I’ve been given ample time for R&D of late, and also I’m staying an extra hour and a half every day for dinners at school.  (it costs half the price of eating out)

The opportunity to learn Korean with immigrant brides was dashed when the class time was changed to conflict with the classes I teach.  So, I’ve got to learn on my own, as there are no weekend classes anywhere, and no way to make a weekday class in Seoul when my commute is about an hour and a half each way.

Fortunately, I’ve discovered:

Talk to me in Korean

and

Live Mocha

and the sexy voice of

Busy Atom

also helpful have been some random videos by individuals, such as:

(the video above is REALLY helpful – these are actually the words that stick out the most, that you hear the most, and which grease conversations)

Queerion’s LEARN KOREAN in less than a minute

(okay, maybe not as helpful since foreigners can’t afford to be smart-asses, but definitely fun)

My lunar new year’s resolution was to create a set schedule of studying Korean daily, but like all resolutions my whole life, it’s fallen by the wayside.  I do  believe these will help, I just have to repeatedly listen to them again, and again, and again, and again.  It’s the closest thing I have to human company too.  : (

The great thing about this past year of trying every kind of learning Korean method under the sun – all of which have failed – is that it’s made me think about how to teach English better.  And no, I disagree with Ask a Korean who claims foreigners are just lazy and need to work their asses off memorizing like Koreans do.   It’s true that method is possible, but it’s also inefficient, academic, and  hard to make meaningful.   And thus, my problem learning Korean is fundamentally learning in a vacuum.  I HAVE TO learn language naturally.  I NEED a Korean in my life, and it’s not happening despite my best efforts.  (and, unfortunately, for those of us involved with TRACK, our energies are diluted so language acquisition is even slower than other foreigners — that along with not having the celebrity cache that white westerners do so people take time out of their busy schedules to talk with us, and many who were not relinquished at birth feel there is an emotional mental block; that the recognition and loss of this language hurts every time it’s heard or spoken)

This assumption that foreigners should suck it up and learn the same way Koreans do, through busting their ass, is fundamentally flawed because  IT ISN’T WORKING FOR KOREANS, so how can they expect hitting the books to work for us?  This attitude — that it’s all up to the individual to learn a SOCIAL skill involving COMMUNICATION by oneself in isolation — is just, well, bullshit and ass backwards.

It’s shocking to me how nobody here OFFERS to show the foreigner a word or explain anything EVER.  When back at home, I’ve helped visitors from other countries with their English without even a second thought and witnessed everyone around me doing the same.  Hell, usually people are EXCITED to show newcomers around and teach them new words and share insider info about their culture.  Here,  we are TOTALLY ON OUR OWN with no sympathy.

To add insult to injury, if, after prying with all one’s might a simple conversation out of someone with a HUGE English vocabulary, every road explored gets a door slammed shut on it.  Now, I realize this is because English is a cold language and because they’ve not learned how to warm it up or pad harsh news, but it doesn’t change the shock of it.  So it’s WORK and takes great effort to not be shocked, dismayed, disgusted, and hurt when every effort at conversation is totally shut down with a conversation killing answer.  You just have to swallow your feelings, not hold it against them, and keep trying.  But some days it just feels hopeless.

Being with lower level language learners is helping me somewhat.  Because my lessons are about basic things, like what’s this, what’s that, etc.  I am starting to hear things in context because the co-teachers are translating.  So I’m hearing words stand out that get repeated. yogi and  chugi. The problem is there are too many of these, and I don’t get paid to have the whole class stop and review words I need reinforced.  But, every now and then, these old brain cells will remember a word.  At this rate, I might have a vocabulary of 100 more words by the end of the year.  I would learn more in a class and through memorizing, but they wouldn’t have any meaning to me, and I would immediately forget most of them.

