::A Geek in Korea::

Today was our second Halloween day at school for students that come on the alternating days. The reason that Halloween is a one day affair in America is this: a costume is only the funny the first time you see it, and having multiple costumes is a pain in the butt.

Because most of the school comes everyday, we only had a few classes where students hadn’t seen my costume from yesterday.  My alien mask was giving me strange vision after I took it off. Since the eyes were covered in green filters, I would see everything in strange washed out colors for a few minutes. The students that saw my mask yesterday were no longer frightened anyway. I took it off and put on my second "costume".

A few days ago I went to a Halloween party at a bar. I went to see an old coworkers band, now sans coworker and with a new name. (Now all male band is now known as the The Cock blockers.) I sat around the entire day trying to think up a costume, but came up blank until it was about five minutes until I had to leave. Then I quickly grabbed a box, put some tape on it, then some ribbon and a pair of wooden disposable chopsticks, and made a crude phone looking device. I hung the phone around my neck. I went to the party as a "phone accessory".

The students liked my costume, and were curious to see how I made it. They thought it was funny. Some of them knocked my craftsmanship, but the time vs. reward was heavily in my favor anyway. They were just jealous they didn’t have a costume of their own. I made sure to give out as much candy as I could today, and completely depleted my multiple bag supply.

No one else did anything Halloween related other than handing out some candy. Tests days and Holidays coinciding really sucks the fun out of school.

Someone at a forum I post at had a idea to post a mix tape of ten songs to represent your musical tastes. I thought I’d give it a whirl, as I don’t do much meme-posting.

Air – Walkie Talkie -Universal TravelerWhenever I come home stressed out from work and need to write, I can put this song on and have the words start flowing. It’s basically "me" when I write in song form.

Radiohead- Hail to the Thief- There There
I love the whole lyrics and vocals to this song. I have many favorite Radiohead songs, but this one gripped me right away.

Aphex Twin- Drukqs – Ruflen Holon
I’ve been a fan of Aphex Twin since college, but this simple, beautiful song reminds me of a simple countryside in peace.

Daft Punk – Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
This was my "Working in Korea" theme for my first few years. Things kept getting worse at work, and I needed to do more with less, which had me feeling alienated and robotic most of the time. I was a tool in an English teaching machine.

Fiona Apple – Extraordinary Machine- A better version of me (Alternative Mix) / Extraordinary Machine
 I’m a frightened fickle person/ fighting, crying, kicking, cursing, / what should I do?
…
I’m good at being uncomfortable, so I can’t stop changing all the time
If this is cheating, so be it. I can’t listen to one of these songs without the other anyway. I’ve been a fan of Fiona Apple for as long as she’s been around, and her lyrics are always her strongest when she’s pissed off and uncomfortable yet assured. When I was switching jobs and having a hard time finding myself, I really got into listening to Fiona Apple again.

The Flaming Lips – Fight Test
To lose I could accept/ but to surrender I just wept and regretted this moment
There is always a time where you have to pick your battles, and sometimes you don’t forget the ones you stepped away from.

Incubus – Morning view – Wish you were here
When I get all lonely and introspective I like to listen to this song on my own. Staring up at the stars at night with a lighter being held above your head is almost a requirement when listening to this song.

The Postal Service – Such Great Heights
This track is one of those cheesy emo songs that I really like for the sweet lyrics. When I get all weepy from traveling alone, I like to listen to this song.

Mike Doughty – Haughty Melodic- American Car
My circus train pulls throught the night/
full of lions and trapeze artists/
I’m done with elephants and clowns/
I want to run away and join the office
When I stopped digging the foreigner heavy drinking bar scene in Korea, this was the song that sort of encapsulated that feeling for me very well.

Weezer- Self Titled (Blue) – Say it ain’t so
I dare ANYONE to listen to this song and NOT sing along. It’s simply not possible.

*Note: The Beatles aren’t on the list because they deserve a list of their own. I can’t choose one song. The list was difficult enough as it is!

Anyone with decent taste and some free time, post your list in the comments!

