::A Geek in Korea::

We get free English newspapers at the school. I only started being interested in them because the crosswords. One of my intensive single student classes has an essay heavy text book. All that is required me is to help her learn how to prepare her notes, then give a series of practice tests in which she writes for the majority of the class period. Rather than twiddle my thumbs for an hour, I picked up the crossword. I actually completed a crossword on my own the first time since I had given up on crosswords in general for about a year. It felt good to be in the groove and solving some English related puzzles, so during my lunch break I brought home a newspaper to read in the taxi, and to try to solve at home.

Whenever any of the students in the school see me pick up an English newspaper and read it, they give me looks of complete awe, as if I’m levitating while swallowing flaming swords or something. Really, it’s not that I go out of my way to read a newspaper in front of people or something, but people look at my like I have magical powers when I do. Some of my students think I’m just faking it, and that I can’t really understand anything on the paper. I guess holding up a paper and pretending to read it is something they are used to and suppose everyone else does it as well.

When I got into my taxi, I told my driver the destination, then went to unfold my paper. My arms stretched so the paper went over the front seat briefly. The taxi driver gave me this extremely paranoid look, as if I was going to decapitate him with it. Whatever. I went to reading the news, and as we stopped at a light, I heard a scream to my right. "HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHEYYYYY! HELLLLLLLLLLOO"

What the hell?

The man in the car parallel to me was screaming to get my attention. I looked over, and he gave me this smile, like, "I’ve got something important to share with you.". He did a sort of tap on his glass, as if he wanted me to roll down my window. I returned to reading the newspaper. I could feel his eyes on me as I finished the article. Somehow this guy thought that riding in the back of the taxi with a newspaper meant that I was in the business of giving thirty second English lessons while the lights changed. I was baffled by what he was possibly going to try to explain to me. He was really creepy.

Rattled, I went back to my apartment. The elevator had a lengthy descent, so I resumed reading the newspaper. No children ever talk to me in the apartment complex. I live on an upper floor, and they tend to live at the bottom and play outside. As I was waiting, a boy came out of an apartment and started screaming for one of his friends to meet him. He stopped when he saw me.

He then did the whole, "Hello? HELLO? HELLLLLLOOO?" thing that children do to try to get your attention. I find it incredibly rude, because if I respond, I get either laughed at, or they simply act like I’m putting on a show for them. I choose not to participate instead. I’ve got plenty of students that aren’t rude when trying to get my attention that speak to me everday. Being rude isn’t going to win me over with them either. I was fairly annoyed from the whole taxi episode, but when the boy continued to yell at me, I gave him a terribly frightful look.

"No. Don’t do that. I don’t bother you. Please, don’t bother me." I said it in a very sour tone, which I regret now, but at the time I was in the middle of a very terrible day at work and have been completely stressed by the (incredible) amount of work given to me this week. To be fair, the child might have even understood what I said, because he gave me a downtrodden look and went on his way.

Had I not been carrying the newspaper, would he have bothered me? I don’t know. No one bothers me when I listen to music, but I haven’t been carrying my mp3 player to work recently. I don’t know why people feel compelled to annoy me when I read a newspaper. There really isn’t anything magical about a guy reading an English paper at all.

My first class of the afternoon was at 2:30. I came back early to prepare my lesson.  The only other teacher in the room was tired and was trying to sleep in her chair facing the heater towards the back of the room. The head teacher shares my book, and had it stored away in her file on her desk. I leaned over my desk to the head teacher’s file and tried to pull out the book I needed without sitting up. As I pulled the book out, I spilled the head teacher’s coffee directly onto her chair, which contained her Burberry purse a new knitted wool sweater!

Zoinks!

I looked over to the other teacher. She was still sleeping. Perfect. Now here was my chance to run around like a bad sitcom character, quickly trying to replace or fix a situation I had caused without getting trouble before the person in question had come back home. First things first. I cleaned off the expensive looking purse and coat. The coffee had already started soaking into t he cushion of the seat. No matter how much I did to try to soak up the coffee, it continued to come out of the seat. No way I would be able to fix the damage in ten minutes when the class finished and my coworker returned.