I started formulating some ideas last week, and I’ve been happy to discover some others in the EFL field who must have beat me to it.  There’s one guy who has an entire program called Effortless English, which basically is all the ideas I came up with on my own but codified and fleshed out with materials.  The problem is, it’s for adults.  And the other problem is most EFL stuff is either for adults or geared towards early elementary.  But me, I’ve got low level English learners who are almost adults, who are having giggling crushes while dreaming about sex and worrying about their futures but still have one foot in video games.   There’s a serious void in the teen EFL market, one that I must fill somehow.

So I’ve started thinking about what I need to learn Korean and I’m trying to find ways to give my students that in English.  I wish we could all hang out more, actually, and I’ve missed them this week.  Doing R&D this week, I’ve been just appalled at the preponderance of dry, grammar-focused garbage western losers posing as expert teachers are putting out there.  It’s clear I have to make my own.  I’m down-loading a lot of videos and cutting them up and creating something totally different with them.  However, there aren’t enough hours in the day to do this.  I’d love to make my own videos, but my handycam isn’t reliable and turns all the images red without notice.  Actually, I’m happy to just use the blackboard, but I want a return on my investment so I don’t have to keep re-creating the lessons over and over.

Yup, it’s being introduced into Congress right now.  Almost slipped by me because I haven’t been watching, but you can read more about it at the Transracial Korean Adoptee Nexus.

What I want to know is, why America?  AGAIN?  Freaking S. Koreans should take in those stranded N. Koreans fleeing into China, and if their children have no paperwork, why must their families be separated?  Are these really truly orphans, just because they have no country?  Or only on paper? How ’bout Adopt A WHOLE FAMILY?  Huh?

This is like some horror movie, watching yet another example of Americans jumping on every possible opportunity to acquire ethnic children for their own.

This, on top of the Russian boy being returned has me in a very bad mood.

Video from Japanese combination English/Aerobics class…

is you drink rice wine and write embarrassing things.

oh well.  it’s a document.  it stays.

i’m not as strong and brave as everyone thinks.

i’m the opposite of cool.

which is, i suppose, one thing i can like about myself.

Annyeonghasaeyo.

That means, are you at peace? And the answer would be a big fat, NO!
(not that anybody really wants an answer to that rhetorical question)

I’m trying really hard to just live a life, but here in Korea I’m an adoptee.

Pear makkolli is really good, btw. Did you know I have four ceramic makkolli cups now? One for me and three for the other three kitchen stools.

One stool is occupied by my kids. Another stool is occupied by my absent lost love who sent me music to remind me of him so I have something to cry over my makkolli about. The third stool is occupied by my adoptive parents mom. And sitting on the table mocking me is a mad, angry adoptee gone berserk, who sent me a photo memorializing Harry Holt, which is like sending photos of Hitler to Jewish people, or dismembered fetuses to the aborting.

I’m afraid.

Berserkers were Norse fighters who went insane during battle, losing all perspective and could not discriminate between friend or foe, attacking everything in their path, oblivious to self destruction.

Also at the table is an adjosshi who knows for certain Kim Sook Ja is not my sister who wanted a six year dating plan and a gyopo who wanted a ten minute dating plan and a violent neighbor who just wants a punching bag.

The table is groaning.

In Sang-Shil Kim’s Land of the Not So Calm blog is this fortune cookie:

Aunt Carmen described how, at the turn of the century, they didn’t have envelopes but folded their letters into self-containing envelopes. She went on to describe several of her long-term correspondences, and how embarrassed she was, after-the-fact, for having used the pronoun “I” too much. But when you live alone, and you’ve only yourself to talk to, and where you live nobody speaks your language but you and three others who don’t live in the same town, how can you not write “I?” How can you not speak to yourself all the time?

Aunt Carmen made me eat in the kitchen by myself. With the dog. How many ways must the tree be reminded?

“Teacher! You are so beautiful! I want to marry you!” It’s true. I think I’m getting more beautiful every day. At the turn of the century, they said that about women as they got consumption, just before they wasted away.