Today was the first of our "Halloween" parties. It was a Halloween party in name only, as we had speaking tests today in the majority of classes. No fun! We had to prepare tests and take students outside one by one for a speaking examination. Seeing as I had done this a number of times at different schools, I was sure to prepare a puzzle for all of my classes to work on while I was outside. I gave them a copy of the questions I would be asking then went outside. The students had five minutes to prepare, then I started calling students out at random.
Depending on their levels, the questions might have been a simple straight forward question/answer style response, or a more specific answer that required the knowledge of some related vocabulary. I had scores ranging from perfect to completely wrong, which is amazing considering I told the students every single question and every single answer every single day I taught them last week.

During the interview, I sat in another classroom. I had bought an alien mask, so when I called the students in after setting up the test, they entered the room to talk to an alien for their test. Some of the students were surprised, some laughed, and some were freaking out. I gave candy for every correct answer, then when I went back into class I gave them some more if they worked on their puzzle well. I also played some Haunted Hangman style games for candy as well.

When the students heard the bell rang, they were surprised. "So, whens the party? Tomorrow?"
"Uh, I gave you candy, that was the party."

 I was the ONLY teacher to wear a costume, to bring candy, or even do anything with my students vaguely related to the holiday at all. It was pathetic. The student’s expectations of a haunted house and multiple rooms of terror and parties was a bit of a stretch, but I didn’t feel like the other teachers tried at all. Even my foreign coworker was suffering what looked like a little burn out from a party heavy weekend. Tomorrow I hope the other teachers pick up the slack and deliver on some of their Halloween duties. Students are frightened of them enough, with the beatings and insane homework. All they need to do to cause abject terror would be to wear a scary mask too.

A hypothetical situation such as the following has been covered on The Brady Bunch, more or less:
Pretend you are walking down the street and find a credit card lying on the ground. As you pick it up you discover that it is signed with a basic script on the back that would be easy to forge, with an expiration day far in the future. No one is around. No one is looking for the card, and no one has seen you pick it up. What do you do?

I found such a card a few days ago. It was simply lying on the ground. I picked it up, looked at it, realized what it was, looked around, then wondered what to do. Since I had touched it, I thought about wiping my fingerprints off it, putting it back where I found it, and simply walking away. Then I thought that if someone more dishonest than I found this card, they might hurt the person that lost it.

The card owner was Korean. I didn’t know who it was, and I didn’t know how to get in touch with them. I had no idea who to call, or where to go to get this sort of thing settled. I supposed I would need to call the bank or service that issued the card, but I didn’t know what sort of questions they would ask. If I showed up at a police station to explain where I got the card, there might be a very good chance they wouldn’t understand me and a larger problem would arise.

Briefly I thought about the situation. A foreigner walks in with a credit card clearly with a Korean name on it. I turn it over to the police, and they run some sort of program to check what was purchased recently. The card had been in the hands of criminals before it came into my possession, so now all the fake purchases are attributed to me. Having no way to explain myself, I’m locked up and sent off to who knows where. Unlikely? Perhaps, but why take a risk.

To be honest, there was a fleeting second where I considered holding onto the card, using it to go on a wild spending spree at an electronics mall, living like a techno-obessed geek king. I would take up cigar smoking and walk around without a shirt on so that people could admire my copious amounts of chest hair while I talked condescendingly to the locals. There would be wild car chases, and perhaps a comedic sidekick that would join me before my inevitable shootout with the cops while on some remote tropical island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It would be a good life, short and sweet, with the option to be made into a film by Jerry Bruckheimer. This was all in a very brief second of doubt, before I pondered all the negative aspects of having my own credit card stolen.

Next, I thought about destroying the card. I didn’t have any scissors with me, and snapping the card in two wasn’t something I had been able to do with expired cards of my own in the past. This probably would have been the best option, but I decided I would hold onto it instead. I was actually headed to relatives house at the time, so I kept the card with me and simply handed it over to them. I explained where I found it and told them I don’t know who it is. Let them sort it all out. I don’t think they will do anything to abuse the card, and I trust them to either find the owner, inform the proper authorities, destroy the card, or figure out what to do.

Seems to me, when given a moral choice, I trusted someone with more chance of doing right to make the decisions for me, but didn’t trust the average person on the street to do the right thing. Perhaps this says something about my character as a person. Entrusted with power, I’m likely to go ask someone else to fix a problem too big for me if I think the consequences of failure are too severe. I haven’t lost sleep over my choice.

