::A Geek in Korea::

I was talking to some of my students about the World Cup. I asked them if they were going to watch it at home, or if they were excited about it. One of the students said they weren’t going to be watching it. I was taken back by this. To admit to not watching the World Cup in Korea is pretty much unthinkable. Every advertisement, show, and entertainment of any sort is completely tied into the World Cup at this point.

I’m sure there are some people not interested in soccer somewhere in Korea, but I couldn’t believe that this student would have said something of the sort. He comes into class with battle scars from his latest soccer game all the time. Why would such a student swear off from watching the World Cup? Were his parents killed by a soccer ball at the last World Cup? What could cause this to happen? I asked him why he wouldn’t watch the World Cup despite liking to play soccer.

He said it wasn’t because he wasn’t interested in the World Cup. It was because his father had removed the cable television cord in their house. Now no one in the house was able to watch television for the next month.

Why would his father do that? It’s because at the end of the month, coinciding with the very middle of the World Cup, is a set of school exams. This is probably the worst timing for a set of exams ever. Because of the time differences of Korea and Europe, most of the games are in the middle of the night. Soccer fans would be staying up all night to watch games. His father has banned watching television and fun until this set of class tests has passed.

While I can understand the desire for students to do well on tests, I hardly think that removing the cable television during the World Cup is an example of good parenting. Watching Korean soccer games is a cultural experience that unifies this country in an unbelievable way. People think fondly of the 2002 World Cup performance and they way it represented Korea on a world stage. The nationalism and pride that comes with watching the World Cup is amazing to experience. When the Korean soccer team scores a goal, everyone in an apartment building knows because the cheering. Even in the dead of night, it is loud enough to wake someone that had foolishly fallen asleep. To miss out on this because you have to study for some tests that, in the scheme of things, don’t make or break anyone’s academic career seems like too strong an action.

One of my current batch of kindergarten students is the most silent student I’ve ever taught. I’ve been teaching her for six months, and I was started to doubt if she could speak at all. I’m not talking about someone that is shy and reserved. I’m not talking about someone that only spoke Korean to other students. This girl didn’t talk to anyone, any time, ever.

She could have been mute for all I knew, but I wondered why someone would would enroll a mute girl in an English class. The other students thought she needed special help, but she was clearly one of the brightest students in the class. She understood most of my questions, and knew what to do on her work, but she simply would not speak.

When she really needed to say something or do something in class, I would bend down and wait for her to speak. For the first four months, I got no response from this. I never punished her. I never demanded she speak. I simply gave her the chance to speak to me if she wanted to privately. It turns out she was only comfortable whispering at first.

After four months of waiting for a response, she started whispering to me last month. It was very quiet, and she wouldn’t repeat herself, but she would speak only if I placed my ear near her and waited patiently. This wasn’t something that would happen everyday. The girl usually liked to sit next to me too, so I could tell she was feeling more comfortable in class.

She had plenty of opportunities to talk in class today. When we were working on our worksheet for the day, she grabbed my arm and whispered to me that she didn’t color the eyes of her panda correctly and she wanted help fixing them. This was the first time she ever talked to me without being prompted in all the time I had taught her.

Today was also the day after a nice rain storm, which means one thing: Mosquitoes in the school! It’s something of a tradition in the school to be teaching English while swatting mosquitoes at the same time. It doesn’t matter how many times they fumigate, the little buggers return. In the kindergarten class the students noticed there were two or more insects buzzing around. One landed next to the quiet girl and was persistent in its annoyance of her.

She grabbed my arm to tell me she had something to say. I bent down and she told me that there was a mosquito on the table. We went to smash it, but it flew away and attacked her some more. Eventually the class cornered it and I got to slay the beast in a valiant battle. The girl again pulled my arm and told me that there was another mosquito flying around. I couldn’t hear (or didn’t understand) the next few words, so she actually cupped her hands around her mouth and spoke up and said a word audible to the other students close around her to hear. She told me to open the door to let the mosquito outside.  It was the first time her voice was anything loud enough to not be confused for a sigh.

