as it sounds- most deserve it though) or make them squat on top of their desk/stand in some awkward position for a couple minutes when they misbehave? Either way, compared to insolent Americans, Koreans are pretty good. The first day was an introduction about myself which I'm sure very few understood. Then I had them make name tags which proved to be the most difficult tasks on the face of the earth (for my second class)! For the first thirty minutes they wrote their Korean name translated in English which I try to have the students break away from just because I simply can't pronounce their names correctly. For instance, saying Kim Hye Rye sounds a good deal different in Korean. I first realized that I should not pronounce names when talking or trying to have a common interest conversation with fellow teachers about the Major League Baseball pitcher Chan ho Park. His last name in particular sounds more like Pak (say it real fast) than Park. Anyway, I ended up finding a list of English names that the students could choose from and G-d willing, this Friday they will have their new English name tags provided they didn't lose them/eat them.
Instead of starting a new blog page I've decided to just start a new paragraph. So it's been nearly a week since I wrote what you've just read above. My insect of the week: gnats (small flies for my esl international readers, welcome). Yep, I'm pretty stoked about the new company as you probably are. Despite all my food (including fruit!) being in the fridge I now have gnats. Back to important human activities. This week I've started teaching the after-school program four days a week at Dogo Middle School. I teach 7th and 8th periods which start at 3:30 and end at 5:10. Afterwards I'm thoroughly tired as I'm sure the student's brains simply cannot retain any more information. At my school they have 9 periods by the way. You're probably like, they have nine fuckin classes (hopefully my swearing doesn't become a habit because I think loose swearing like in Joe Pesci movies kind of degrades the conversation/discourse; kind of like seeing Cindy Crawford in Playboy you know, it takes away from what's left to the imagination or what hasn't been said/seen)!!? Anyway, that was a a long digression (my ADD/lack of sleep kicking in) but yes, my school has 9 classes and that's not even that much from what I hear. From my understandings or more likely misunderstandings of Korea is that students go to school like a normal school day and then afterwards they go to 'hogwon' or private learning academies and repeat every class during their normal school day. The Korean educational system you might say is like the British health care system with both governmental and private components. Point being here is that Korean students go to school as much as any students in the world. A high school student for instance, starts his class-day around 7 or 8 and gets done around 12 pm (I kid you not). My co-teacher even told me that Saint Obama said in a news conference/sermon that he wishes Americans should go to school as much as Koreans did. I'm not sure if I agree- there's only so much information the brain can take until it goes on screen saver mode. The Koreans whom I've met that are around the same age seem educated, probably a little more than me (in hindsight, I may have smoked too much pot over the years), but aside from speaking another language which they're forced to learn since grade school, they don't appear other worldly like the Chinese I've met do. I should mention however, that Korea ranks number two and three respectively (why do we put that word? I'm going to start replacing it with, 'irrespectively' or 'not undeservedly' or something because it sounds artificially academic like using the word 'normative'- another bombastic word to prove that you went to school) in science and math which I guess is an achievement despite the fact that all of the best brains in the world still go to American universities (see list of top world universities or walk around UCLA south campus (where science/engineering/math departments are located) and just listen to how much English you hear if you beg to differ). Thank goodness America still attracts the best and brightest by the way, because when this stops America will be like a one legged man trying to run a mile; it might be fun to watch but after a while you'll get bored and watch the 5' 2'' Chinese runner with two good legs.
One last story I thought of mentioning while doing laundry- By doing laundry I mean pressing many buttons simultaneously until my clothes get clean. The clothes get way cleaner, I should point out, when you're not using fabric softener as detergent. So last Friday I went to the bank because it was payday last week and I wanted to reap what I had sowed, not in harvest but in Won! Yeepee! I went to the bank with my bank book- I literally have a small book that I use as my debit card (they have debit cards too but my employment organization did not provide me with one for some odd reason?) and just like a debit card they have machines (it's usually the same machine as the debit card one) in which you can put the small book in to withdraw money. So I did and saw they had an English button you can press and I pressed and did everything the machine commanded me to do. As you might guess the machine spit out my bank book repeatedly like a baby spitting out food. I then proceeded inside to ask one of the tellers for help. With a polite yet befuddled smile I asked the teller if she spoke English. Of course she didn't and I went through the body language of not being able to get money from the machine. Naturally she understood immediately and walked over to the ATM to help show me how to use it. As things would have it, with all her help my dreaded bank book still was getting rejected like a crumbled one dollar bill (I'm big into the similes right now as you can tell). This didn't perturb me because I had come with my travelers cheques that are good in over 191 countries around the world as a backup. I walk back over the counter and pull out the cheques and sure enough, that bank didn't exchange travelers cheques. I then walked outside and just stood outside staring into empty space- I saw an old lady examine me as she passed by. I must have stood there for about a good five minutes before I walked back into the bank to try the ATM one more time (no luck). I ended up being able to exchange my travelers cheques at another bank later that day but this story is a perfect illustration of how my day(s) sometimes goes around here. You might think I get depressed but I don't, I just smile and breath and everything seems to work its way out, eventually. I still can't withdraw money out of the ATM but who knows, maybe next week I will! :)
Thank you for reading and taking an interesting in my awkwardly pedestrian life. Annyonghi jumushipsiyo (Good night).
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