Teaching, Week 3 - Snaking Charts, Rattling Cubes (Year 3, Day 17)

English is a confusing language, and it is made more so by things like this:

English is not a language of function. It is a language of propriety and style, of set forms and powerful patterns. I haven't even touched on the secret codes waiters and chefs use between themselves.

Korean? Now there's a language of function. In Korean, this exact same chart would translate to

Customer: Give me one kimchi jjigae.

Waiter: One kimchi jjigae?

Customer: Yes.

Waiter (to chef): One kimchi jjigae.

Chef: One kimchi jjigae?

Waiter: Yes.

Beauty in simplicity. That was not dumbed down in anyway. That is exactly how it happens.

We Americans speak in a code that defies comprehension when we perform such menial tasks as ordering food. It gets to the point that a foreigner visiting America is actually scared away from from frequenting restaurants at all.

One of the biology teachers at this school once attended a summer seminar at Michigan State University. He tried ordering a burger at a fast food joint. He never stepped foot in a restaurant again for his entire month's stay. Instead, he subsided on bread and milk in his dormitory room.

"Jeremy, what did they say to me that day?" was his haunted inquiry. "Well, my friend, that depends on if you were ordering breakfast or lunch..."

Thus the flow chart that took an entire 50 minutes to explain.

* * *

Boggled

Students exhausted by study sit before my eyes. Partially my fault, I, ashamed, admit. Writing is too hard because "Teacher, I am boring!" (He means bored, of course, but comprehension and thus communication accomplished, I am loathe to correct his agonized plea.) A game we shall play! I announce today. A cube I shake to their Whoops! and Hurrays!

Students rattle the cube, stare through the plastic dome, and distinguish letters faded through poor manufacture and subsequent misuse, yet functional. They ditinguish letters, then words, then points, then penalties, then another round, and so on. Their minds have been set free for a brief half-hour. It is enough despite this. Recharged, stretched in a different way of viewing the world (or at least the words), I escape to my hovel. They retrieve books from lockers. We smile, breathe before returning to work, fully boggled.

The Legend of Bokbunja, a Korean Raspberry Wine (Year 3, Day 15)

This, my friends, is bokbunja (복분자), a Korean wine made from raspberries. Although it is sweet, to me it tastes a little like cough syrup. Still, it's better than the usual local swill by far and can be found for no great cost at most moderately priced restaurants here.

As the entry for bokbunja on Wikipedia will tell you, the drink is supposed to promote both health and male sexual stamina. Now, in Korea, many things are supposed to do this, and men are especially interested in increasing their stamina, or at least in telling me that a particular food we are eating at the time will accomplish this for us. (For the record, I've only eaten two of those three linked foods.)

Whenever a Korean man tells me that something or rather is supposed to have the same effect as chomping on little blue pills, I usually put on a confiding grin and say, "Oh, really? And why is that?" The usual response is, "I don't know. People just say that."

Not so when my adult English class and I partook of bokbunja over a meal of raw fish and tempura. With bokbunja, I got a story.

But before I tell the story, it is important to know what bok, bun, and ja mean. All three are hanja, or borrowed Chinese characters. The first is 복 (覆) and can be roughly translated as "flip"; the second, 분 (盆) as "pot"; and the third, 자 (子) as "person".

And now the story.

A long time ago, a farmer was picking raspberries, and, deciding that they'd make a pretty tasty brew, proceeded to make a lovely liquor out of them. He had his fill of the delightfully delectable drink that night and promptly passed out. Having neglected to relieve himself before setting himself to repose and having slept quite soundly the night through, he of course had to release the pressure, so to speak, upon waking up the next morning. So, he dragged himself over to the chamber pot and relieved his aching bladder. The stream had such great power that the pot flipped over, needlessly fertilizing the ondol floor of his thatched roof hut, but inspiring him to christen the cause of his new found male virility, bokbunja, or, roughly translated, "It'll make a man flip his pot!"

To me, this would seem to speak more to the beverage's powers as a diuretic than its qualities for enhancing "male stamina".

When It Rains... (Year 3, Day 12)

This being my third year, weekend routine is somewhat... routine. This has not always been the case. After all, in just a couple of weeks during the first year, I was lobotomized, walked up a near-vertical cliff face, and spent an entire day being chauffeured around by a friend of a friend, that friend having just met her friend on the bus the night before. Year One was a positive adventure weekend to weekend with my weeks seeming like a relative vacation for all their routine mundaneness, what with their 20-hour work weeks of predictable schedules. (Who am I kidding? Those had their moments of insanity as well.)