It’s really cool that this girl is slowly growing in confidence and trust enough to go from absolute silence to a more confident form of speech with me. The girl clearly likes me, as she’ll give me letters with adorable backwards written Korean characters. She also comes back into the class after everyone leaves to wave goodbye as well. I make sure to give her praise every day and encourage her to speak at her own pace, never embarrass her, and always give her my ear, pun intended, when she has something to say. I’ll be extremely proud if I ever get her speaking like all the other students in class. I’ve got two other students in the class that are extremely shy as well. I want to keep up my current form of motivation to see if it will help bring them out of their shells as well.

O,RLY?

YA, RLY.

What?

In my morning adult class yesterday, we were talking about ways to save energy. I mentioned shopping for clothing following the advice of the "Cool Biz" campaign. I had heard a rumor about Fan Death that I wanted to share with my class.

Fan death, if you recall, is the belief that sleeping in a sealed room with a fan on will cause the person to die. According to the Wiki:

There are several reasons given as to how a fan can kill:

• It is believed that an electric fan creates a vortex, which sucks the oxygen from the enclosed and sealed room and creates a partial vacuum inside.
• The fan uses up the oxygen in the room and creates fatal levels of carbon dioxide.
• If the fan is put directly in front of the face of the sleeping person, it will suck all the air away, preventing one from breathing.
• Fans can cause hypothermia. As the metabolism slows down at night, one becomes more sensitive to temperature, and more prone to hypothermia. In other words, if the fan is left on all night in a sealed and enclosed room, it will lower the temperature of the room to the point that it can cause hypothermia.
• Often, it is claimed that a combination of these factors is responsible. For example, it might be explained that the fan lowers the oxygen level in the room while raising carbon dioxide levels, which could prove fatal to a sleeping person already weakened by hypothermia.

I had heard a rumor that during the 1970’s during Park Chung Hee’s presidency that the government spread the idea of fan death as a way to convince Korean people to turn off fans in the summer heat, thus lowering energy consumption and preventing black outs. I heard this from a fellow teacher at my school but had never spoken to a Korean about it.

When I told them that perhaps the government was behind the idea of "Fan Death", they looked at me as if I was insane. Not because I was suggesting the government had lied for its own purposes, but that I disbelieved that sleeping with a fan on was dangerous. I had just woken up with a fan pointed at my bed, yet these women claimed that I was lucky to be alive. I told them that there is absolutely no danger of sleeping in a room with a fan.

They then started asking skeptical questions.
"Was the door closed?" one woman asked. I told her it was closed and locked, with no fresh air coming in.I also mentioned that the fan was no more than a meter or so away from the bed.

Another woman said that what I was doing was clearly dangerous. "The wind going over your face will create a vacuum and suck the oxygen out of your  mouth and nose. The oxygen in the room will disappear!"

"What about Air Conditioners? Don’t you think those are dangerous?"

I was laughing at the absurdity of it all. They could not believe that I had placed a fan near my bed and endangered myself and my wife so carelessly. I challenged them. I told them to pick their least favorite family member, put them in a room, and turn on the fan and tell them to take a nap. If they don’t look like they will survive, wake them up before they die. Everyone laughed, as if they thought that was akin to suicide. The Fan Death myth refuses to die with women that grew up in the 1970’s. Despite all the evidence, and the proof that I’m still alive, they simply won’t listen to me about it.

When I ask my younger students about turning on the fan in the room, they laughed when I asked about the door being closed. They clearly don’t believe it. Regardless, I’m going to continue to live on the edge and have a fan going in my room this summer. I’m dangerous like that.

It’s simple to make things a much bigger deal of things in kindergarten. Some dramatic actions and funny voices can turn a boring lesson into a fun one. The students take cues from your actions to judge how they should act.  Moving a few chairs around and acting shocked at the importance of a paper instantly turns a worksheet you prepared into a "test" that the students take seriously.

I had worked out that my students needed to work on a paper I had made to correctly color and find the pictures of the words they knew. If I had let them work together, they would have finished it too quickly and probably wouldn’t have gotten anything out of the exercise. Instead, I separated them to sit along at a table, set crayons down in front of them, and called for silence as I explained we were having our first "test".

