tales from Korea

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I made this video a while back but never uploaded it for some reason! It gives you a general idea about what my school looks like and how the students behave. In general, Korea students aren’t that much better behaved then western students; the same things that go on in schools in Ireland go on here too. You can see some of my teachers too, they’re really great, I get on with them so well and they like me a lot too.

The one major thing that’s changed since this video is my desk, it’s no longer here as I was moved to a smaller office across the hall. My new office is much quieter and I’ve a great desk ‘position’, it is a little more boring in there, though.

Last year the school’s annual three day trip was cancelled due to the swine flu pandemic. I was looking forward to going on the trip before as it was a good chance to break the ice with the students and have some fun, missing classes for three days is also something I wouldn’t complain about! So this year the chance came around again and the trip was set for three days in April — Monday to Wednesday, and a choice to go with either the new first grade students or the second graders. I wanted to get to know the first year students a little better, especially considering there are probably more better English speakers there then in the second grade. But the first year’s trip destination weren’t going very far, just outside Seoul and not moving around too much making it sound relaxing, if a little boring. The second graders however were heading down pretty far south to a very rural part of Korea called 남원 (Namwon) to see some cultural sites — temples, a castle, a mountain area and the largest steelworks plant in Asia. That tickled my fancy enough to go with the second graders and they signed me up. Funnily enough, they never even asked me at the beginning if I wanted to go, for some reason assuming that I wouldn’t be interested. But they were happy that I was and they made the arrangements quickly to have me come along.

Unfortunately the advantages of going on a trip further away, being able to see places otherwise you may have missed brings one inherit disadvantage, having to sit on a bus for so long. The whole trip was probably more then 50% being on the bus and the rest a mix of rushed site visits, eating and sleeping. I felt like a gleeful tourist the whole time, getting a free trip and seeing some great places, the students on the other hand hated pretty much everything. What can you expect from teenagers though? I never heard so much complaining in my life: “Teacher, my legs hurt”, “Teacher, I’m tired”, “Teacher, I’m bored”, “Teacher, I feel sick”, “Teacher, I hate the bus”, “Teacher, I’m hungry”. I think all that was missing was “Teacher, are we there yet?”. In true Korean ‘balli’ ‘balli’ fashion, as I briefly mentioned above, the visits to the actual sites were really short, maybe about 30 minutes or less at each one. Also the general plan seemed to just let students run loose around the place and not really teach them much. There were tour guides, but it seemed that they didn’t really tell them much besides what time to come back to the bus. I did find it a little strange that we travelled so far to spend such a short amount of time at the locations, but, alas, it was still worth it.

Take a look at some of the photos below, it shows some of the places we went to. I still have to get film developed so I might add more later.

I’ve been expecting some early morning warmth these days, a transition beginning to swing further to the side of spring, but alas, it hasn’t really been so. Only the the last few days have temperatures been keeping above freezing in the morning and holding themselves at about 10 or 12 degrees during the afternoon. I guess I shouldn’t be expecting the change to happen too fast, right? But it seems even Koreans are a little surprised at the slow crawl of spring and the constant gripping hand of winter. The new season has a lot in store for when it’s truly here: Blooming, including Cherry Blossoms and other Korean wild flowers, including the elusive national flower of Korea as well as a few nice holidays including the school trip in two weeks.

But more importantly, I’m sick of being sick, sick of being cold. What a complainer, eh? I usually don’t get too sick back home but I never really considered the whole spectrum of pathogens I’d be breathing and touching once I came over here. I’ve pretty much been sick for about 2-3 weeks, on and off. First there was a case of the cold followed by a relapse case of an auto-immune condition I have, which was a bit miserable. After that I seemed to develop a nasty chest infection (Most probably bronchitis), which can last anything from a few days to a few weeks. Needless to say, I haven’t been doing much the last couple of weeks beside sleeping, drinking water, taking medicine and complaining to Jayeon (To which she responds by hitting me for being so sick for so long). She puts it down to a mixture of exposure to new virus and bacteria as well as the blasted Yellow Wind from China/Asia.

While emerging one day from a subway station in Itawon I looked out over the top of the escalator steps and saw a dark yellow and gloomy sky. “What the f…?.” I was thinking. It looked a bit like a nuclear fallout, reminding me of the videogame I’d been played the few days previously. Jayeon informed me that this is the Yellow Wind; I guess I wasn’t expecting it to be so obvious and… all encompassing. It was disturbing, gloomy and a bit disguising.

I’m not even in China but I was probably affected more from a short walk through that dust then any other pollution in Seoul. I don’t know if it was this or a combination of things but so many people seem to have lung infections at the moment. Over half of the students at my school are now sick — a little higher then the swine flu pandemic last year. I don’t know about the rest of the population, though. Anyway all I can do is sit and wait through this transition of seasons and sickness and emerge with a body and a mind that’s ready to try some more challenges and adventures. Hey, I haven’t tried eating that live squid yet…

As it comes to the end of February, and my vacation days, the new school year is about to begin. Korea’s school term starts in March and runs until December, with January and February being the main vacation time with maybe two weeks during the summer for a respite. The vacation days I planned for this month are just about up – went by in a breeze, and I barely did anything. I went back to Ireland for the majority of it – nearly ten days; being at home as doing all kinds of things made it never really feel like a ‘vacation’, though. Not that I wasn’t happy to see everyone, it’s just that not much happened. It feels like the build up to the vacation was better then the pay off. But, I’m almost ready to go back, my mind is certainly not in school mode yet and with a new grade and double the amount of students to last year it may take some getting use to. The second half of my contracted year – I wonder what it’ll have in store for me, one thing I know for sure – It’ll be full on go for the next few months once I land back in my desk in a weeks time. No breaks for holidays, no vacations, just full on work. But, hopefully I can plan time for photography over the coming weekends, I have a few things in mind and looking forward to seeing what I can try to capture this year.

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.