::A Geek in Korea::

The American Thanksgiving holiday has once again arrived with me being in Korea. I haven’t made it to a turkey dinner for Thanksgiving for years. Not that Korean Thanksgiving, Chuseok, is bad. Visiting the Korean in-laws and eating lots of food is great. The men are still lazy like in America, but their are differences. We watch soccer or The Lord of the Rings on Chuseok, not American football. During Chuseok we eat seafood and rice with kimchi, not turkey, mashed potatoes, or the various unnameable casseroles produced by my aunts for the occasion. Two different excuses for gluttony and assal horizontology are always welcomed, but I must say, things just aren’t the same.

To make up for this, we happened to be in Costco during American Thanksgiving this week. We had picked up a sweet rebate coupon on a computer printer that we wanted to cash in. It just so happened that the first day we could cash it in coincided with the holiday. As we walked around, we stumbled upon pumpkin pie, which was always a holiday mainstay at my relatives gatherings. The only way we could have purchased whipped cream was in a bulk shipment that would make an whippet snorting fast food worker laugh with delight, we decided that we’d go for the alternate "vanilla ice cream" route.

I was told that there were turkey available in select locations that cater to the foreigner crowd, but as you’ve probably guessed, I don’t run in the foreigner circle by and large, and I usually avoid the habit of pining for something likely to make me overly homesick. My love for turkey is something I have a handle on most times of the year, but if I get to thinking about Thanksgiving with the fixings too much, the drool can sometimes overwhelm. It’s best not to think about it. I’ll count my pumpkin pie as a victory and simply substitute what I’m missing with something hearty and meat that’s easier to get in Korea. I might pick up a rotisserie chicken or something. Those things are common enough to be sold out of trucks on the street (!) As an aside, the sight of a giant rotisserie with cooking chickens set up on a truck is truly glorious, but remains a mystery to me as to how it came about.

My parents called last night. We talked for two hours with Skype. They even activated their new webcam for the occasion. I had to stop surfing the web in an undershirt and actually put something on to chat with them. That’s how special the call was. At least they didn’t mock me by holding up a leg of turkey or something. We chatted and arranged Christmas presents. Christmas really does start earlier each year.

For the most part, I’m usually very comfortable living in Korea. Thanksgiving is always a time to be with family, but the little things that ease the sting of what homesickness I have always help. It’s also good that I have a family to celebrate Korean Thanksgiving with, if I so choose.

One of the teachers at the school wasn’t available for an hour, so I had to teach one of my classes twice today. Since we are already dangerously close to finishing our book a month early, I couldn’t exactly move ahead at twice the pace I had set down in my syllabus. A dramatic solution was needed. I set out to find a suitable game for their level. It would, ultimately, need to be something we could do for the majority of the two hour class.

I settled on the "Odd man out" game. We have a group of words, and each of them is somehow related to each other. You had to choose the most unique reason to make one of the words "Odd man out". For example, if you had a list of words like "Bear, Tiger, Cat, Lion", you could give a reason like "A cat isn’t in a zoo", or "A bear isn’t feline". While the challenge for the students was to figure out all the words, how they related, and making a coherent reason for excluding one in English,

I wanted to turn the game into a fun challenge. The students were divided into teams. Then they had a class to look up words and put their unique reasons on paper. I took the "odd man out" student since we had an indivisible number and I’m not allowed to cut students in half. We played on a team against the rest of the students

I had played this game with adult students at a previous school. The students in this class are in elementary school, and they consistently came up with more amusing and unique answers than when I played this game in the past. Some of their answers were really awesome. For example:

One of the groups of words contained a doctor, a psychologist, a priest, and a poet.

My group suggested ,"The doctor is the only word that starts with ‘d’, so it’s the strange one".
Another group said, "Doctor, but because it’s the only one to not end in the letter ‘T’. "
The last group said "priest", because that was the only one that was allowed to marry people.

Those were totally awesome answers.

The final group of words I tossed in to see what kind of reaction it would get. I wanted to know what these students would say when they had to choose between: China , Japan, America, South Korea

Our group said, "Japan is the only island country."
Another group said, "Japan is the only country that didn’t end in the letter "A". "
Another group said, "America, because it isn’t in Asia."

Their creativity really impressed me. For homework, I gave them a harder task. They had to come up with four logically related words that each had a different way to make them "odd man out" depending on the conditions. The students really liked the game, so if they can make a good list, I’ll try to begin making another round of the game later.