tales from Korea

The three week long winter camp is nearly at an end. It went by pretty quickly, a lot of feelings about the success of the camp I’ll keep firmly in my head and off the Internet. But, I can always talk about the great things that happened, and the greatest thing for me was my brilliant class. Each class was expected to have between 8-10 students, mine had 8 originally but two dropped out on the first day leaving me with a tidy six. The class bonded together very quickly – Three of the students are from the same school, two other girls are both aspiring artists with similar interests and took a liking to each other on the first day. The last boy kinda forced himself to fit in, I’m sure you can tell from the photo above which one he is.

Quotes

Some of my favourite quotes and things that happened during the camp:

“Teacher, don’t Vikings still exist?”
“Yes, that’s one reason I came to Korea, to escape the murder and pillage”.
“Ahh really teacher? Wow… like the pirates I read about in the news”.
“Young Mu – I’m joking! The Vikings were around about 1000 years ago!”

When writing about the movie Saving Private Ryan, one student wrote the directors name as Steven Smallbug.

“Teacher I love you, and I love your fashion”.

One of the students wrote ‘Paul is legend’ on the board.

“Teacher, are there blacks in Ireland?”

“Teacher – I know about RIA!”
“I think you mean IRA.”

When acting out a performance, one girl shouted at her ‘boyfriend’ [pointing at another girl] “You sleep?! You sleep?!”.

“Students, listen up, on a scale of one to ten, where would you rate this lesson?” [not my lesson!]

“0″, “-10″, “Boring”, ”1″, “Can’t rate – too horrible”, “바보”.

Give me 5 new years resolutions, one student is obsessed with GG:
1. Meet Girls Generation.
2. Hug Girls Generation.
3. Kiss Girls Generation.
4. Shake hands with Girls Generation.
5. Marry Girls Generation.

[Maybe more if I can remember...]

The camps end: The performance

On the last day of the camp is the ‘performance’ the students have been working on for 20 minutes a day. Three weeks to prepare something may sound like a lot but it really isn’t. I like my classes ambition, though. They chose to do something a little different, they wanted to do something Irish, since that’s where their teacher’s from. After showing a few scary videos of Irish dancing and Michael Flatly, we found a Ceili dance that’s relatively easy to perform. At this stage, they have it down pretty well. Well, they have the movement and pace of the dance, the footwork is more like skipping but still, I’m impressed. I’ll upload the video of the performance after Friday.

Update: The performance video.

First Place!

My class won first place in the performance competition – beat back the beatles, Grease (Sorry Jeremy!) and some plays! Very happy, they worked hard for it and pulled off a good performance. I think I was more nervous then they were.

In some ways it almost makes me sad to think of going back to the 28-35 sized classrooms in my own school when the new semester starts. The noise and discipline problems, seeing them once a week – you can’t really build any sort of relationship with the students. I got to know these six students better in this short time then any of the students in my own school. Hopefully I can change that a little when I go back for next semester.

You’ll be spoilt for choice when shopping in Korea, that is, as long as your size is pretty small and you have a similar build to a Korean. For men, I think it may be a little easier as some Korean men can be pretty big – comparable to a normal western man. But for everyone else, having a slightly oversized romp, being extra tall or having a wide chest can mean giving up on high street shopping and going instead for some specialist shopping in Itaewon.

I’m 178cm, pretty normal, I’m not a very big guy, but have quite wide shoulders and a wide chest – I am XL everywhere in Korea, and at that the XL barely fits. By the way, they don’t really have the American style XXL XXXL type sizes in Korean stores – XL is the biggest. For top sizes, I look for the Korean “105″ which is generally the biggest size, and it fits me just about. Pants, jeans ect are a little easier, you can get them pretty easily up to 36″ waist – but most of them have a fixed length (Or they just say ‘normal’ or ‘longer’). If you’re a rather tall fellow – you’ll probably have to head off to Itaewon. I know quite a few westerners who don’t really get any clothes in Korea, they have to haul it all from their home country.

When I go shopping for clothes, I have a quick checklist which goes from the most important (Practicality) to the least important (Style). Pretty much everything I buy has to fulfil these criteria, but if one point weights heavily above the point below it, I may still get it. For example, if something was really damn comfortable, even if it was expensive, I’d probably get it. This may all sound a bit pretentious or something, but really it’s just my priority when buying clothes. Like most men, I couldn’t care, but I still have the inbuilt strict money sense from being a student for so long. Here’s the list:

• Practicality
• An item should have a purpose and be build well for that purpose, it should be practical and useful.
• Comfort
• It should be comfortable to wear and not cause any pain even with extended use*.
• Cost
• It should be reasonably priced – Build quality and materials equal to a fair price**.
• Style
• It should look good, and not just be made for a current fashion trend but be good for a while.

* This is why high heels fail the test (Obviously for girls!).
** Most designer labels you’re paying for the brand over the quality of the product hence that’s why i don’t buy any.

Yeah, you all know how anal I am.

The three shops I’m going to recommend which provide what I need with those requirements are Giordano, UNIQLO and Basic House. By the way, I’m not being sponsored, this is just my opinion.

Giordano is great for casual clothing, I like their simple but attractive styles. Their jumpers are neat: Round necks and hoodies, in a variety of colours so you can easily match to taste. They have some really high quality shirts too; a little pricey mind, but they’re really nice. I do wear some of the shirts for school, and none have ever shrunk in the wash. I’ve never bought any pants here, but I did buy a very nice long jacket that was on sale (-40%) because it was last seasons fashion.

