Winter Intensives

The school is a lot different than it was a month ago.  For one thing, we have broken off from our parent company of Kim Hak Su.  I was aware that Albert, my boss, had been itching to do this for a while, but I didn’t expect it to happen so fast.  He had told me over beers that while the man, Kim Hak Su, was very smart and a social brother to him, he was also very selfish.  Truth be told, this hasn’t had a noticeable impact on my day to day life.  We just don’t have a school name at the moment.
Boram has been gone since Christmas.  Since then a foreign teacher at Albert’s other school bailed.  To remedy this, he brought Hae Jin to that school.  She has been replaced with a Korean girl named Ara, who has some pretty amazing English under her belt from Australia. 
The problem with Hae Jin and Boram leaving, other than it being sad to see people I’ve known my whole time in Korea leave,  is that they were the ones who really kept kids under control.  Han and I do not inspire the same level of fear of death as those two.  So, to a certain extent, a few classes have descended into anarchy. 
What makes things worse is that public schools have let out for winter break and again the kids flock to private academies.  They come earlier and they stay for a longer part of the day.  Classes have all changed and with that the general dynamic.  Kids who were subdues and peaceful before are now with their friends and they combined to become a kind of axis of evil. 
Winter Class B would be a pretty decent example.  In the class is one boy and two girls who, on their own, aren’t beyond manageable.  Individually, whenever I told one of them to stop talking they would immediately apologize.  The boy would make a heart with his arms and say “Ok, sorry Thomas, I love you ok very good.” 
Currently, I spend most of the class screaming like a lunatic at all three of them.  A week ago, the boy smacked one of the girls on the head and made her cry.  He spent the entire 45 minute class kneeling in front of the smart board.  He still wouldn’t shut up.
Then, there is the Missing Boy (who went MIA for a few hours a bunch of months ago).  I would be lying if I said that winter intensives have made any difference in his classes as he is all alone but he has definitely stepped up his game.
He is one of my first classes a few days a week.  Everyday, he comes in and we do our little dance.  It ends in two ways:
1.  Trap him in a corner, put him in a headlock or pick him up and carry him to class. 
2.  He sprints into class and tries to barricade the door. 
I win both of these scenarios.  He is a scrawny 8 or 9 year old and I outweigh him by approximately 500 lbs.  One day last week, I joined him in a pre-dance glass of orange juice.  We stood there until he took a big sip, threw his glass and ran for the door.  Ok, I thought, scenario 2.  Generally, my strategy is to get my foot into the door as he closes it and then pull the door handle off of the inside (it is broken).  He then closes the door, realizes that he is trapped inside with nothing to hold onto.  I win.
On this day the door was too far broken and wouldn’t properly close.  I thought nothing of it and reached my left arm in and tickled his side.  He responded by shotgun spitting a mouthful of orange juice into my face and all over my folders. 
The dance was over.  He won. 
The next day, after literally dragging him on the floor and into the classroom, he tried to instigate a repeat of the previous day with a mouthful of green tea.  I’m no fool so I laughed and said “no.”  He then spit his at out into my thermos of water.  I said something to the extent of “seriously” and he grabbed my papers and blitzed around me and hurled them out the window.  Kid is like a sneaky little velociraptor. 
As of today, I have been in Korea for 265 days.  I have 100 days left on my contract and I can only imagine that the time I have left will fly by.  The first thing I did upon receiving a cell phone here was set a countdown for the end of my contract.  It wasn’t so much an issue of me wanting time to go by quickly or the need to know exactly how long I have left so much that I sometimes don’t realize time is going by at all.
When I first landed here, a year might as well have been forever.  There were so many milestones that I needed to get through before I went back home: Halloween, my birthday, New Year’s Eve, Christmas, Thanksgiving.  Now: there is nothing. 
In an hour I will check my phone and see that I am down to double-digits.  I don’t know why it is so significant to me; not really.  I suppose I can remember laying in bed at my first apartment in Cheongju with no internet wondering what kind of mess I had gotten myself into.  I recall laying there wondering how I would feel when I was down to the last 100 days; whether I would be emotionally scarred from a Christmas alone. 
I guess I feel pretty much the same as I did at the half way point; which felt pretty much the same as the 4 month point.  Though I am starting to feel that urgency to start doing as much as I can in Korea; my days are numbered.
In 10 days I have a lot of work to do.  I have been mulling over how to get home for quite some time.  I don’t feel like jumping onto an airplane and being home 20 something hours later.  Somehow that seems so anticlimactic to a year abroad. 
Part of the reason I like travel writing and books about journeys (The Hobbit / LOTR) is that they acknowledge that the way home can be an adventure in itself.  I am getting a decent wad of cash when my contract is completed and I feel it would be a waste (both personally and with the whole photographer thing) to skip out on the rest of the world.  As it is, I have not so much as touched my portfolio in a year or so. 
The plan is this: Ferry from Korea to the eastern shore of Russia.  Rail from there to Moscow.  Moscow - Europe (avoiding Belarus).  Eventually I mean to make my way to Barcelona to see an old friend before I finally get on a plane head back to Boston. 
It’s a plan anyway.  A Russian Visa seems to be require a horrible amount of patience, but the embassy told me that it was possible to get while living abroad.  So, I am going to make a go of it.

