Nuggets of Life: The Team

It's only trivia, so don't freak out.

I am not good at sports. I may be stating the obvious to anyone who knows me personally or has actually seen what I look like, but I suck at them. I suck big time at physical things that don’t involve a mountain or a pool, I’m like a gorilla if you strap me to skis or skates or a bicycle or any contraption between me and the ground, and unless I’m holding a pencil or a paintbrush, my hand-eye coordination indicates that I may actually be blind. If there was a disorder describing this, rather than simply the colloquial “comically inept,” I would claim to have it.

 

Super Happy Fun Interesting 100th Post Extravaganza!

It’s a banner day here at SUF Headquarters (SUFHQ, by the way, is the dining chair in front of my laptop where I sit in my underwear, watch Mad Men, and type blog posts: titillating insider scoop!). According to my obsessive checking and WordPress’ slavish record-keeping, this is my 100th post at Stupid Ugly Foreigner. Fun has been had. Lessons learned. Tears shed. Weird, writhing things eaten. Alcohol consumed, and in turn, memories poorly reconstructed for the reading public. I graduated teacher’s college, road-tripped across Canada, moved to Korea, travelled around Asia some, did a 4-day dash back to Canada, and met exactly 8-bazillion and three people. Let us celebrate this momentous occasion in true SUF style: through neuroticism, humorous tidbits of life in Korea, and gimmicky photography from my travels! I can feel your excitement radiating through my computer like the warmth of the sun. Let’s go!

 

Nuggets of Pedagogy: Sorry to Interrupt

There is a prevailing notion in my school, one that is pretty inaccurate and a little funny. It is that I am a busy person.

Teaching in Canada, especially homeroom, is harried. You generally look like a headless chicken on your best day, and maybe a little like you are on fire and covered in bees the rest of the time because you are constantly sprinting from one thing to the next, all with a fleet of 20+ children or adolescents in your wake. You need to teach them science and get them to swim class, and also include music somehow in all of their lessons, make a call to child services, rewrite a dozen IEPs, begin logging their grades into the report cards, start setting up interviews with parents, eat lunch, do recess duty, and single-handedly write, produce, and direct the school play, and it has to all be done within twenty seconds ago. As a student teacher, I actually came to dread evenings and weekends. The time I wasn’t actively teaching I was planning on what I would be teaching next.

As an English teacher in Korea, I have free time. Oodles of it. Eons of it. I could do the work given to me twice-over every week and still clock out on time on a daily basis. Teaching the same lessons dozens of times certainly helps, and doing the same subject for this long now has left me a pretty deep well of activities to draw from. Thus I have a lot of downtime (and blogging time, clearly).

Other teachers seem to not be aware of this. When they approach me, they always ask a careful, plaintive, “Are you busy?” I wondered if this was politeness, dropping a phrase they know is a gentle conversation starter in English. But some will ask me in Korean, and genuinely check if I have free time. When I am summoned for some task that will take me far from my desk, they always look pained, as though I will respond with deep, great umbrage at their requests. “I am so sorry to disturb you. I know your work is of the greatest importance,” their eyes seem to say.

I can maybe understand the misinterpretation. Circumstance gives some of my fellow foreign compatriots much more work than I have. And Korean teachers are always busy. When they’re not teaching, the educational bureaucracy is so dense and robust that they basically drown in paper-work for untold hours of their days. But, being unable to adequately interpret most of the paperwork, I am exempt. I am exempt from the meetings. I am exempt from the discussions (including those discussions about English teaching and English planning, but that’s a whole separate kettle of fish).

Thus people approach me gently and ask if I’m busy. As they do, I’ll usually minimize the youtube video, stop typing up blogposts, and join them in whatever it is they want, as I’d already finished my actual work ages ago. I come off looking like I’m accommodating, when really I’m just feckless.

English: Loving the Frankenstein Language

English, you're lucky most of the things I like are in you.

I’ve never really thought about or appreciated the language I was born with. In high school and university, I had a lot of boring, pretentious conversations about different languages, and English was usually filed pretty low in the rankings. French and Spanish were romantic, Indian languages earthy and exotic; Japanese, Korean, Mandarin all alluring and bewildering beyond measure. I liked these other languages because I didn’t speak them, and thus they were somehow more fascinating or special than my own gutter tongue. I would never put work into learning any of them, because that would require effort and forethought and dedication, and all that stuff was for losers. I was to be stuck a unilingual, with the most boring language of all.

