::A Geek in Korea::

Test days are trying times for teachers. Despite what my students think, I give tests to be fair evaluations of students level and skill in a particular area of English. All my tests, bar one, was a multifaceted approach to testing. All of  my students had listening, whether it was dictation or simply "circle the correct answer" was dependent on the level of the students. Most of my students had writing. as well as a speaking portion to their testing as well.

Consider the dilemma I was in, testing the day after Christmas, when a majority of my students are either on vacation, or soon will be on vacation by the end of the week. While they still attend the English school regardless of their elementary schools being open or not, if Korean elementary school hasn’t beaten them down with an oppressive amount of work earlier in the day, no amount of nagging or yelling will suppress them once they enter our halls. It’s like pissing on a wild fire, once freedom is discovered it burns the students minds up completely.

Given this fact, I designed my tests in advanced, and disclosed the entire test to my students. I told them exactly what pages to study in their books. I told them no more than ten pages to study, and included parts from five of those exact pages, unaltered, on the test. Entire pages would be given verbatim as they appeared in their own text books. Short of doing the material for them and filing out the paper, I couldn’t have told them any more than what they knew going into the tests and still have called it a test in any sense of the word.

When the final tests results were in, it was blatantly clear who had studied, and who hadn’t. Anyone that scored in the 50% range was a raging idiot, and anyone that did better had at least been smart enough to look at the book during the long weekend. If I tell you exactly what is on the test, and you have three or more days to prepare, and you still can’t get more than 50% of what we studied together correct, that’s pathetic.

My older students in upper level classes have terrible books to test from. In one class I had a dictation test that would have been hard for even me had I not prepared the materials. I had to read the dialog once for them to bring the difficulty down to more "sane" levels. One group of students had to write an essay on their favorite seasons. Several students, even when provided a dictionary could not spell "favorite" or "season" correctly, despite it being on the top of the paper in the question. (Sigh)

My favorite incorrect answer was one of the speaking questions. They had to follow a model dialog and simply replace the vocabulary words with what was in the picture. The model dialog went like this:

(Picture of rabbit in a yard.)
A: "Do you want to see my rabbit?"
B: "Sure, where is it?"
A: "In the yard."

When given a picture of a dog in a kitchen next to an oven, several students answered:
Student: "Do you want to see my dog?"
To which I would answer, "Sure, where is it?"
Student: "In the chicken. Oh, wait…er…kitchen."

If they weren’t comically mistaking kitchen for chicken (A warning I gave them about 100 times since we studied that unit), they were saying something even worse:
Student: "Do you want to see my dog?"
Which I would to respond to by saying, "Sure, where is it?"
Student: "It’s in the oven."
To which I would simply laugh hysterically.

Christmas this year was very different that the usual affair. We set up the tree a few days ago, and Yoshi has yet to destroy it. That alone is beyond strange. We had our wedding anniversary last week, so we’ve had an excessive number of opportunities to spoil ourselves in the past few days. Instead, both of us were struggling to thinking of a single thing we actually needed for the holidays.

Up until a few days ago, I was thinking about buying an ultra-expensive personal media player. After weighing in on different options, visiting electronics stores, and shopping around online, I ended up getting…nothing. It was decided that if we ever end up getting a car, we could get a Navigation/GPS/Digital Television/Movie player combination device. They are very popular here, and there would be no reason to get two devices with roughly the same abilities. We’d get a car to let us travel around Korea with our dog more easily, and get navigation device to get from point A to point B without a map. We’ve put off that decision until sometime in the upcoming New Year.

I told my wife that we needed to do something for the holiday. Gift giving is more for children or couples here. It’s not typically what married adults do. Since we hadn’t gotten anything to put under the tree, we went shopping today on our day off. This alone was a huge gift from me. Shopping? On Christmas? Are you kidding me?

It wasn’t even all that crowded today at the department stores visited. It’s rather weird. The holiday "crush" must have been leading up to the holidays, because it was a fairly average day in the mall. Due to the mild weather we’ve been having, all the winter items were being sold at steep discounts.My wife picked up a skirt and coat at a 70% discount. Holiday savings galore!

I didn’t have anything in mind for a gift since my expensive toy got shot down, so I ordered a DS game from my local retail connection. They’ll have an English version of the latest Castlevania title I’ve been looking forward to within the week for me. They even offered to import a Nintendo Wii for me, but I declined because being in a "forced to import English games at twice the price" situation sucks. I’ll wait until someone else figures out the details of how to play different region games on the cheap. Region locks = bad for my potential business.

We ate a cheap meal, went grocery shopping, then came back to the apartment to walk Yoshi. After his walk, my parents called on Skype and we chatted for an hour or longer. They’ve got a webcam now too, so we have video calls from time to time. We got caught up on their last trip, and filled them in on what we had been doing for the holiday. Usually my parents spend a fortune to ship gifts to me, but this year we opted for a simple transfer of funds. It makes more sense, but knowing I’ll be getting my IRS statements in the mail instead of, say, a cool gift, isn’t really something you look forward to.

 All and all, it was just another typical laid back lazy holiday. I don’t miss the stress and pressure of finding the perfect gift for people, but I do miss tearing into a package in anticipation of something new and great.