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Intensives and Minnie

Summer is getting on here in Korea. At home kids have been out of school for at least a few weeks; here kids began their summer vacation yesterday. How do Korean school children celebrate the kick-off of Summer? Go to school!

I feel bad about my job sometimes. I feel bad that students and co-workers put so much effort into trying to communicate in English when it should be me that puts the greater effort into learning their language. Still, I am trying. I can say “I’m hungry,” “are you hungry,” “I’m tired,” “are you tired,” a few swears, and I can now count to four… sometimes.

I feel bad that I am profiting from the misery of little children. Who the hell wants to go to the English academy on their first day of summer vacation? For crying out loud I didn’t want to be there today. And these kids made it pretty obvious that they didn’t want to be there. I walked out of the office and found one of my favorite students crying. I thought perhaps he had gone and done something stupid (I have had to tackle him to keep him from trying to body slam the Smartboards). I asked Han what had happened and she said: “Nothing. He doesn’t want to study.”

I don’t blame the kid. It seems like that is all these kids do: study. They go to school every other Saturday and then go to a number of academies for math, music, English, whatever. We are open until 9 pm and for some of them we are not their last stop. Where they find the energy to do everything that they do is beyond me. Intensives are starting and I can’t even drag my ass out of bed for 9am.

Intensives. Before I came here I gathered that Intensives were a period of intense studying so that students passed some god of a test. In order to do this they spent more time at academies. This, I think is only part of the reason. Until sometime in late August our school hours are 9:30 am until 7 pm. Kids stay longer and our student body has increased by a good number. There is so much pressure for kids to succeed and get into the right schools that it is largely their parents dragging them to the academy. What is worse, the older kids come in earlier so that my first class of the day is now my last class. So now, instead of waking up early and going to school they get to wake up early and go to academy where they are greeted by me trying not to fall asleep on my desk.

This all seems like such a pain or annoyance, but its important to know that South Korea has the HIGHEST suicide rate in the developed world. The pressure of genuinely living in Korea is immense. Kids (and parents) want entry into the best schools. When I say that I am from Boston (more recognizable than Massachusetts) they ask if I went to Harvard and that I must be smart. I then usually hold my hand as high as I can and say “Harvard: there. My university: here” and make the sound of bomb falling to the ground.

So, I try to make it fun. I am a novelty here and I have no teaching experience so I do what I can. I try my hardest to tell when a kid is on the verge of a total meltdown. It is hard because even when a kid looks like they can’t possibly take in any more verbs or nouns academy teachers know that the mother will ask their kid what they learned. If the kid says “Oh, we played a game for 15 minutes” we could be in trouble. I already have two parents who want to come in and observe a class.

