Fifth Graders in Amber

Kindergarten: tiny adults in training.

It was a local news story about Halloween safety. Stock footage of adorable tykes marching up and down halls played: Spidermen and fairy princesses and home-made crafty monstrosities constructed by invested parents. Soon we rushed to a classroom where concerned grade ones looked into the camera and handed down safety advice to their peers so that they could enjoy their Halloweens in comfort and without fear. You never know which piece of candy is filled with razorblades and spider eggs, their shining eyes seemed to say.

Suddenly the camera cut to Charlie. Charlie was a kindergartener I had taught two years before – a Chinese immigrant who spoke only Mandarin at home. A respectful tot in the midst of a silent phase, he showed his appreciation for our snack choices, enjoyed Wednesday afternoon baking projects, and loved the water table. He looked into the camera, wizened almost, as though passing down knowledge from generations past, unearthed from ancient tomes in tongues only he could read. “Always make sure your parents check your candy.” He gave a serene, concerned nod. Don’t fear. Charlie knows what you need to do. Charlie has lived some life. He’s been in the shit.

Pre-Summer: The Longest Wait in the World

Things are very nearly settled into their summer gear here at SUF HQ, which, as you may recall, is the dining chair in front of my laptop where I eat ice cream in my underpants. The sun is shining, the air is thicker than oil, and the tropical storms and monsoons have begun to cleanse the roads of puke like some vengeful god drowning away our sins. The day of release from our constraints is nigh, and everyone I interact with is essentially checked out. Children, adults, teachers and students, Korean or foreign: it’s time for summer vacation.

Urination is for the Weak: Incidental Teaching Skills

As a teacher, you develop a lot of useful abilities and habits. You know how to run a room full of children, you know how to scaffold learning, you know how to lead a herd of horses to water and how to cajole them, carefully and fitfully, to drink the damn water.  You gain responsibility, a sense of reciprocity and generativity with the next generation, and a deep investment in the future of society through your work with the tiny people who will make that future. You learn how to seem bigger and more powerful and more mature and more sensible than you really are, and you learn how to be something that is somewhere nebulously between parent, textbook, coach, and judge.

You also pick up a few weird other things along the way.

The Little Ones

For obvious reasons, I can’t share photos of my kindies. Enjoy a stock photo of some little Buddhist figurines!

It was probably one of the most rewarding and exhausting work experiences of my life, running a kindergarten class. It was my first practicum, and I was fresh-faced, desperate for a good recommendation from my teacher and principal–and thus a rabid boot-licker, and just high-energy enough on a regular basis to power space travel. It fell to me to basically keep a room full of children from falling victim to their own selves: from attacking one another or unwittingly ingesting food they were allergic to. Making them regularly get to the bathroom so they didn’t soil themselves. If I wasn’t keeping a close enough eye on them, it was entirely possible that one or more of them would have drowned in the sand box. I was a human petri dish, my pockets were filled to the brim with mucus-encrusted tissues from the kids, and it was my duty to teach them colours and numbers and how to read. And to make sure they didn’t die.

The Suggestion Box

“Michael,” my coworker quavers. She is clutching a notebook in her hands, and she only uses this tone when she is about to say something she knows will upset or infuriate me. She has steeled herself for this conversation, has thought of every permutation. She has maybe practiced it a few times before a mirror, to rehearse. “The teachers had a meeting yesterday with the Vice Principal. About English education. They have some ideas that they want you to do…”

Our New Calendar: Happy Cupcakes and Electricity Chicken Day!

It’s cubesteak and those specially bred Japanese watermelons from here on out.

Bored as I often am by the suggested materials provided in my curriculum, and itching to just let my kids to run wild and free without the constraints of grammar or syntax or cohesion, I decided we should all invent new holidays. As long as they managed to include a date with an ordinal number jammed in it, I wasn’t going to harp on anything else involved, especially especially if they got creative and made something funny or interesting. When is your holiday? What do people eat? What do people do? Confronted with a teacher simply asking them to be weird, they provided. In abundance. Behold, our new calendar of holidays.

The World is Your Safari III: The Endless Journey

World culture: what’s up with that? My students certainly wonder this from time to time, as I storm about the halls, as they see foreign people and lands on their televisions and ponder as to what they might do with themselves. What bizarre, quivering, gelatinous delights they might suck down into their mouths (if they even have mouths, because, I mean, who knows)? What strange, guttural base noises might issue forth from their vocal cords with which they might communicate? What obscene, confusing, alien activities might they engage in for “fun”? Well, gather your sun hat, your SLR, and maybe a can of mace to keep the weirdoes at bay: we’re going on a safari to find out!

Winter Camp: Damn You, Librarian

Let's get all procedural language up in this turkey.

Winter camp is upon me, which means I must go on teaching English, but that I must also toss in enough distraction and entertainment to justify my kids giving up their precious winter vacation time. Camp is very clearly delineated between the kids who signed up willingly (I’ll be generous to myself and say a solid 40%, higher in the third and fourth graders), and those who were signed up by their parents to get them out of the house for a few extra hours.

Storytime in the Nonsense Emporium

There are times in life that make you truly wonder, “How the hell did I get here?” Circumstance or odd occurrences mount, and suddenly you question the very nature of your existence. Lots of things in Korean schools bring me to the precipice of this feeling, but I am often able to subjugate the emotion. However, there are some things which I am expected to teach–things which I must pass on to my charges as though it is not actually bizarre, inarticulate gibberish, with a smile and a flourish and the projected confidence of a native speaker. It is in these times that I move over the edge. In that vein, I bring you, “My Mom’s Story.”

Training

How I spent my first training in Korea.

Those who know me in the real world probably know how I feel about being condescended to — namely, how I really, viscerally hate it more than anything. Being talked down to, especially in a realm where I consider myself moderately competent, makes me mad. It makes me mad in a vicious, do-nothing, petty sort of way, and my mind goes only to sabotage and how to ruin the system. My brain instantly goes on flights of terrible fancy, revenge fantasies against people I don’t even know that turn into Tarantino films, soaked in blood and talky scenes about my petulant rage. I am never more bitter and self-indulgently full of myself and my distaste than when other people are condescending to me.

It is thus that most of the teacher training in Korea is set-up basically to raise my ire.