UNIQLO is one of all my all round favourite shops – It’s actually a Japanese company. Check out their pants and jeans – they usually have some formal ones good for school and some casual ones good for outside school. They regularly run sale events and you can usually pick up a genuine bargain there. I’ve bought jumpers for school, great underwear, Thermal pants, Jeans and other things there. Very good prices for the quality, I’ve generally found. There is a huge UNIQLO in the 명동 (Myeongdong) shopping area.

Basic House is another good all rounder. They have a lot of clothes that are good for school wearing – cotton pants, ‘teacher’ style jumpers and a lot of decent shirts. I’ve found the quality to be a bit hit and miss, but it’s still a shop worth checking out. Prices are a bit odd too – Some things are very well priced while others seem arbitrarily high. Sometimes they have very fashionable clothes in one section and in the other they have very basic and generic universal styles.

There are a few other places worth checking out, but these three seem to be the best for western male teachers buying clothes in Korea, in my opinion.

During one meeting last year we were informed by one of the SMOE coordinators that the Gangdong district was going to make additional afternoon classes entitled “Arts and Sports”, and took the names of teachers that may be interested. When i though of the title, the first thing that jumped into my head was photography. “Hey there’s something I know about, it’s an art… I can teach that, right?”. Quite a few teachers signed up, each with their own ideas: Music, knitting, modelling, painting, etc (I didn’t see anyone offering to teach a sport). A few weeks went by and the title seemed to have changed to “Arts and Crafts camp”, it seemed that these extra classes were a first for the Gangdong area and they were altering the purpose of the classes as needed. Each school advertised the classes… but not surprisingly, numbers were low. After all, students have to go to the winter camp, most of them probably go to hagwons (Private learning institutes) and aren’t too enthusiastic about signing up for voluntary extra classes. My school seemed to fair better – with my co-teachers advertising the class, 4 students signed up.

We heard finally, the Gangdong office had decided that classes must have over 5 students to proceed – the final numbers came in, my class was the only one with over 5 students; in fact I was pleased to see that 7 had signed up – 3 students from other schools as well. I felt sorry for the other teachers, some classes had zero students. I feel it more a case of the schools doing a bad job of advertising the classes rather then the subject of the classes themselves. The classes were laid out as 3 classes per day, starting at 2pm, for 5 days (One week essentially – 15 classes in total). I made an overview of what the teaching schedule was like but it was a little stretched, to say the least. What should I do for 15 classes? It seemed a bit much. It ended up changing to 10 classes, which was great, so I decided to do them back to back and have it from 2pm – 3:30pm for the Monday to Friday.

I spent a while preparing for the lessons… Photography, what was I thinking? These are 1st and 2nd grade middle grade students (14 and 15 year old), can they handle this? I mean seriously, photography has some pretty dynamic scientific components with some very specific and uncommon vocabulary. How can I dumb it down though, and then expect them to take good photographs? I decided to just put in the essential information without dumbing it down and all, and though that real life demoing might peak their interest enough to try and remember [and use] the information. The schedule was set for the week, Monday and Tuesday would be classroom based – powerpoints, the history of Photography, the uses, etc, all the way into how photography works – how to take a good picture. Wednesday was half based in the classroom, the first part was just about composition – I tried to emphasise the importance. The second half of the class was them running around the school taking photographs of each other, trying to apply the information they learned during the last two days.

When the classes started, I actually only had 6 students, one had dropped out due to sickness. It was more a little more convenient for making teams though, and I easily divided them into three pairs. I informed them of a competition that would take up all day Thursday in which we would go outside and shoot for the whole 1 and a half hour, the place was Garden5, just across the road from my school. On Friday we would be choosing and editing the photographs using Photoshop, their choices would be submitted and I would pick the winning team there and then. Friday was a day for criticism too – I explained how to give and take criticism, and how important it is in photography.

The competition:

I explained the students must submit a final 5 photographs, based on these requirements:

• Photograph One:
• Portrait, shallow depth of field.
• Photograph Two:
• Theme is “Circles”.
• Photograph Three:
• A building, deep depth of field.
• Photograph Four:
• Theme is “Moving people”.
• Photograph Five:
• A photograph of your choice.

Here are a few images of the students when we went out shooting on the competition day.

Some of the students creativity was just inspirational, I felt like I really got them thinking about how to use their own imagination and skill to try and capture something a normal person would never have thought to look at that way. Here are the images taken by the winning team:

I have to say, the class was an absolute success and I really enjoyed teaching it. I’ve never taught anybody photography before, I still have a lot to learn myself, but to get the elementary stuff across was still really useful for these aspiring students. It was such a good feeling to see them inspired, being creative, having fun and following me around like my own little photo posse, armed with SLRs slung over their shoulders.

The end of a year and start of a new one, usually things go out quietly… One year rolls into another one, you can’t tell the difference and almost forget that it happens until you sign something and write the year date wrong. More has happened in the last 10 days then has really happened in the rest of 2009. My brother and his girlfriend had a baby, just a few days before Christmas. Jayeon and I announced our engagement, and just a day after, Jessie, the family dog was taken ill and had to be put down.

A few days of absolute joy, surprise, laughing and cheering as well as inevitability, incredible sadness and loneliness.

Jayeon and I haven’t made any dates yet, but it’s likely we’ll be married here in the summer of 2010. We won’t have anything high-key, you know us.

I want to congratulate Mark and Lindsay again, and wish the best for them and their baby.

I will miss my dog, terribly; I wrote a small document (13.3MB) with some memories of her.

Looking forward to this year… So many great things planned.