Well, as I said, the third year is more routine. I have my clique that I like to spend time with, and I rarely make trips out of Pohang anymore, both because of expense and because I've already seen and experienced so much. Here's a fairly typical weekend for me now:

Friday Night - Play board games, watch movies, talk at my friends' apartment.
Saturday Morning - Go to sleep around 2 A.M. Wake up in time for Ultimate Frisbee at 11 AM.
Saturday Afternoon to Evening - Continue playing games and generalizing socializing at the same apartment. Go to bed much earlier both because I am tired by then and because ...
Sunday Morning - Go to church.
Sunday Afternoon - Relax. This means drinking a pot of coffee, playing basketball with my boys, reading a book on East Asian history (to each his own...), or--but most likely and--playing guitar.

I sleep in the same bed, I eat in the same cafeteria, and I do everything at roughly the same time.

Occasionally though, I get blindsided. That's what happened this weekend.

Initially, I had no plans whatsoever. I did have the intention of seeing a friend in Daejeon, but when I called her, she said that she had plans to help out with an orphanage party in Gumi on Saturday. (Incidentally, the group that helps out at that particular orphanage, KKOOM, is well worth supporting if you're into that kind of thing. I know some of the founders, and the group is strongly affiliated with the organization that brought us out here. Good things are happening people! Check them out!) So, it looked like it was back to the old routine for me.

Then I get a call from the new EPIK (English Program in Korea) teacher at the elementary school adjacent to mine. She tells me that a bunch of the new EPIK teachers are getting together on Saturday and that it'd be cool if I could come as well to show them around. Sure, why not? It's just dinner and some drinks after wards, right?

Then I call up my good friend Jon F. to see if he wants to tag along. No can do. He's going to the orphanage party too, but he invites me along to Daegu on Friday night to meet some other teachers in our program. Well, okay, I say, but only so long as I'm back in Pohang before 11 AM on Saturday.

So we go to Daegu and generally carouse until the wee hours of the morning. With several teachers from the program, four Korean good sports (I got a lot of speaking practice in at least!), and even an old friend from VALPO who ended up out in Daegu last year at Chungdahm Language Institute. (At least seven of these people were going to the orphanage the next day as well. Why wasn't I going?!) The point is, much alcohol was consumed, songs sung, and memories made. The even more important point is that it wasn't totally out of my system by the time I woke up four hours later to catch a bus back to Pohang for Ultimate... (Of course, to wake up you actually need to fall asleep...)

So, a little (read: lot) hung over, I drag myself onto the Ultimate pitch. I forget how many games we played exactly, but it was about two hours of play time. Enough at least to exhaust me to the point where I fell asleep almost immediately upon my return to my apartment, slept through an alarm, and barely woke up in time to meet the new EPIK teachers for dinner.

Dinner was actually quite fun though. I clarified early on that I wouldn't be hanging out with them too late both because of the night before and because I wanted to make church in the morning. But they seem like a good group of people, and at least a couple would like to play Ultimate. (This will help tremendously, as we've been playing a lot of exhausting 3-on-3 games lately...) The night ended (for me) with a trip to the beach to enjoy the lights.

Then Sunday: Woke up early to catch the bus to church. Read a book on the history of Korean politics and took notes on my computer in a Dunkin Donuts. Played basketball with my boys. Sat down to type up this little window on life as an EFL teacher to you all.

And yet, it is not over for me. My ESPN Fantasy Football league commissioner changed the draft date to a very reasonable 2 pm Eastern Standard Time, which happens to correspond with a quite more unreasonable 3 am I-live-in-Korea Time.

All this is to say, when it rains, it pours.

I'm just happy that it still occasionally does pour.

Next Week Preview - Eating Out Flowchart

Next week's adult lesson will be about how to order food at an American restaurant. This is by no means a complete flowchart. It doesn't even include all the variations on the questions or how to order from a fast food place if you're doing it a la carte. Still, complicated enough, right?

Teaching, Week 2 - Environmentalism and Democratic Process (Year 3, Day 10)

Be it here known to all that I severely underestimated my student's abilities in English last semester. They--both my students and their abilities--pretty much rock.

Last semester, we did a lot of simple grammar review and practice. Although I teach at a high level science college-prep high school (For reference, 75% of students graduate to the top tier universities in the country in the equivalent of Grade 11 in America. Not after. In.), my students' English skills are all over the map. It's not nearly as bad as my first placement in Pyeongchang (평창)--a rural town in Kangwon-do (강원도) with Olympic aspirations--but I still have a terrible spread between low intermediate and high advanced EFL learners. The idea with the grammar review and practice was to get everyone on the same page while creating lessons where the advanced students could expand upon the prompts given them.

