One of my youngest, lowest level students was supposed to write a haiku for his homework. Any book that asks early readers to write poetry is insane. However, the point is that they had to count the syllables to their words and arrange them in a five, seven, five pattern. We had spent the entire class clapping out words so that the students could figure out how to say words with the proper number of syllables. Unfortunately for me, Korean, when taking an English word, will often add one or two more extra syllables which messes up almost all lower level student’s pronunciation.

I told a student that his line of poetry was one syllable too short, because when he clapped he used Korean pronunciation. He actually told me I was wrong, clapped out the same like with Korean pronunciation again, and tried to call me dumb. This did not put me in a very good mood for the rest of the day. I corrected him a second time, clapped out my pronunciation, and let him see his mistake. At least he accepted that I knew more than him after that.

Another group of older students were working on a cross word puzzle I had made for them so that they wouldn’t be forced to read the entire time. Despite what they think, this makes me a nice person, because I am thinking about their boredom and dislike of repetition. I told them we would read for a certain amount of time, then work on the puzzle.  The first ten minutes of the puzzle was closed book, and the rest was open book, as long as they didn’t just shout out the answers to one another. Spelling help was acceptable, but yelling out solutions wasn’t.

I had a girl call me over to her table to ask me a question. Instead of using English, (strike one), she used rude Korean, as if you were calling a dog or baby as if I didn’t know what she said (strike two). Then she proceeded to get pissed off that I wouldn’t just tell her the answers she wanted to know and expected her to read the question and think (strike three).

This is one of the downsides of learning Korean, in that you have to constantly be on guard against students that try to whittle away respect by treating you like a lesser person. I told her that if she ever did that to me again, she would be in very big trouble. I don’t think she’s ever had a native English speaker that actually understood how condescending she is when not speaking English. As sweet as she tries to be in front of me, I know she’s actually someone I need to watch for when she speaks Korean.

I was already a bit annoyed from all this student mischief when my taxi driver going home decided to be the worst driver ever. He took the absolute worst path, hit every traffic light, and ignored many, many opportunities go a faster route. I know how condescending it is to be told how to do your job, but I was absolutely stewing in the back of his cab as my fare went to record new highs. When I got out of the cab and someone made a dash for the taxi door to hope in the back seat, I actually told the next woman, "Don’t take this taxi, he is very slow."

She freaked out that a foreigner was speaking Korean to her and dove into the slow taxi to escape me as I walked away.
 
(Sigh)