I’m teaching the children to talk English to themselves. I know no one is going to practice with them. I know we’re all essentially alone. Part of me thinks I am preparing them for life.

Outside my window is the tulli-shaped building. I watch the farmer, his wife, and his mother tend their homestead. He feeds the rabbits. She feeds the fire to warm the floor. She must always smell like camp fire, as she’s always squatting in front of a puff of smoke. The mother gathers things and breaks ground by pitchfork. The dog barks at the chickens and can’t chase them, because he’s too stupid to not wrap his chain around the tree he’s tethered to.

I ask Dongja, “Does anyone live in those mountains?” She knows one person’s mother who lives alone in the mountains. She has a beautiful view. “Why don’t more people live up there?” Because it’s too hard. Too cold. Dongja later asks me, they all ask me, “Are you learning Korean?” Dongja prays before every meal. She prays for a husband.

Today it was 4 degrees Celsius with a biting wind. It’s mid April. I lose weight, just shivering.

Several years ago, a thousand miles away in China, a Buddhist monk was found in his hermitage cave in a trance and woken up by visitors. He offered his guests some dinner, but the dinner had been sitting uneaten for a week: burned, cold, and rotten.

Here in my room, I eat images for dinner. It takes days to digest them. In my consumptive trance-like state, I don’t move. Somebody please wake me. No. Don’t wake me. Let me stay here forever.

On my floor are pieces of joey. I’m assembling a kangaroo baby to symbolize the family bond that shouldn’t be broken. Our kangaroo costume was missing the joey. The joey is missing the kangaroo. I’m sewing as best I can, but the fabric wants to unravel.

The adjosshi reveled in his bachelor melancholy. He said love weakened men. We danced a blues sway to Piazzola, with the city lights beneath us and he gasped how romantic it was. And when are you going to learn Korean? Maybe if somebody here loved me I’d learn Korean. There has to be a reason. There has to be someone to talk WITH, or what’s the point? English exhausts him, so I must learn Korean. Stalemate. The bandoneon is silent.

I am very nearly reaching that point: that point where I only exist as vapor. This is the point where nothing really matters anymore, where sadness and loneliness are unintentionally image-enhancing. And, maddeningly, that is the point where suddenly you become interesting: because you are on the cusp of knowledge of the unknowable, near the revelations of death, and everyone wants that. Where Marlene Dietrich’s indifference and Betty Davis’s hysteria combine into something infantile and erotic. And Jean Paul kisses my legs and begs, begs me to let him be my boyfriend. And the artist gives me jewelry I didn’t ask for. And the foreman brings me prime cuts of beef I don’t want and the co-worker mows my lawn unsolicited and…only this time I am older and in Korea. And not willing to go through another nervous break-down and never, ever, willing to play Korean dating games.  I hate games.

Oh lord, what’s to become of me in this place?

A boy says “hi” to me. I say back, “An Yeong! (waaay too casual) Ha! Say YO!” (a mockery of formality) Please God, let me be cool. Let the students save me this year.

Today, one of the boys started the class by saying, “what’s up?” and I opened up my sweater to reveal my “what’s up?” t-shirt…he, he, he…

After my first week at school, the co-teacher let me know that the students told her, “she seems really cool!”

Thank God.

At the last school, after taking much abuse and rudeness, I was constantly in this mind-set of, “hey! I’m cool! why are you treating me like this? You little f**king brats…” I was always trying to show them how awesome I could be, but they weren’t having any part of it: I was the foreign enemy and part of their English oppression. Their mission was to make my lessons as ineffective as possible.

But here, none of the kids are brats. What a difference a year and a new location makes…even the worst discipline problem kids treat me well.

Part of this is due in no small part to the co-teachers. They are sometimes like gestapo, their control of the class is so eagle-eyed and rigid. Frankly, it makes me uncomfortable at times, and I get embarrassed and it’s awkward as the teacher is reaming someone for not paying attention to the foreign teacher.