Busan Vacation: The Trauma Discount

This year, Buddha’s birthday and Children’s Day, two national Korean holidays, fell on either side of a weekend, and thus most schools threw everyone a bone and gave them one of the sandwich days in between off to stretch into a long weekend. Buffeted by the prospect of a 4-day weekend, I whined to everyone I knew that we should go to Busan, and at the first bite I received, my train and hostel were booked. Soon I was bound for the other side of the country.

Busan Photoglut: The Life Aquatic

So this last weekend was a long one in Korea: Children’s day fell on the Thursday, and Buddha’s Birthday fell on the Tuesday. Most schools threw everyone a bone and gave off one of the sandwich days (really nice schools gave both and bestowed a six day weekend), and thus I saw a stretch of vacation time and effed off to the opposing coast of Korea, to glorious Busan. Busan, land of actual beaches, and wildlife and stuff. Land of fog. Land of sewer-gas. The eagle-eyed amongst you may recognize a nautical theme amongst these photos: as a major port town and possessor of the enormous Jagalchi fish market, water-related photography opportunities were thick on the ground. Behold.

Nuggets of Pedagogy: Remembering

YeonHwa Middle School is directly across the street from YeonHwa Elementary. This means that on a daily basis, I pass by probably a dozen of my former students either entering or leaving their school. I have about the same relationship with them now that I did back when I regularly taught them, in that we breeze past one another and shout “Hello!” very loudly in one another’s faces, as is customary between English teachers and Korean children.

Many of these students liked me, I thought, but not in any realistic way. They liked me in the way they liked recess, or a pleasant-looking water fountain. I was an interesting diversion, rather than a real teacher. Most of them met me partway into their last semester at elementary school, long after they had been taking anything seriously, and thus I tried to make them enjoy the classes rather than asserting my dominance as alpha or drilling grammar into their brains.

The deep, nestled yearnings I have of being a beloved teacher, of being That One That Kids Remember, run pretty strong. I assumed, of course, that if this was going to be true of any of my kids, it would at least be the ones I will teach for a little longer, and thus have more time to come off awesomely towards.

One day, I heard my class doors swing open gently. A ruffling of dense North Face jackets sounded, and a middle-schooler’s head poked around the corner before darting back. There was some discussion, and a lot of muffled 어덯게?ing (“HOW?!”), before I rose and saw them. Two of my former students.

Generally when kids invade the class in the off time it’s for one of the Korean teachers, so I gestured to the office, before one of the girls burrowed into her backpack and produced a large map of the world. “I got this. And I thought… you could use it. For good teaching.” I was so stunned I couldn’t properly inundate the poor kids with thanks, but I talked to them a little bit in Korean before they bustled away.

There are times when I forget that children, especially middle-schoolers (!) are capable of genuine kindness and humanity. Whod’ve thunk.

Being in On the Code

Korean! What could it mean?

When I arrived fresh off the plane in Korea, Korean language was nothing but cipher. Exotic, bewildering cipher. A massive conspiratorial gumbo language spoken by millions, I assumed, while colluding with one another. Koreans had secrets, and I was not in on them. They spoke in whispered hushes with knowing glances, because I, the lumbering whitey, knew not a word of Korean. What were they hiding? Were they discussing the true origins of kimchi? What they really thought about the North? Exactly when and how Super Junior and Big Bang would be mobilized to North America to begin Korean plans for world domination? I wanted nothing more than to understand what was being said around me.

Nuggets of Life: The Life and Times of My Haircut

"Teacher... head is... curly. Why?"

I have never had so many people so deeply invested in the ongoing travails of my hair. As discussed, its texture and whackness were a matter of considerable debate and conversation  amongst the many Koreans in my life, particularly those at my school. It became my calling card feature, other than the whole, you know, being white thing. People also became very, very used to it, thinking of it as a natural part of the landscape.

Ganghwa Photoglut: We Will See Mountain Flowers, And Eat Delicious Food

The title is also the description I was given of our staff club day excursion to nearby Ganghwa island. From this, I did not quite decipher that “see flowers” meant “engage in arduous hike” and thus did not come prepared with adequate footwear or clothing. School let out early, and most of the staff piled onto the bus, and we rushed off to the wilderness across the enormous airport island bridge. The extent of my preparation was carrying my bulky camera and the ziploc full of snackfoods that the staff handed to me upon embarking the bus. I wheedled a Korean teacher into using the English he claimed not to know, and off we went into the wilderness.