I pulled the chair out quietly as to not disturb my sleeping coworker to search for a replacement. The majority of the other chairs in the room didn’t match. Only the director’s seat was the same style. Perfect. She’ll be gone for a few weeks taking people on a tour of the United States. The perfect crime would be to switch it with her so she wouldn’t know what had happened until she got back. I adjusted the heights of the chairs and switched them. With no sign of my coworker yet coming out of class, I went to work cleaning up the floor around the chair and tossing away the evidence of cleaning.

After five or more minutes, I had positioned the bag and sweater back as I had found it, cleaned up the majority of the mess, and got the scene of the crime looking as good as possible. Or so I thought. I sat down on the computer and had Hitchcock like musical scores full of tension playing while I thought, "What would Mike Seaver do in a time like this?"

As soon as my coworker sat down, she pulled out a tape she needed for her next class. It had been splattered with coffee. "What’s this? Did something happen?"

I lasted a whole thirty seconds before I cracked and told her what happened. I would not last long in torture. Anyway, I told her what happened, and she said it was her fault for leaving the coffee on the corner of her desk. One of the papers on the table had a splash of coffee on it too. Damn the forensic evidence! She asked how I had cleaned up the spill on her chair so quickly. I said, "I didn’t. I just switched your chair with the director’s."

She got a devilish grin of satisfaction from that and said, "Good."

One of my afternoon classes is a huge group of students from three different classes thrown together. Originally it was going to be two classes better broken up by level, but then some of the students signed up for the morning intensive classes and the "high" level class shrunk too much to justify having it. If you can squeeze all the students in one classroom instead of two, this is what you do in a school like ours. I’m not complaining, because it means that when I usually had a solid schedule in the afternoon, twice a week I get a break instead. However, fifteen students crammed into a class is a bit of a handful if you aren’t on your game.

Since the higher level students have already been moved out of the class, the remaining fifteen have a hard time understanding me at times. Occasionally someone will come up with the right answer, but there are times where I am speaking to a wall. For example, today we were talking about fruits. I tried to explain a grapefruit to students. "It’s like an orange and a lemon, but bigger, and pink on the inside. It’s bitter and citrus, not sweet. Have you seen this?" The students were thrown off by the words "grape" and "fruit". They kept thinking of "grapes" and didn’t know that a "grapefruit" is something completely different. Grapefruits are still not common to see in Korea, so none of my students had seen one before.

I went around asking the students what their favorite fruits were. One of the students said, "A Kiwi". The book we were using called them "Kiwi fruits". I asked them why they would say, "Kiwi fruit". One student, probably the brightest in the class, said, "A Kiwi is also a bird."

"That’s right." I said, "Awesome answer. They are also people from New Zealand. People from New Zealand are sometimes called Kiwis too!"

All my students had this look on their faces like, "What the hell? I ran through the whole "nationality" thing once more, and told students that people from New Zealand refer to themselves as Kiwis. "I’m American, you are Korean, and people from New Zealand are Kiwi."

Then, one of the students turned to another in the back of class and said, "What? You can eat people from New Zealand? They taste like Kiwis?" If any grade school students are responsible for biting a Kiwi English teacher and get in big trouble for it, I’m probably responsible for the rumor that they taste like fruit.

Sorry about that.

I can not, for the life of me, remember the first time I got introduced to Gummy Bears. I remember my father buying us various "Gummy" candies and hiding them from my brother an I on a high shelf. We got them as rewards when we were well behaved at dinner. They were usually stale by the time we finished a package.
There was some sort of addiction hidden in those short stubby limbs and blank gummy eyes, as I’ve been an uncontrollable gummy eating freak. I don’t chew gum anymore, never dug on chocolate that much, and don’t eat much other confectionery, but gummy candies are still something I like to munch on from time to time.

At Costco, there are gigantic bags of Gummy Bears. A single bag of gummy bears containing enough sugar to rot teeth by simply staring at it’s neon colors for too long. Extreme Bulk Gummy. We purchased a bag once, and my wife hid the bag from me in the house to prevent some sort of bear overdose while she was away from the source. I was actually lucky, as they weren’t all that good a brand and I had no desire to track them down while my wife was out of the house. She would simply leave a container for me near the computer when I would write, and I would eat them absentmindedly. When I finished off the bag, we didn’t talk about repurchasing it. Too much of a good thing I suppose, but my gummy urge had faded for the time.