Well, either that worked, or, like I said, the students were a lot more able than I thought and just shy the first semester. The past three lessons I wanted to see how far I can push them. Apparently, pretty far.

Our tripartite project, based on a similar lesson plan by a colleague, was to research, write, and debate a US$100 billion budget for the United Nations Environmental Committee. Each class researched different topics within small groups, among them global warming, air pollution, deforestation, and endangered species. Each group tackled one of the topics and, using the Internet, researched the causes and effects of each problem and possible projects that could help alleviate them.

When we finally got around to debating the budgets, the students threw themselves into it full force. We used a very simplified democratic model (raise hands to be recognized by the committee president to give an opinion on increasing funding for a project, decreasing its funding, or cutting it all together, then vote), but considering their actual democratic models, I was impressed with the amount of calm reasoning and negotiation they employed to get their budgets under the $100 billion limit.

My co-teacher commented to me after the first class that this kind of lesson is especially good for Korean students, especially ones with aspirations to be the future leaders of Korea. In their classes, they learn about democracy and democratic process from books and by listening to their teachers lecture them about it. He says that this leads to the sort of schoolyard rumble conduct the Korea National Assembly displayed in that video linked above. Actually practicing it in class beforehand, as we so often do in the states even when we are deciding something menial like playing inside or outside with the last ten minutes of class, will hopefully make these students better citizens in the future.

Universal Standards on Stereotyping - MC Mong's "Indian Boy" (Year 3, Day 8)

Watch this video. Then we'll talk.

At first, I was appalled. I'm not Native American--or, as the Canadians would say, First Nation--or anything, but it seemed to me the utmost of bad taste. MC Mong, the main artist in this song and, I'll admit, one of my favorites in K-Pop, seems to mock the cultures of the true natives to my native land. He and his cadre wear ridiculous headdresses and dance around like savages in the jungle and the desert and a football game apparently being played in a black hole, all the while hunting down two explorers who dared consider partaking of his treasure horde. Despicable. At the worst, insensitive. At the best, just plain ignorant.

It seemed to me indicative of how Koreans I've met tend to stereotype other cultures.

It didn't help my opinion of it that this is the poster advertising the album.

The hangeul says, in effect, "Mong becomes an Indian boy."

It also didn't help my opinion of it that the first time I saw it, I didn't have the benefit of subtitles. I was in the cafeteria at school, and, as is their custom, the students turned to the Korean MTV equivalent MNET, which incidentally, unlike MTV, actually frequently plays music videos. I felt a little sick watching it but managed to finish my meal.

I went up to my room to figure out what the lyrics for the song were, and for the most part, besides the possibly offending "I am an Indian boy" lines, it is a simple upbeat love song--a boy declaring that he was lost without his girl and that he will always protect her.

And it was here that my gut reaction--my conditioned response as an American bred in a racially diverse environment that shuns all forms of stereotyping--began to recede and my mind began to say, "Well, now wait a moment. Assume charity. What are the words and the images together actually saying? What does it mean for MC Mong to say that he is brothers with Geronimo? What does it mean to be an Indian boy?"

So, let's be charitable for a moment and assume the best of Mr. Mong. Let's assume that he's neither malicious nor ill informed. Let's assume that as in all his videos, he's using caricatures to portray an idea, and that it is our job, as the viewers, to try to understand what he's communicating to us.

An Indian boy would then seem to be:

• A marksman ("My arrow is aimed at your heart.")
  
• Someone who spends a significant amount of time outside (Dancing under the stars, sleeping in the desert, building fires)
• Someone of incredible endurance (his breakfast is kisses from his love)
  
• A globetrotter (going to Alaska, Niagra, the Nile, etc.)
• Someone to be trusted and who will look after his love ("You're the one I'll protect until the end"; "I'll do anything for you")

The imagery holds up with much of this. We see MC Mong's Indian boy as being proficient with archery (so long as he was aiming for his love's head and not her heart...), always outside (with the possible exception of the black hole football game), in various locales worldwide, and almost always in defending or support positions (protecting the treasure from greedy explorers, in the stands as a band member at a sporting event, and as a lineman on the football team).

In fact, as with most of MC Mong's headliner songs, the main image of the song seems to be only slightly related to the actual theme of the song. Stereotypically, we don't think of Native Americans wearing Sioux headdresses living in tropical jungles, sitting at tables, or dancing in deserts. Nor do we associate them with Alaska, Niagara Falls, or the Nile. The same holds true with hip-hop and tie-dye style clothing. What's more, we typically don't associate them with football or marching bands, unless we happen to go to a school or support a professional team with them as our mascots ("And Indians?" "Don't be racist, Timmy, they're called 'Redskins'").

