Star, Teacher! Star!

*I wrote this back at the beginning of April, but forgot to post*

Last week my special kindy class (5-7 yos) had a pizza party to celebrate the end of the month. My co-teacher ordered 2 large pizzas (spam, sausage and  corn, oh my), and because of a few absent kids, we had plenty left over. There’s one little boy in my class named Dylan. And when I say he’s little, I mean it. He’s much smaller than the other kids in the class. In fact, he’s much smaller than most 5 yos in general– he’s like the teacup chihuahua of 5 year olds. 

As I passed out the pizza to the kids, I noticed Dylan had already stuffed half his piece in his mouth.  Soon it was all gone, and where the other kids where full after that one piece, he comes up to me and says in his adorable teacup voice, “More, teacher?” So I give him another piece, which he proceeds to shove in his little mouth, then come back up and ask again, “More, teacher?” In my head, I’m thinking 3 pieces of pizza probably isn’t the best bet with his little teacup tummy. But I was so amazed that he was actually able to pack all that away, that I went ahead and handed him another pieces.

Well, 3 pieces of pizza and two little packages of pickles (They come with the pizza. It’s a Korean thing) later, we’re playing one of my mindless games with a set of Nature flashcards, where I hold up a card hidden by the back of another flashcard, slowly revealing the pictures. Whoever guesses the picture first gets a star, and whoever gets the most stars wins. Well, low and behold, Dylan is winning. And this kid literally NEVER wins. He’s completely freaking out with excitement, jumping up and down as I’m revealing the final card, screaming, “WATERFALL TEACHER!!!! WATERFALL!!!” (the right answer), and then before I know it–

bbblllleeehhh 

–he’s puking up massive quantities of half digested spam and corn pizza. Of course Dylan doesn’t even seem phased by the fact that he’s just upchucked all over the classroom floor, and he’s still screaming “WATERFALL!!!” bbbllleeehhhh “WATERFALL!!!”

I shake off the initial shock, drop the cards, scoop him up from by the waist like a very small sack of potatoes and make a mad dash for the bathroom (unfortunately, my slippers did not survive the journey), and as I’m running him to the toilet, he looks up at me and goes “Star, Teacher! Star!”

Life lesson #1, kid: the party’s usually over once somebody pukes.

Every day have a good day

My roommate, Miss Cha, moved out tonight. She told me “Okay bye bye. Every day have a good day.”  Excited to have an apartment to myself (and so is she I’m sure). She was a sweet roommate and, despite her eccentricities, was a sweet person as well… I have the feeling she is saying this exact same thing in korean to someone right now. I will miss her hospitality and helpfulness the next time I’m sick… or want to order take out… or the washing machine breaks… or when summer rolls around and I need to figure out how to use the damn air conditioner (it looks extremely complicated and has been looming in the corner of the living room taunting me with its Hangul button panel all winter).

Anyways, 안녕히 가세요 Miss Cha. I hope every day is a good day for you too.

Don’t worry Britney, your job is safe.

For the last month my school has been preparing for the school festival tomorrow. This is basically like a recital that elementary kids have back in the states… only with traditional drums and dance. For my kids part, they are reciting sentences (I am a lion, I am a tiger, I am a police officer, etc…) and are singing Edelweiss and My Love (no, I didn’t pick the music), and all month my co-teacher has been telling me I’ll be up on stage singing with the kids AND holding a microphone. You should know that I’m just this side of tone def. Seriously. And I’ve been telling her this all month, but every time I do she just waves her hands and says “Easy song. You fine”. Bear in mind she’s never actually heard me sing since it’s always in a small classroom with the kids singing loudly and the music up. So today was the first day we rehearsed in the gymnasium with microphones, and I get up there on stage with the kids, mic in front of my mouth, and warble through Edelweiss. Words cannot express the look of sheer horror on her face as she listened to me. At the end of the song, she marches over, takes the mic from my hands and says “Maybe you just introduce them. No singing”.