The students were remarkably serious about it for their age. For the first ten or fifteen minutes they all worked in silence, asking me only to repeat the questions a few times. Most of them should know all their colors by now. The few times they didn’t know a word they would try to cheat, or ask each other in Korean. This is pretty normal for most tests I give. Students just assume I don’t know what is going on when I start giving tests. I kept walking in between cheaters and disrupting their line of sight while subtly suggesting they kept their eyes on their own paper. Occasionally I would give hints when it was clear they were frustrated.

I saw a few parents sneak a look at what I was doing since my class is usually a raucous affair always teetering on the edge of chaos while still managing a fine thin line of English education at it’s core. This quiet was that unnatural sort of still that makes parents nervous. Clearly, we were up to something and this was the calm before all sorts of noise would be made. I managed to get them out the door before anyone got really loud and restless. Everyone got "good job" enthusiastic praise for their effort and they proudly showed their papers to their parents.

The parents needed a little help understanding how a page of coloring was a test, but once they understood it was a listening, color, and directions sort of test they were happy with the results.

In keeping with our school policy of not wearing shorts to appear more professional when teaching, I needed to go shopping for cool summer clothes. I detest fashion to the highest possible degree. I hate clothes shopping more than a large percentage of activities I do to continue my existence in society. Hearing me talk about fashion is like being caught in a solar eclipse, it so rarely people need to put on protective goggles and not look directly at the source of my hate lest they be blinded, much like staring directly in the sun.

The Korean government has enacted a plan that urges people to stop wearing jackets and ties in summer. This makes me thankful I don’t work in an office environment that requires suits and ties. I’m also thankful I don’t work in the Korean government, because wearing a jacket in summer seems like something people shouldn’t need to be told not to do. It’s hot people, and jackets are something to keep you warm. C’mon!

The idea behind the plan is that if office workers are free to wear more comfortable clothing during the summer, less air conditioning will be required, reducing the energy required during the hottest parts of the year. This prevents power shortages, saves money, reduces pollution, and makes people more comfortable at the same time. It also spawns new requirements for the fashionable, provides work to businesses related in selling and manufacturing of specialized clothing, and makes people shop for new "cool" suits in the middle of summer.

That being said, when fashion is about being comfortable and helping the environment at the same time, I can’t feel bad about the trend too much. While my job doesn’t require suits or ties at my campus, we do need to wear comfortable casual clothes. Last year I picked up a nice bamboo fabric shirt that helped me stay much cooler while I worked. I spent my Memorial day off work shopping for a more comfortable pair of pants for the summer. All the department store windows were filled with "Cool Biz" style suits for the summer. I had already picked up a few light fabric shirts designed to be wrinkle free and cool earlier in the week.

I completed my cool fashion "fashion concept"  with my sandals, new pants, and cool shirts. It’s not much of a "concept", it’s more like "I’d like to be comfortable and not sweat like crazy at work, please" fashion statement. Before Korea, I had never been known to use the term "fashion concept" in a absurdist non-ironic way. I’m pretty sure the quotes I’m using with the phrase are still "irony quotes" (picture the annoying air quoting gesture as you read them), but I’m not sure if I can still play that off convincingly after spending an entire day shopping with my wife for a specific style of pants. I’m really not sure if this is a case of Korea changing me, or having access to the "On Style" network at to watch at my home.

My wife and I needed to take our dog Yoshi to get his third set of shots. We affixed a basket to the back of my wife’s bike, and set the dog in for the ride to the vet. We got the shots, and then got on our bikes to go back home. We crossed one intersection and waited for the light to change.

There was a car that was waiting near the intersection to turn right. As we kicked off to start pedaling, the car continued to go forward despite the fact that we had a clear "walk" symbol and there were at least five people crossing the intersection with us. There was a boy on rollerblades behind my wife’s bike looking at our puppy. Since I was supposed to ride behind to make sure that the dog didn’t jump out of the basket, I sort of looked behind to see if I could get behind the boy. I saw that the car was really close to my bike, but I just assumed it was being very aggressive about turning. I was RIGHT in front of it as it kept rolling forward, so I yelled, "Hey, WOAH!"