In the end, MC Mong was probably just using the image to convey a story he wanted to tell about a boy meeting a girl and wanting to be with her forever and how fun that can be.

Still, the question must be asked, is using stereotypical images of a culture (or, at least perceived stereotypes, because his formula for creating a stereotypical Native Americans is apparently, "Take any person in the world in any setting. Put feathers on their head.") even for apparently harmless and complimentary purposes to be allowed?

My gut American reaction is still, "No," that we're better off not having to ask this question in the first place, that, in the end, not having this sort of imagery in the consciousness is probably better for harmony between cultures.

But then I think about it. It is fun. It isn't the sort of racist stereotyping where he's actually making fun of someone (a la Dave Chapelle, Carlos Mencia, Chris Rock, Jeff Foxworthy). He seems to have this conception of Native Americans as people who like to have fun. He's not insulting them for that. He's joining them in that. In fairness, I don't know of any culture that doesn't like to have fun. And perhaps, because MC Mong is Korean and I'm an American, he feels comfortable calling himself a fun-loving brother of Geronimo and I don't.

For me it raises questions of the universality of cultural taboos. In other words, are stereotypes taboo in all places at all times for all peoples? Can we impose our standards of what is appropriate, politically correct imagery on other peoples when we don't share a common history? Are we only uncomfortable because we are Americans and have built our country on the backs of whom we whites considered less than ourselves? Are Native Americans even offended? Or are we Americans just ashamed of our past and want to hide our shame behind "staying P.C."? Would the rest of the world say, "Lighten up!"?

That's part of the reason I came to Korea, after all. To get the world's perspective on things we Americans take for granted. I asked my students what they thought of this video. "Teacher, it's just fun."

In the end, I would say this video seems harmless.

But how harmless is it really?

Morning Calm (Year 3, Day 5)

Year 3, Day 5… At least, according to the contract. By my reckoning, it has been twelve days since returning to Korea—the Land of the Morning Calm, as it is sometimes called.

Not that my mornings are calm.

My window faces the East, and so I am greeted by the Sun’s rays every morning. This would be wondrous if I could actually see the Sun peek over the horizon of the East Sea (unless you are feeling contrary, in which case it is the Sea of Japan) from atop my hill, but instead a sea of skyscrapers delays the Sun’s appearance, allowing it to get fully dressed for the day as if he were a performer getting into position behind the curtains. If you got lost the simile, the skyscrapers are curtains. But regardless, I get to see the Sun in all his glory without that pesky making-up and costuming business. His glory is bright and intrusive.

The school provided me with curtains. They are white like snow and allow me to view the Sun’s intrusiveness through their fibers as through a glass darkly. That is, very brightly.

In addition to my automatic lighting system, I am greeted each daily by matutinal thunder. It is my students daily, ritualistic obligation to wake me in this way. Loose lines form on the dirt yard, the students’ eyes bleary, but alert for the coming litany. The combination physical educator and dormitory supervisor descends from on high and nods to his chief officiant, the student body president. A call to attention, a call to at ease, a call to attention again, a bow to the educating supervisor to show respect for authority, a bow to the flag to show respect for blood shed, a bow to North and South and West and all directions in between (except East) to show respect for one’s own family (because few here would unabashedly admit to coming from an island nation of dwarves and monkeys), and then it begins. Its lyrics are eight words—hana, dul, set, net, tass, yass, ilgob, yadolb—with claps—hana, dul, set, net—and arm motions accompanying—tass, yass, ilgob, yadolb. Their bodies stretch lazily, their blood flows more quickly, their minds sharpen considerably, and then the run begins. There is a light padding of feet as athletic shoes—and sometimes slippers for those who were late getting up—hit the dirt, one footfall indistinguishable from the next eighty-nine. And then, the thunder, as they come around to the newly paved basketball court—a blessing because trying to stop and go on dirt is a sin, and a curse because as their feet hit the green painted concrete, they begin to run in unison. The monsoon season has long ago passed Korea by, thank the Heavens, but every morning in my initial haze I wake to think that it is raining despite the brightness of the light streaming through my window. Their feet pound to the rhythm of hana, hana, hana, hana. I am fully awake.

I can’t help but smile because they are the reason I came back. Every morning at 6:30 am, they remind me that they are still here, minds eager and ready for that 50 minutes of nonsense that is my English class.

My internal clock runs biologically now, like the cavemen of old. I manage without mechanical arms that tick and tock. I disregard displays on digital devices. When a student asks if I am a morning person or an evening person, I laugh. I am an afternoon person. I am most fully alive in the Sun’s glory. His Morning Noise. They have made me so.