The last time I went to Costco, we didn’t go down the candy aisle, but we ran into Gummy Bears just the same. This time they were in the vitamin and supplement aisle. Gummy Bear Vitamins! I jokingly suggested that I should get these vitamins for a health supplement. We didn’t buy them at the time, and I quickly forgot about them.

Last week my wife had vacation time while i had to work. I came home to discover she had purchased the Gummy vitamins for me. Now they sit on my desk, mocking me. Since they are vitamins, I can’t just eat as many as I want. The dosage for small children is 1-2 bears a day, but I’ve been getting away with limiting myself to something around four a day. Two after breakfast and dinner. However, these vitamin gummy bears actually taste better than the bulk gummy bears we purchased earlier.

The feat of keeping myself away from the gummy bears is a test of will. My wife could hide them again, but then it would be silly and annoying to eat them since she doesn’t want to get them out twice a day for me. I’m also tall enough to reach any high ledge in  the house. I’ll have to just keep my desire under control and try to prevent a vitamin gummy overdose.

One of the parents of my students invited me and my wife out to dinner with their children. They are twin girls that have studied abroad and have excellent English. They really enjoy my class, so they wanted to hang out with me. Their mother agreed to treat at a restaurant of our choice, so we went to Bennigan’s again. This is our third trip in less than a month’s time, so we are getting a lot of use out of our mileage cards and discounts. Since it was snowing, the family even agreed to pick us up in their car so we could go together safely.

We had an excellent meal, even though we were stuck in the "children" section. I made a small child cry by smiling from our booth in her direction, and another child nearly projectile vomited onto our table. She only missed by like 10 centimeters but I got to see it all as if it was a glorious sort of slow motion action movie happening in front of my eyes.

We had a nice night with their family and I got to talk to some of my best students. My students are always shy when I see them outside of classroom situations. The mother was interested in our plans for a European vacation sometime this year, and wanted us to travel with her family! We’re still thinking about the offer. It might be a little too much of a headache to plan for a troop of people if we didn’t do a tour, and my and I were set on doing some backpacking. It’s something to consider, of course.

After the excellent (Free!) meal, we went to get my haircut at my regular salon. My new stylist was in cutting hair, so we waited. We were served green tea, and my wife got a hand waxing and massage while we waited. He cut my hair and complimented me on following some of his instructions on hair care. After my cut, I was also given a hand wax, then had my hair shampooed by a young assistant woman. She complimented me for my Korean, as well as telling me I was handsome. My stylist told her to be careful, since my wife was watching. She got very embarrassed.

As I was sitting in the chair waiting for them to take of the hair bib and let me free, I was thinking about my night out with my wife. I had a delicious and huge meal for free with interesting people. I then went and got my hair cut at a stylish salon, had my hair dried by two people at the same time, got fawned over, and all of this for around 10 dollars. We walked home on the ice and snow and had a good time keeping each other from falling down. When I got home, my well adjusted and well behaved dog was waiting for me to play with him, and I had an evening spent chatting with friends and listening to music while the snow fell and the wind blew.

What the hell did I do to deserve such luxury?

Due to our busy schedules, and changes in when we teach, we can’t always be home at a reasonable hour to feed Yoshi. As a way to assure that Yoshi will get fed at the same time every day, we purchased an automatic dog feeder. The feeder we bought allows for four meals to be programmed in sequence. We could feed Yoshi once a day for four days, or twice a day, etc. There is a clock and a timer associated with each of the feeding times. The best part of the appliance is that it lets you record a short message to play after the food bowl has been rotated to get the dog’s attention.

We’ve trained Yoshi so that he needs "permission" to eat when we put food in his bowl. If we are watching when we put the food in his bowl, he’ll wait until we say, "Ma Ma!", which is what you say to infants meaning "Eat!". Since the instructions to the machine came in English, and I was home when it was delivered, I was the one that recorded my voice saying the command to eat. Now whenever the machine is programmed to feed Yoshi, I’ll hear a voice saying, "Yoshi, Ma ma!"

Of course, the only problem is that when we set Yoshi’s food dish to feed him when we went out to watch a movie, we only had enough food for that day. The food dish cycles through the program for three days, because we didn’t bother to turn it off, but each time it would tell Yoshi to eat, but would only present him an empty dish. Talk about a mixed message.