Glad we finally see eye to eye.

This, by the way, is also the same co-teacher I had to spend five awkward minutes explaining why “I am a fire fighter. I have a large hose. It’s very hard. I am very proud of it!” isn’t the best thing for a 7yo to recite to a room full of parents.

It’s been a long December…

I’ve never been big on New Year’s resolutions, mostly because I feel this is something we should practice year round, but also because I never actually keep them and usually forget what they were in the first place (seriously, what was my resolution last year? Or the year before? I have no idea). 

But this New Year’s seems different. I’ll be honest– the last few have kinda sucked for me. They both fell on my first day back in AZ after visiting family and friends in Seattle, so I was already massively homesick and depressed over the notion of going back to an empty apartment in a city that I hated, where my life revolved around a job that I hated.

And while there are still some familiar elements this year– I’ve traded seperation from my family in AZ for seperation in South Korea, I’ve traded a crappy manager who made my life miserable in AZ for a crappy boss who may very well make my life miserable here in Incheon– I feel for the first time in years like this coming year holds so much promise. So I felt it neccessary to come up with a couple of resolutions:

1.) To improve as a teacher, and to constantly ask myself what I could be doing better to help these kids learn.

2.) To continuously push myself outside my comfort zone, take a few risks, have a lot of adventures, not let the fear of getting lost stand in my way of exploring, and come home with stories I’ll be telling my friends, family, kids, grandkids, etc. for years to come (I picture myself an old lady sitting in my rocking chair with my grandchildren around me, going “Did I ever tell you about the time I moved to Korea for a year?” Very cheesy and “Titanic”-esque, I know).

What am I doing wrong?

The teacher before me was much younger, much sillier, much louder and much more willing to “be one of the kids” than I am. All that I’ve been hearing from my coteacher and principal since I arrived is how much more I need to “be like her”. They’ve even gone so far as to make a 2 hour compilation DVD of the former teacher in the classroom so I can “study her”. But at the same time, I don’t exactly understand what I’m doing “wrong”. They tell me that I am “too strict” with the kids, then in the same breath tell me that I’m nice and the kids are taking advantage of me. They tell me to make the classes more fun, then say I play too many games and sing too many songs and get the kids too worked up. They tell me not to let the kids speak Korean in the classroom, then sit in there with me and speak korean with the kids. And over and over again, I’m told I need to be louder in the classroom. Tonight I was told I haven’t made as much progress as my predecessor had after a month, but they seem to forget the fact that they also paid to send her to an intensive training course especially for kindy students before she started. I don’t get any training because it’s so expensive. What’s a girl to do? I admit this month has been disorganized and chaotic, but what do you expect when you give me no notes, lesson plans, game ideas, etc.

 

I really have no idea how to please them, and feel like so much of the disatisfaction stems from the fact that I’m not my predeccessor.  And the strange part is, I feel like I’ve made huge improvements in the past month. I’m not an outgoing, energetic person, and have always been fairly laid back. It’s not like I’m a stick in the mud– I play games with the kids, sing songs with them, and they seem to have fun. But I’m not on my hands and knees acting out “Walter Walrus” when it comes time to teach them the letter “W” either. I’m not a loud person– I’m soft-spoken, always have been and always will be. It isn’t timidness, it’s physiology– I just don’t have a loud voice that projects very well. So unless they want to buy me a bullhorn, they’d better get used to it. I’m completely at a loss as to how to please them, and am wondering if it’s even worth it to try? Maybe I should just focus on what teaching style works for me.

The lists begin:

Things I already miss, in no particular order:

1.) A dryer

2) A coffee pot

3.) A shower that consists of more than a nozzle on the wall over the bathroom sink. A bonus if it has reliable hot water and water pressure.

4.) Mexican food

5.) Christmas music and decorations, and having a family get-together (or 2 or 3) to look forward to.