About two week ago, I broke the copy machine at work. I was printing something from the side tray, the intake of paper got messed up, and it got stuck in the machine so well that the repairman had to come and disassemble the entire machine to get it out. It was an impressive scene, that one single paper could cause a man to that much work. The guts of the machine were spread everywhere as he looked for the source of the problem. I broke the machine as well as humanly possible.

Now it’s something of an office joke when I have printing problems. For some reasons, the machines simply do not like me. The copier I killed gives me issues from time to time that no other people have. All I am doing is inserting a paper, pressing a number, then printing. How the machine know it is me defies rationality.

Today I needed to print a test quickly before class. I asked to use the desk secretary’s computer because the teacher’s office computer was being used. I typed up my sentences, then clicked print. The paper "printed" through the machine, but it was blank. I asked the secretary for help, since this was the first time I had ever used this computer. She went through the options, printing about six papers at various machines in the office. All of them were blank. The machines had conspired to not work for me at all.

I went back to the teacher’s room. This is the only printer that has worked for me consistently. I typed up the questions again, and luckily got the test printed without incident just before the bell rang. Something strange is going on at work with all the printers, and I don’t know what it is.

Nolboo is a character from Korean folk tales. He is the greedy brother of a man named Hungboo. It is also the name of the largest chain of Korean restaurants in the country. These restaurants use the picture of Nolboo as their mascot. It’s my absolute favorite Korean food chain, and every time I eat there I walk out proclaiming it was the best meal I’ve ever had. We had one of the franchise in our old neighborhood. We got introduced to it by a friend, then returned there many times.

When we moved to our current neighborhood, we searched for a replacement restaurant that would take Nolboo’s place. We eventually settled on a small, quiet restaurant that never seemed to draw much attention. The waiting staff was always bored since we were the only customers. We had a feeling that this was
a family owned shop and that they weren’t doing very well. We liked the food, but ate there partly out of guilt. There was nothing spectacular about the meal. It was simply the basic meal you could get anywhere. They weren’t competing on price, taste, or location. It was simply the only place that was consistently empty during the busiest times of night. This continued for a few weeks.

The last time we went to go eat at our family owned restaurant, we saw that a Nolboo Hangari (They have different franchises based on their main dishes) had opened up right across the street. Since they had just opened, we decided to go to Nolboo instead. We told ourselves that the next time we wanted to eat out, we’d go to the family restaurant for pork. We would peer across the street into the windows to see how the family run business was doing. It was empty as always. We enjoyed our meal at Nolboo as always, but thought that the family restaurant had very little chance of lasting long with the more popular chain being across the street.

Today we went to eat in the same area and ended up at Nolboo again. The meal was even better than last time. The guilt is still there about abandoning our old eatery, but the price, service, and food are all better where we eat now. There is nothing compelling us to eat at the old restaurant other than a dislike of chain restaurants, even though Nolboo is the best food in the neighborhood. You want to support independent restaurants to promote diversity, but you also want to walk out of a restaurant with the best tasting food in your stomach.

It’s a hard compromise when you think that people you used to support might be out of business because of a popular chain moving in and taking what business they had. There is plenty of competition for Nolboo in the neighborhood, but it’s consistently packed even a few weeks after it’s opening. The food chain is well known and popular. I don’t want to see the franchise model to supplant Korean local niche restaurants, but they do make a good meal.

The review for my test in one particular class was short today. We had gone over the material enough times that they had gotten used to answering the questions as a reflex. It worked well to spend this week drilling the answers into their brain. We got finished and had time to have some free conversations after we put away our books.

One of the girls in the class was talking about a teacher at their Korean school. The student was talking about the fact that none of the students in the class liked the teacher.  One of our questions was about Teacher’s day gifts. She said none of her classmates gave her teacher a present this year. This is highly unusual. I asked why no one would give a carnation to a teacher they had all year.

"First, He is very old, and he smokes in class," she said.

"He smokes during the lesson in class, or between classes on a break?" I asked.

"In class. During the lecture. Oh, and he swears too." she replied.

"He swears? To students?"

"Yeah, when he kicks them in the head, he calls them bad names."

"When he WHAT?"

"He kicks students in the head and curses."

"Your teacher KICKS students in the HEAD? Please explain."