The best reaction we got out of our talking food dish was when I went to feed Yoshi at the same time the feeder said it was time to eat. Yoshi saw me getting food out of the bowl and heard my voice coming from another room telling me to eat. He usually follows me when I go near the food, so when he heard my voice, he did a double take, as if he didn’t know what was going on with me being in two places at once. Messing with a dogs mind wasn’t on the list of features, but it should have been.

Warning: Post contains some foul language. Blame John McClane.

Occasionally I’ll watch television for the chance to practice reading Korean subtitles. There is a lot of potential knowledge, and a lot of humor that can be gained from this as well. I was watching a tabloid style entertainment show that was subtitled in Korean. These are great, because they are usually about a month old, so even I know what the "hottest rumors" are, and I don’t even follow Hollywood gossip. The episode had a piece about how aging Hollywood stars were signing up to do sequels of old action movies.

The clip they showed was from one of the "Die Hard" movies. I personally dislike the Die Hard movies, but even I had seen them a few times. The clip had Bruce Willis about to exit from a door. He held up his gun, then said, "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker."

The subtitles translated "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker" as "나는 간다" (Na-nun kand-a) or "I’m going."

I nearly fell off the couch laughing at the absurdity of the translation. That’s what he was doing, but something was lost in translation. My wife heard me laughing, so I had to explain what I thought was so funny. Then it struck me. What exactly does "Yippee-ki-yay motherfucker!" mean? How would I explain something as random and foul in a way that would appropriately express what it meant?

Do cowboys say, "Yippee-ki-yay?" I thought so, but why? Did they say it before the movie Die Hard was released? Does that help me explain things or not? Do I really want my wife cursing like this character if I do manage to explain it well enough? Probably not.

Perhaps the life of a subtitle author is full of such constant doubt and fear of mistranslation that they simple ignore such pondering and simply state what they know to be true. However, if such an expression was key to understanding a character, and by ignoring context you lose part of the "charm" of John McClane, are you really doing your job of trying to make a movie comprehensible to foreigners?

What about other movies I’ve watched that have heavily featured subtitles with swearing? How much of their meaning have I missed? It’s times like this we need a babblefish.

My wife was watching television when she said, "What the…a Nintendo DS commercial?"

Nintendo doesn’t have any sort of presence in Korea in the advertising space outside of hardcore import shops. That is, until now. They are now officially promoting the Korean version of Brain training, as well as a version of English educational study that focuses on listening and dictation for the TOEIC tests that are popular here. They have testimonials (kids studying English!) and spokes person playing the game.

This is a wonderful time to get the word out, as the Lunar New Year celebrations are coming around, and children get the bulk of their spending cash for the entire year in the next few weeks.
I’ve been saying this for three years now since the launch of the Nintendo DS. Once English learning software gets published on this machine, there will be a wildfire move for adoption as a hardware platform. It’s online, it’s portable, it’s cheaper that a phone, and students can study and play games on it. My students that have seen a DS lite didn’t know what it was, and it’s been on sale for nearly a year in Korea. Unless you go to game stores, it’s just not a common sight. Once mother’s hear they can buy a gadget that can double as a dictionary, a game machine, a portable internet browser, and a study tool, they’re going to be all over it.

You have no idea how boring it is to teach TOEIC. You play a tape, the students circle an answer. You play a cd, they write down something. The students hate it. The teachers hate it. Watch this testimonial and see girls HAVING FUN studying. This is going to be huge.

It’s so rare they my hobby and my job collide.

Remember the exhaustive search the school did for books for the intensive classes that started today? Let me refresh your memory. I spent three hours with the foreign and Korean teachers personally approving all the books I was supposed to be teaching during the Intensive and Regular course periods. All books I taught a majority of hours on that I did not share with a Korean teacher were my responsibility to choose or at least approve. I spent an entire morning approving nearly all the books used in the entire school. I said "nearly all". Keep this in mind.

My second highest level class from last semester will be taught by no less than four teachers during the intensive period this month. Since the Korean teachers were responsible for finding the book series, I didn’t have a chance to preview the material before today. The book literally arrived on my desk this morning. I gave it a look and told my head teacher, "There are serious problems with the level of the materials in this book. It is not suitable for them. It is incredibly infantile and the children will find this insultingly easy." This is after looking at the book for a minute on my own. One of my Korean coworkers agreed that the series chosen for that level stunk, but that they wanted something easy to let the students get a sense of accomplishment while speaking in class. She seemed to hint that either the head teacher or the director had chosen the book without asking her.