The car didn’t stop. I had seen that it was coming for me, so I got my foot and leg out of the way, but the car ran over my back tire. I didn’t fall off the bike, I just sort of let the bike go as it went under the tire. I looked over the hood of the car. The woman driving wasn’t paying attention at all, so I gave a nice curse to get her attention. She had been looking at the person in the passenger seat, not forward.

We were both lucky no one was directly next to me to get pinched by my bike as it got crunched. The driver never realized what was happening. Her passenger got her to stop, and I pulled my bike out from under her car. The back tire was ruined, shaped somewhat like a crescent. The spokes were bent beyond repair.

I hauled the bike back to the curb and expressed my extreme dissatisfaction with the woman for running me over, in so many words. The two women got out of the car and gave me a sorry look. The passenger looked like death warmed over, a woman not much older than we were, but sickly and weak looking. The other woman, which I later found out to be her mother, was not really concerned about my health at all.

The first words out of her mouth was, "Sorry I ran over your bike. We are in a hurry to get to the hospital because of my daughter. Sorry!" It was implied that I should just let them go at this point, but the look I gave them made it clear I didn’t think that was the end to anything.

I’m not sure if they were betting on the fact that I was a foreigner that I wouldn’t know my rights, or that they thought I wouldn’t be fighting for a little more compensation that a token apology said in haste. I really think that it was more that the sick woman was so important to the lady driving that hitting a foreigner on the bike seemed like something not worth worrying about too much if it delayed getting to the hospital for too long.

My wife rode back after she saw what happened and the two women stated that they needed to get to the hospital as soon as possible to her as well. Since I was luckily uninjured, I suggested that we cross the street to a bike store LITERALLY across the street, get my bike fixed, or, failing that, they buy me a new bike. They said that they needed to get to the hospital, but had no money to pay me at the moment. They wanted to go to the hospital, then meet somewhere to sort out the problem.

I’m not sure if this was out of general concern about the sick woman’s health, or a chance for them to skip out on paying. The woman really did look sick, but I refused to let them go without a bike I could ride home, whether it be something new or my old bike in a much better condition. I told them the price of the bike, and I would settle for any bike up to that amount. I really think that this was a very reasonable agreement on my part. They refused to go to the bike shop, and the mother called her son, who was an insurance agent.

We called my mother in law, who is also an insurance agent. She was attending an funeral at the moment, and wasn’t able to come to the scene while we waited for the other insurance agent to arrive. As we waited, the boy on rollerblades that had wanted to look at our dog stayed with us. He was curious about me and the puppy. We wanted to keep him as a witness in case some of the facts were put into dispute. We gave him enough money to get an ice cream cone, got his phone number, and asked him what he saw. He agreed that the car had hit me. He’s probably lucky my bike was between him and the car, because he had a good chance of getting hit otherwise.

We waited for around twenty or so minutes for the insurance agent to arrive. After we explained what happened and what we wanted, he offered to take us to the bike shop to have the tire fixed. He placated his mother, who wanted to blame me for getting in her way when she was in a hurry. We had suggested this very solution at the beginning since the bike store was across the street, and it would have saved her lots of time if she really needed to go to the hospital so quickly. She seemed exasperated that we had wasted all this time having him come to the scene of the accident when the bike store was so close, but she was the one that refused to go there in the first place and had demanded she call him.

The woman desperately wanted to take her daughter to the hospital, so we went with the son to the bike shop. He paid for fixing the bike. This is the only time the bike shop owner didn’t charge an obscene amount of money to fix our bike. I gave the bike a ride around the block and it seemed to be fine. The man refused to give us anything else, and wouldn’t even apologize to us.

The son offered to take me to the hospital, as obligated by Korean law, but I refused. If I had thought there was any chance I was injured, I would have instantly took him up on the offer. There would be no reason to pass up on free medical checks if it would have proven wrongdoing.