She went on to explain that students that don’t do work are expected to get in a "push up" like position, legs bent, facing the floor, hands down on the ground. The teacher then "kicks" their head. She made the motion of stamping her foot down on someone that was in this position. She said the man was so short that the students would lose sight of him as he walked with their classmates. He wasn’t much taller than a 11 year old girl. This is probably why he needed the students to lean down for punishment. That’s the only way he could be imposing.

The student said that everyone in the class was united against this particular teacher, and would flick him off and curse at him behind his back. I don’t know what caused this situation to escalate to this point, but the hatred seems equal on both sides. He was a career teacher, but the students seemed to think he wasn’t going to retire any time soon despite his age.

It sounds like a classic case of "short man’s disease" to me.

Since I spend the day as a human radio, reading and rereading in front of students to help their pronunciation, a case of the hiccups can be disastrous. It’s hard to maintain the proper pauses and flow to a sentence when you start gasping for air every few words. I had been eating a pear between classes as a snack and must have eaten too quickly, as I was fighting off hiccups on one of my classes.

One student shouted that I should, "Drink some water!" That is what I usually do, and I had nearly drown myself while sipping during my hiccup fit. This was not working.

Since all my students lack volume control, the next student also shouted that I should hold my breath for ten seconds or longer. I inflated my cheeks and waited, but they said I had to start over since I didn’t cover my nose as well. When I pointed out that I hadn’t been breathing through my nose, I spasmed again. Another cure, another failure.

Next came the weirdest solution I have ever heard for a hiccup cure. A student shouted, "Pull your tongue with your fingers! That will end your hiccups!"

According to a show on Korean television called "Sponge", this is the sure fire cure to all hiccups.

"Pull my tongue? What?" I asked.

The student demonstrated by squashing his tongue between his thumb and forefinger and quickly yanking downwards. It looked painful. Several students said they were willing to pull their own tongues, or might have been offering to pull mine for me. While most of these students looked sincere, I couldn’t help but think that asking someone to pull their own tongue was something like asking someone to give themselves a wedgie or poke themselves in the eye. Wait until they do it, then laugh!

I wiped off my hand, grabbed my tongue, gave it a little tug, then waited.

*Hiccup*

Damn it!

The focus of my last class of the day today has changed once again. My student has a series of mid-term examinations this week. She studies at school taught entirely in English. She’s been coming for extra English lessons for months now, but today the class was somewhat different. I was teaching science! Her lesson in her science book was about planets, axis rotation and why we have seasons. Thematically, this works well, because in her reading books done by the same publishers, all the stories also feature lessons about seasons and weather. Instead of focusing on poems about winter, we are moving on to the science about where there is a winter.

Before class, both my director, and my student were asking me, "Did you, uh, study science? Do you like science?" They wanted to know if I was going to be able to prepare the lesson. Going into the class, I didn’t know why they were suddenly interested in such topics. The only science I did poorly at in high school was chemistry. (I passed the class solely due to my ability of being able to quote a line from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". True story.) General science was something I was always interested in.

Luckily, I had a degree of understanding that let me grasp third grade science well enough to get the basic points across. My cup represented the sun, and her phone represented the Earth spinning on it’s axis. We went over the terms and eventually she could predict the weather in a particular location based on it’s position relative to the sun.

We moved on to phases of the moon, the lunar calendar, and composition of the moon and other planets in the solar system. I even remembered the mnemonic device "My Very Excited Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas", (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) where the bold letters represented planet names. I had to modify the device now that Pluto is no longer considered a planet. Now it’s simply, "My Very Excited Mother Just Served Us Noodles."

Things I’ve learned while teaching science for a single lesson? Sometime in the past I’ve subconsciously I’ve adopted the British/International pronunciation of "Uranus". I now say "Uran-us" with a "soft a" sound, instead of the Mid-western American"Ur-anus" with a "hard a". I realize now that would be how a doctor talks about your sphincter. When I went to correct the student’s pronunciation, she got a laugh as to why I was insistent that the "soft a" sound was more pleasant to listen to for a native speaker.

Since this is a cram class, we’ll have another lesson tomorrow before the test. More science lessons tomorrow! It’s a change of pace from my other classes, where I am reviewing for tests and preparing for mid-terms next week. (Halloween = Canceled! DAMN!)