This book was for listening skills. It was arranged in a dictation/test sort of format. The entire lesson for an hour class consisted of "Good Morning, Good Afternoon, Good Evening." These students can write entire essays, respond to news articles, and can hold decent conversations. What am I supposed to do with a book that is suitable for children five years younger? I went into class and brought the tape for the dictation with me. We listened to a chant, then did the simple dialog. It was far too basic to hold the students attention. Five minutes later, we had completed my lesson.

The worst student in the class raised his hand and said, "This book is too easy. I want a refund. I won’t waste money studying this." (In Korean. He is the worst student in the class by far.)

Yeah, that’s what I thought was going to happen. I immediately told the students to stop writing in their books. They were confused. I asked them, "Do you want to study this book?" They said no. "If you write in this book, it means that we wouldn’t be able to change. You’d have to buy this book and whatever else we switch to. That’d be impossible. Erase everything, I’ll take care of this."

The simple fact that I am questioning the wise and all powerful director on a book decision means I’m putting my neck out on the line. To suggest switching book series when three other teachers will be using the book, and a syllabus had already been written for the material means I’m really taking a chance.  I don’t know who could have possibly made a syllabus thinking this material was appropriate, but I was about to ask them to throw out their (awful) work. The material was absolutely not suitable, and I refused to teach it.

I went to my director. She happened to be in a meeting, but I called her out just the same. Wasting my time and the students time is costly. This is make or break time for schools trying to sign up and retain students. We needed this sorted out fast, because the same material would be used two more times today. I was the first teacher to use the book, and if I didn’t say anything, no one else would.

I gave the director the materials and told her my objections. Not suitable. Not teachable. Not worth wasting time on. I needed another book, or another series. She defended the choice, saying that the students needed something easy to "Get them talking". She said that tougher material led to "Foreign teacher lead classes" and not "student driven classes". That might be true, but what sort of conversation would I be having with students that needed to read material that easy? I couldn’t even come up with a conversation if I tried, and I’m good at that sort of thing.

As the director polled the opinions of the books from the students (which ranged from, "It sucks" to "I want a refund, I won’t study this."), I staged a coup by asking my foreign coworker what he thought about the series himself. He told me he found it easy, but tolerable. When I looked at the work he was doing with younger students, it was actually the same series, but more difficult work. He was using the level "2" book, while my students were suffering the awful level "3" book. He pointed out that the material in his book was actually harder than my own to the director for me. From there, we went on the check the level "1" books. It seems that the Korean publishers used a weird reverse numbering system that had level "1" being the hardest and higher numbers were easier. In all my years teaching, the progression of books goes from "starter" to "level 1" to "level 2", with each following number being higher. Everyone was surprised to see the mistake.

Once we sorted out the confusion, the students and the director were more than happy to switch the books around. I got to use the more difficult "level 1" books, and the "level 3" books were pushed down to a slightly lower level. They will still be WAY too easy for the students in that class, but that is tomorrow’s fight. While I was pleased I got the book switched and made my students happier, my director tried to get in a dig at me during the break.

She told me, "Well, I’m glad we sorted out the book problem. The next time we choose book materials, you should be more involved in the process. You should be sure to check all the materials to make sure it was suitable for your classes."

HOLD THE FUCK UP. WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?

My jaw actually DROPPED. My coworker chuckled under his breath in a "No, she didn’t just say that!" sort of way.

I replied, " I was very involved in the book process. I helped choose every book we used this morning for three hours on my own time before work. I remember picking every other book for nearly all the classes but this one. I wasn’t responsible for this book being chosen, and it wasn’t shown to me before the class period…" After that, I was sort of at a loss for words. She had walked out to talk to a mother without listening to me respond to her little jab.

For the director to call my professionalism into question in front of the ENTIRE teaching staff while gone out of my way at great risk to fix a problem probably caused by the director herself, and then to not even listen to my rebuttal? Woah. I’m a pretty well adjusted person when it comes to Korean manners flying in the face of what I am used to, but this felt like a slap in the face. A "Let’s keep the job for a month because the money is oh-so-sweet during intensive classes, but let’s immediately start considering other options" sort of slap in the face.