Crazy Kids, Crazy Life

It's been a long time (now I have the Cake song stuck in my head)

Here it is on youtube in case it's stuck in your head now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9HjvIHsEhM

Getting on with it....because Dave and I are very interested in cooking local cuisine, we are starting a tradition at work to have cooking parties with our co-workers. Every once in a while we are going to gather and cook various meals, some Korean and some Western. It's a good chance for everyone to spend time together and learn something new. We started our tradition two weeks ago, after work on Friday. It was Korean night in which they taught us how to make thin seafood pancake-esk things. They were thinner than the pancakes we know and love back home, and they were full of scallions and an assortment of seafood. It was really good. We shared a few bottles of traditional rice wine and had an enjoyable evening. Our director was very impressed that Dave and I do the dishes together and help each other. (What can I say, were a good team!)

There isn't a very big foreigner community here in Mokpo (as you could imagine) but there certainly is one. I'm not sure who it was, but someone organized a Thanksgiving pot luck dinner at the local foreigner bar. We made ants on a log (a childhood classic). We went with our friends Kirsten an Keegan. It was a very strange site to have so many non-asians in a room together. We don't have many friends here so it was a bit awkward. The foreign community seems a bit clicky with well established groups of friends. We stood at a table closest to the food (good strategy) and talked with a few people. The food was delicious and it was nice to eat some western food such as stuffing, chicken, mashed potatoes, and pizza. The dessert was my personal favorite! I think there may be another pot luck coming up to celebrate Christmas. We have to start planing what we will make now due to the extreme lack of anything close to what we know in the grocery stores. Any suggestions?

I, Lindsey, have been sick for the past week and a half. What started off as a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad case of the flu lasting roughly 8 days, turned into a pestering cough, which yet again turned into a basic cold. Needless to say it has not been fun. It's exhausting trying to teach in such a weak state but I'm making it through. I will tell you my secret: lots of Go Fish and Uno. I'm pretty sure I used up at least half of each class just letting the students play such games. The joys of teaching!

One positive from being sick is that Secretary Teacher made some homemade traditional Korean tea for me. After typing to her for about 10 minutes using Google Translation, because she speaks very little English, I found out that the ingredients are: ginger, jujube (an Asian fruit similar to apples), and honey. It was delicious and we plan on making some of our own when we get paid.

As for school, it's been a bit crazy, between seemingly useless work, to our boss using words that make me uncomfortable, to kids hiding under desks.

Let me explain.

First off, I have this class of all girls. These girls are around 12 years old and just learning the in's and out's of being crabby. I started off a month ago thinking I was going to love this class because there were no boys to be rambunctious and the girls are all very good at speaking English. I think I made a mistake and was a bit too lenient with them and they started rebelling in the typical girl style. One girl, Holly, in particular rebelled the most. During a review game of Jeopardy before a test I asked Holly to make a sentence using "It ......to....." (It is dangerous to play with matches). She didn't understand it so I had her make a few more sentences. She was not happy. Unfortunately I am 99% sure called me a dumb bitch under her breath. This caught me by surprise. Where on earth did she ever learn such a phrase?! I thought it was just my mind playing tricks on me. Low and behold though, I heard it again. I had enough! At the time a few of them were playing on their cell phones so I took them all away that instant. I began talking very fast (I was clearly very mad) telling them that they are rude, disrespectful and they have very bad attitudes. They kept saying they could not understand me. I said "don't play dumb with me!" and tried to talk as slow as possible. I tried to break it down as much as I could saying, "you are being mean, and you all have bad attitudes." For lack of better way of conveying my message I said "positive attitude" and had a big smile on my face and then I pointed to all of them and said "bad attitude" and put a big dopey frown face on. They still didn't understand me and I rushed out of the room and grabbed my director and told her that my class was being disrespectful. She went in there right away and gave it to them. One of the girls, Holly (the one that called me the name under her breath) was even in tears.

This is where it gets awkward. The girls were very upset because I took their phones away. They said that they were just putting it on vibrate and I took it away for no reason. (Oh kids, how you are so cheeky) My director was trying to defend the kids (which is silly because the students shouldn't use their phones so it doesn't matter if I take them) about taking their phones, saying that I shouldn't have done it and that they were just putting on the "vibrator". She must have said "putting on the vibrator" about 20 times. I could feel my face burning up with embarrassment. No one had the slightest clue but me, however it was very uncomfortable.

The next class the girls did a complete 180. They are now back to the lovely young girls they were when I first met them. I hope it stays that way.

In another one of my classes we were playing a game. All of the students had their hands up because they wanted to go first. I picked a quiet little girl in the back. Kevin, up in the front was not happy about this and when I turned around to write on the board I felt a huge WHAP! on my back....not just a little love tap...I'm talking a full on swing and hit! This student hit me in anger! I brought him right to my directors office where he defiantly got in trouble.

Because I was sick and I had little to no energy I would usually start off my classes asking the students to be extra respectful because I was sick. Like I was saying in one of my earlier posts, I really do not like teaching at EASY Academy because of the lack of respect they students have for any teacher. This little story sums it up. Almost every class I had was very quiet and respectful when I told them that I was sick....with one exception..... my EASY Academy class. After I told them, a boy in the back yelled, "Yeahhh!!!!!! Teacher is sick!!!!!!!!!" At that moment there is nothing left to do but shake your head and realize this is the next year of your life.

Not all of my school stories are disasters. Of course it's only the bad ones that I remember, except this one. I have a class of very funny students. Every day they come in with different jokes and antics they play. In one of my earlier classes with them, when I was still learning their names, they all switched from their normal seats and took on different names. They kept that game up for about 3 classes. I still don't know if I call them by their right names. Well, the other day I walked into the class and every single one of them was hiding under the table. I played along with it for about a minute and they all came back up. 5 minutes later, as I was doing attendance I asked the students where May and Ellen were. They said they may be in the lab so I had one of students go search for them. I continued doing attendance and the detective student came back saying she couldn't' find them. I thought it was strange since I could have sworn that I saw them earlier. About 3 minutes go by and all of a sudden May and Ellen pop out from under the table. Ohhhh my gosh! I was dying laughing!

Hmm, what else is going on at school? Oh, at EASY Academy I asked Sunny, the head teacher, if I could change my classes from IMT which focuses on creative writing....yes....creative writing to students who can barely make a sentence in English (not the point) to the newspaper class. In the newspaper class my main objective is to get the kids reading and speaking in English while increasing their vocabulary. We use a newspaper translated into English. The class is very open ended and quite enjoyable. I'm hoping this will help me enjoy work a little more. I really dread teaching the IMT classes for many reasons, which I have probably already stated about 1,000 times. I went from having 5 of those classes to 1. I'm very happy about it.

Every 2 months we need to do reports on the students. This means imputing test scores and writing reports  for each student. It's basically a glorified report card. Dave and I find it a little silly and a waste of time to write descriptions for each child when their parents can't read English. It's just another one of those thing at school that doesn't make sense. They are the biggest pain the the but because nothing is in English! We have to memorize which buttons to click and hope for the best! The other hard part of the task is trying to find their personal folders which are strewn about the school. I can't tell you how many Alice's, Amy's, and Stella's there are. It's difficult to try to sort through everything. It's okay though. We only have to do this every other month and our co-workers are extremely helpful.

In more exciting news, we are starting to think about our travels after Korea!!!!! Well, Dave is doing a lot of it while I rest, recover, and knit. The rough plan is to travel through Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Thailand) then spend a few months in India and Nepal. If money permits we are also thinking about Indonesia. We are doing rough budgets, time lines and general look over. We are getting really excited even though it is a year away.