But mostly, it’s because the kids are so great. They’ve got these great personalities…one kid is just a riot. He’s so funny, me and the co-teacher have a hard time keeping a straight face. And his bending of English and saying it beyond wrong takes a lot of intellect and requires both his understanding and it helps the other kids understand better, too, so who cares if they go through life saying it funny?

Plus, I get interpretation all the time now, so I am able to impart why I do things and therefore I can show the kids more empathy than I could when I was speaking Arabic to them while wasting half my time trying to put down twenty brush fires with no water. The interpretation can be a little maddening at times, though. The classes are repeated maybe up to four times, and by the third time, the co-teachers think they know everything I am going to say, and they anticipate what will be interpreted, often stealing my lines before I say them, so I’m left with nothing to say but to repeat what has already been relayed. So that’s a little irritating, as sometimes I want to change things. Also with interpretation, it’s really unnerving when you’ve said four sentences and only get about six words as the interpretation. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, (especially during the morning broadcast) you say a sentence and are poised to say the next, and the interpreter goes on and on and on and on and you’re about to turn blue because you’d taken in air to speak again…and there have been a couple of times where I wanted to explain something sensitive about multi-culturalism, or nationalism, or observations about Korean culture, and I was quite obviously censored. BUT, most of it gets through, and I guess it’s a small price to pay if I still end up being thought of as cool. But mostly I take my hat off to my co-teacher’s facility with the English language, and their ability to interpret so well. Try defining a foreign word to someone, and then imagine having to impart what a foreigner is saying when their message is peppered with a dozen words that need definition. Yeah, my co-teachers are very skilled and awesome.

I’ve also relaxed a little on the students sleeping. The Korean teachers seem to have a measure on who is not worth their effort rousting and who should not be allowed to tune out the lessons, and it’s beginning to have a logic to it. The incorrigible are truly incorrigible. There’s really no point in fighting them if they’ve totally shut their ears and closed their minds. In America, foreign language is an elective, but here the kids are forced to sit through this torture. Most of them play along, and most are interested in little cultural biscuits, but only a small minority are truly interested in becoming conversant. To see a student totally not care AT ALL is shocking to us westerners, but then again, we would never be in the position those kids are in with this kind of educational system.

I’m also getting less pissed off when I see children bribed with candy. I’m still not going to do it, because it still reminds me of training dogs to do pet tricks, but it’s also this weird kind of compensation for all the other crap the kids have to put up with. Fortunately, my co-teachers don’t do it much, and it more resembles a reward than a bribe when they do it. It’s part of the whole coddling thing and currying favors thing and also a genuine demonstration of affection. Maybe a better way to describe it would be that it’s a peace offering. I’m getting quite a lot of candy from the students, and it’s an, “I think you’re cool. remember me.” message. I’ll probably reward the students who’ve completed their journal assignments with something. Maybe I can find something more meaningful than candy to give them.

And, doing wonders for my ego is I hear I’m beautiful often. So part of me wonders if it’s in the eye of the beholder, or if I actually rate well on the superficial Korean beauty meter: because I definitely don’t look like the cookie cutter image you see on t.v., print, or serving you drinks on the airlines. But really, who does? Another reason I like this school is because the girls aren’t primping all the time. There’s only about four who wear make-up, and a few are outright tomboys.

Behind my desk is the office giant roll of toilet paper. In Korean public schools, the schools don’t provide tp for the students. Or paper towels. Or hot water to wash with. So students often forget to bring some with them, or run out, and try and sneak some from the teacher’s office. The other teachers keep an eye out on their precious toilet paper, but I just turn a blind eye. I mean, when you need tp, you need tp, right?

I was also given a bag of paper cups when I arrived. Four boys came and asked me for a paper cup today, and I told them to help themselves. They were totally amazed and said, “you are so cool. you’re the cool teacher.”

It’s so easy to be cool here!