Last weekend I set up my slack-line down by the Namwon theme-park and I had lots of Koreans watching me in amazement. Afterward, I went and watched a children's play with puppets and fell asleep because it was all in Korean - something about an ogre that gets his wart removed and lives in a dream, then realizes that life is better with the wart for some reason.
I got some new glasses last week and I updated my wardrobe. Koreans are very fashion-conscious, so it isn't hard to make a good or bad first impression depending on the way you dress. This week I taught a lesson on clothing vocabulary and basic sentences to my middle school kids and they loved it. The last game I played was saying "I put on my" or "I take off my" and some random vocabulary; the boys were embarrased when they had to say "bra" and the girls "underwear." It was all in good clean fun and the lesson went well.
My last fourth grade class was going smooth until this emotional kid flipped out over me taking his tape dispenser. He threw an eraser and hit me in the face and started kicking at me. My co-teacher restrained him and his peers drug him out of the class. We had to lock the doors, but I had to open them when he was pushing against the glass and going to throw a large phone at them. I restrained him outside until they called the big guy around to deal with him. Whew. Earlier, my co-teacher had to tell a sixth grade class that they could never come back to the English classroom because they were so naughty.
I am finding it easier to walk around the city and not be self-conscious. The secret is not making eye contact with strangers. Koreans show great hospitality towards friends and family, so they don't have time or energy for interacting with strangers. This may be a hold-over from the Confucian ethic of relationships and loyalty, but I think it makes practical sense.
Slack-lining in front of the indigenous group is surely a way to ingratiate oneself to the population in which you are now becoming gradually accustomed to in appearance mannerisms and general behavior.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that the premise of the puppet show revolved around a wart that the ogre wanted to jettison—yet realized that it did him better in the long run is surely good grounds for sleeping during a puppet show, though their sense of what is enthralling subject matter is obviously different from yours.
New glasses, general wardrobe updates that likens yourself in appearance to the students are excellent ways to augment the students absorption of vocabulary you wish to teach them.
Gaining control over emotional children flipping out of control due to a revocation of a tape dispenser sounds like no easy task to bare, yet I am sure that you remember times from your own rudimentary schooling experiences in which you felt emotionally upset for whatever reason on a bad day—every student has at least one of these during their early school socialization. Clearly, you handled the situation with poise and you deserve commendations for the effective implementation of modulated behavioral controls within the classroom setting.
I would be curious to know how the child got access to a large phone to throw at your door—was it on a cord or was it a loose phone.
In the area of the not looking at people because they don’t have time or energy for such quality friends issue, it would be interesting to lobby as people en mass to be your friend due to the large degree of Korean hospitality. It seems if you rotated a different friend a week at your place to eat dinner until all seven of them have eaten dinner at your house one time, the immediate week after this process has gone through, you could then eat at the seven friends house—each on a different night of the week. Invite each one over gradually again and start the process over. You will then have entire weeks, periodically, when you don’t have to cook.