The parents (moms) are those of two of my favorites: Billy, who looks like a non-animated Chicken Little, and Minnie, the cutest little 8 year old ever. They are both smart kids. Hell, even the kids who are having trouble can speak bits of English. I am 26 years old, have been here for 3 months and can only count to four half of the time.

Billy’s mom speaks no English and just wants to see what my classes are like and that I do not cheat and speak Korean with him. This is what I am told and I understand. Minnie’s mom announced she wanted to observe my class an hour after Minnie left and probably told her Mom that we played games all class because she was starting to spread a little thin.

I like Minnie. She is smart and her English is impressive. I remember “interviewing” for placement in the academy and she was so quiet and shy. Now she constantly sticks her tongue out at me and locks me out of the class room when I go for water.  Every time she does this she looks through the lower porthole window of the yellow door and sticks her tongue out at me.

So, she is more advanced than kids a lot older than her. It doesn’t mean that she isn't a little child who can handle day after day of TO BE pounded into her brain because she is having trouble with it.

And she is having trouble with it. We have been going over past and present forms of TO BE for a couple of weeks now. She is starting to understand it more consistently but she is getting burnt out. She doesn’t smile or joke when she walks in anymore. She just sulks to the back of the class (she is the only one in the class) and plops down. When I walk in she looks at me and says “game?!” and I say no.

I don’t say: “well Minnie, I want to play a game with you because I am sick of doing this and we need a break. Only thing is I think your mom doesn’t think I am teaching you fast enough and I don’t feel like her complaining to my boss and having to deal with the consequences. If you mom pulls you from the school she will probably also pull your brother. That is a lot of money Minnie!”

Last week was particularly rough. I tried breaking things up. I let her play on the computer for five minutes but it was not enough. Every day was various forms of “Minnie, where WERE you YESTERDAY?” or “where ARE you NOW?” I try to do it different ways and make it seem fun but she is no fool. I made a game out of it once and she looked at me and said: “What!? This is game!? Real game?”

I told her that no, we had to keep going. She looked like she was going to cry.

The next day I didn’t have Minnie for class. I saw the receptionist wrapping a little Minnie Mouse purse in gift wrap. I asked her what it was for and she told me in a panic that she had forgotten it had been Minnie’s birthday the day before.

What a jerk. I almost made Minnie cry on her birthday.

So, today, at the start of intensives Minnie and I did absolutely nothing in class. I gave her a quarter from Mississippi that she seemed pretty thrilled with. I showed her photos of Mississippi and it took me a while to convince her that it was hers and that it was actually from America but her smile and laughter was back. She pointed to her eye to indicate she wanted me to make a squishy noise with my left eye (my eye is screwed up like that, but kids love it). She then whistled because she thinks whistling is her own freakish talent.  We played “Rock Paper Scissors” and “Heads or Tails” (Minnie wouldn’t flip the coin because she was scared she would lose it) and she wrote down her real name and I wrote mine. She now calls me Thomas and I call her Minnie because I can‘t pronounce her real name. Tomorrow it is back to TO BE and I will probably get yelled at for wasting a class with her but oh well.

If only proper adults could be won over by a quarter and my defective eyeball.

Oh!  You should all totally check out my buddy Marcus' site.  There is the first/only/last ever interview of yours truly.  Aside from being a cool dude, he you can find a million links to his various projects.  He is organizing a GREEN music festival complete with music and vendors that you should probably check out if you are in the Worcester County area.  On top of that he makes some pretty sweet shirts and plays in a band.  I once photographed a concert put on by Marcus at Tammany Hall at which my car was stolen.  I probably shouldn't have left my doors unlocked (or forgotten my keys ON THE CONSOLE) but when the cops found it it had a bunch of beer in it so go me.

What did I eat today: a tiny hamburger that was stored at room temperature for three hours that was pale beige and immediately made me sick. Kimbap. I am starving.

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