Things I Don’t Miss:

1.) Television

2.) The commercialization of Christmas, which always depresses me this time of year. 

3.) Living in a place where I can speak the native language fluently

4.) U.S. politics and news

5.) Eating so much processed food

6.) Western mattresses (of course, this probably wouldn’t be the case if I had been able to find a mattress pad. But even with the pad, it’s still considerably harder than most of what you find in the states)

Things from Korea I don’t ever want to give up:

1.) Radiant floor heating (hence my love of the Korean mattress, which is thin and low to the ground and always warm and toasty)

2.) The pojangmachas (street food vendors)

3.) The transportation system

4.) The feeling when I wake up every morning that today will be new and exciting and shove me even further out of my comfort zone.

Not shi… shi.

Over a breakfast of boiled sweet potatoes and blue corn on the cob, my roommate and I attempted to swap language lessons. This mostly consisted of her dragging out all of her Korean t-shirts with crazy, non-sensical English written on them– “Happy Rabbit Sunshine!”, or ”Love Me Thanks You!”– and me trying to mime out what they (probably) mean. For example, “Stop Killing Whale” was me making a throat cutting sign with my hand, then saying “Korae aneyo (Korean for “whale no”). She really got a kick out of this.

My lesson did not go so well, and was basically ten minutes of her saying “blah blah blah shi” and then me saying “blah blah blah shi” and then her saying “not shi… shi“.  I’m now trying to decide if taking actual Korean lessons are a good idea or will only add to the stress of living in a foreign country.

Fan Death or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the fan

After spending half an hour trying to figure out why the wall fan in my classroom kept switching off periodically throughout the day, I finally consulated my co-teacher, who informed me it had an automatic timer in order to prevent “fan death”. Yes, that’s right, fan death.  Please, read on, and be sure to scroll all the way down to read S.K.’s official position on this— ahem— issue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death

Call it “The Road Not Taken” Syndrome

There is a pattern that is developing in my life, and I’m starting to worry. I was just thinking today about how nice it is that I only have this job for a year. Not because I dislike it, not because I already want to go home, but because I know me, and I know I get restless when I’m in one place for too long. It was like this when I got my first job after high school, when I went to college, when I moved to Arizona, when I started working at Norton. Eventually the newness wears off, the dissatisfaction creeps back into my life and I start to wonder what else is out there. Then returns this familiar desire to “do something different with my life”. The first time around, that meant college, the second, studying abroad, then came moving out of state. The last time it happened, I quit my job, threw everything I owned in a storage locker, and ended up in Korea.

Right now I look at my future, and I see nothing but the smooth, endless ocean that lay outside my window on the flight here, and I find contentment in the fact that no matter what happens, it will all change in a year, and there’s no knowing what’s next. I suppose therein lies the problem: that “not knowing” part is why I wake up in the morning.

I’ve always had this fear that once the “settling down” starts taking place (job, relationship, etc) then the rest of my future will just come tumbling right after it– career to marriage, marriage to houses, houses to babies, babies to college funds, college funds to retirement plans to second mortgages and all the rest those things that seem to define adulthood today.  

At 27, there is very little about this linear life that appeals to me, but I also keep thinking about this pathetic Swedish woman I once shared a hostel with in Dublin– the one who was broke, single and still backpacking around the world at 45+ years old, wanting to go out drinking with us college kids. How then do you find the fine line between settling down and being free without ending up lonely, poor and unemployable? 

Random photos of Incheon, Il-Shin Market at night.

*I feel like I need a disclaimer to these photos. Such as they are, they don’t really capture the actual feeling of being here; the sound, the smells, the stares, and the continuously unsettling feeling that you can’t read or understand anything. It’s exhilarating, and I think the next year will be a constant push outside my comfort zone… which I have to say, I’m really looking forward to.

Side market in Incheon

 

Downtown Incheon (no, I don’t know what the castle is)

 

Il-Shin Market at night