I wanted to be honest. I’m not going to go to the hospital and lie about being hurt. On the off chance that I wake up tomorrow and I’m not able to walk, I’m not sure what I’ll do. I was told we got a day to have a checkup performed before I lose all right to collect more cash for the accident. I hope I’m not punished for my kindness.

Looking back now that I’ve organized my thoughts, it’s clear we were in shock, but we made some mistakes. If something similar happens again, not something I’m exactly hoping for but just in case, I’ll be sure to take pictures of everything first. My camera phone was in my hand, but I didn’t think to get pictures. The woman also refused to share information like her driver’s license number or name with us, which is absolutely ridiculous considering the circumstance. While we got the business card from her son, we don’t know who this guy really is to any provable degree. We have the witness’ phone number, which was good, but entirely due to the boy liking the dog long enough to stick around.

I’m okay, which was pure luck, and I’ll just be thankful for that instead of wishing for money.

I swear when I decided to take care of Yoshi, my descent into dog ownership was never going to sink this low. I had always thought that there was an barrier of pride that I had that would never allow me to do some things. For example, I never pictured myself as a person that would ever purchase, "Dog Clothes."

Yoshi: The "What have you done to me?" expression.

So what the the hell is my dog wearing then? Well, it seems that now whenever you purchase anything at a store, even dog food, you get small token nationalistic items such as this puppy t-shirt. We needed the food for him anyway, so we ended up getting the shirt for free. It’s got a soccer ball and the expression "Again 2002" on it, which happens to be the rallying cry for Korea this year for the World Cup. I don’t even have a World Cup shirt yet!

It’s not like I had done any fashion shopping. I got food and it came with the dog t-shirt. That counts for something. Also, I pretty much dressed him up for the sole purpose of taking that picture. By the time I had gotten an in-focus snapshot, he had already gotten one of his legs out of the sleeves. Seems Yoshi dislikes the shirt as much as I do. With the amount of fur he has, it’s probably no surprise the thing didn’t stay on long. He’ll probably only wear the T-shirt if we watch the World Cup with friends to root on the Korean National Team.

While I can no longer claim to be someone that doesn’t own "Dog Clothing", I can take solace that people I work with have gotten more expensive dog clothing custom tailored and refitted for fashion purposes. I’ve got to redefine my boundaries now that my dog has fashion options.

My cousin in law, a young boy with a love for the NIntendo DS hasn’t been having much luck convincing his parents to buy new games. He spent his entire savings of Lunar New Year’s day money to just get the system and one game to begin playing. He’s been playing the same game for the past few months and can’t get another because his mother has banned him from going to all game stores. Combine this with a lack of cash, and you have someone who isn’t able to enjoy his expensive purchase.

On the other hand, I have several Nintendo DS games that I’ve stopped playing for various reasons. Lack of time being the most likely factor, but there are only so many games to occupy my time, and only the best of the best can see play on a frequent basis. What I don’t play I usually trade back for cash to fund other purchases, but even I have a minimum point where holding onto a game is better than not getting back enough cash. This being the case, there are a few games I’ve beaten and have little or no enthusiasm to play again sitting in my collection.

When I had been asked to help with the purchase of the gaming device, I wanted to give him a few of those spare games I had to build his library, but my wife suggested it wasn’t yet the time. She foresaw the problem the boy now has and asked me to hold onto the games I wanted to trade him so that when he did get bored I could give him something new to play. Also, we wanted to make sure he could learn to balance his school work and his gaming habits. We had to delay giving him a game earlier when he didn’t do as well as his parents wanted on one of his frequent school testing sessions.

After a long wait, she delivered the "new" game to him when she visited their house yesterday. The entire time she was there, he was glued to his NIntendo DS again playing his "hand me down" game. We deflected credit from the purchase and gift by claiming we owed him something for Children’s day a while ago, and that his mother had "allowed" us to get it for him. He shouldn’t go begging me for games, but ask his mother if he had done a good enough job to receive one. I’m glad that I get to be the "cool" relative.