::A Geek in Korea::

Imagine you are in a never ending conversation with people, but you can only ask and answer the same four questions. This is what it is like to be a teacher on  "Speaking test day", and it’s also what it is like to be a foreign teacher taking a taxi.  Just four questions, over and over until you are sick of hearing the words coming out of your mouth. In class I give the same questions to students, and in the taxi, I answer the same questions every day.

Our school had a "level adjustment test" today. I had to interview half the school by pulling them out of class, one by one, and asking questions based on their level and give them a grade based on their responses. Five minutes or less per head for five hours today.  I was told about what was going on yesterday and made up an excellent set of questions for students in the top five classes in the school. My coworker was in charge of making the questions for the lower level classes. No one told him what to do, what the procedure was for testing, or how to make the questions. I had to help him out, as the last thing I wanted to do was ask questions students couldn’t answer all day.

We broke the classes down by level, wrote nice, easy, generally open answered questions that the students knew the vocabulary to answer. The idea is not to stump the students, because giving a grade when there is no answer is much harder. The idea was that the students know the question, but the completeness and correctness of their reply is how we grade. Do the students know the answer? Is the answer grammatically correct and in a complete sentence? Those kinds of things determine what level a student will be placed, who will study together, etc. If someone has made massive improvements, they might be bumped up a level, or if someone is falling behind, they will be knocked back. These are the tests to catch those students.

I know how the students feel. Every time I hop into a taxi, I get the same questions over and over again too. Where am I from? How long have I been here? These are followed by a compliment about my Korean, then a more invasive or annoying question. I’m asked the same things over and over again, with slight variations in phrasing, intonation, and dialect until I’ve mastered my responses. This is misleading, as it creates a false impression that I know lots more than I actually do. When they start asking me harder stuff or things I haven’t heard before, my vocabulary fails me and I can’t answer properly.

That’s why I structured the tests as a series of more difficult tests on a sort of scale. With students that get farther, the test gets harder. For students that struggle, I try to make it a little easier, or stop as soon as I’ve covered the minimum number of questions. If you asked a person the same questions enough, they get good at a canned response. It’s mastery of a more diverse set of vocabulary, tenses, and grammar that shows a better grasp on a language.

I had an interesting time In my Internet Based Testing Test of English as a Foreign Language Class, which is abbreviated as IBT TOEFL. Yes, the word "test" is in the name twice, so the class MUST be important. The class is for high school level students that are intent on studying in an English speaking university abroad. The class material (Sample .PDF) is used to prepare students for testing that they would encounter while applying for a foreign university. I’ve previously taught a course with similar materials used for integrating writing and reading skills. This class focused on integrated speaking skills.

Since it was our first class with a new book, I spent the class explaining how we should prepare our notes, how to create summary of a topic, and necessary details when writing a summary. We went through the two pages of material fairly quickly. I was reluctant in getting into heavy amounts of new material, I decided we should to practice our skills for today. I grabbed an English language newspaper, pulled out a few articles, then prepared copies for my students.

They were given a moderately short article, six to seven paragraphs, then were told to read for three minutes. They needed to write notes and prepare a summary to be given immediately after the reading. One of the articles was this piece about "Mp3 players not compatible with Microsoft Vista". I gave them their three minutes, they read the article, and returned excellent summaries.

After the summary, one of my students asked, "I was thinking of buying an iPod. What do you know about putting music on iPods?"

It’s too bad she got me started on iPods with five minutes left in class, because if you get me started talking about Digital Rights Management, you are probably going to get an earful. There is a reason I read "Anything but iPod" when I want to research new players I might purchase. The girl didn’t know anything about the process of downloading music or files. She used soribada.com to purchase music directly for her phone, but wasn’t sure how or where you could purchase .mp3 files using her computer.

I explained the tight integration between using iPods and the iTunes software. There are ways around such things, but I digress. Clearly, if the girl didn’t know how to download an .mp3 file by herself, then all the tips and tricks I could give to avoid DRM were going to be lost on her. What she was most upset about was the fact that iTunes sells music. She thought she’d have to buy all the music she put on her iPod. I explained that if she wanted to rip files from her own collection of CDs and put them on the player herself, she could.

She replied, "What if I just want to download free mp3’s and not pay for them? Can I do that? How do I get music I want to listen to for free?"

Yeah, like I was going to answer a question like that while on camera being recorded.

Instead, I asked her why she would want an iPod when it didn’t seem to really fit her needs. Korea has excellent non-DRM friendly players that would do exactly what she needed, and are much cheaper. My next media player will certainly be Korean, and that’s after exhaustive searches, price comparisons, and feature by feature breakdowns. They do what I need, and I’m a far more demanding customer. I think she came to her senses after I chatted about both sides of the iPod, good and bad.

The students that left for a month home stay in the United States arranged by our school have arrived back in Korea. They came back on Friday, which means their first classes back in the school will be this week. Some of the student’s I used to teach, and some of them were students I never had in class. One of the students that went to the United States joined my class for the first time today. I wish he would have stayed in the United States longer, because I certainly don’t like him.

When class started, it was their second hour of the day. I took over for the director who shares this class with me. She’s got a class in another room. Since I had already taught the class on Friday, I was surprised to meet a new student that I hadn’t seen before. I asked him his name, to which I immediately got a sarcastic response. He responded that he wanted to be called, "Tom Alexander Jude Junior, the Third," which more honorifics and names inserted each time I asked him to repeat it. Yeah, funny. I told him if he couldn’t pick a shorter name, I’d call him, "Pencil" for the rest of class. Eventually he settled on his name properly.

Next came his challenge, to see how well he would need to behave around me. In an exceedingly condescending Korean tone, he asked me, "Do you like bread?"

I gave him a look like, "Don’t waste my time kid. My Korean isn’t that bad, and me being able to speak, or not speak Korean has no impact on me teaching you English right here and now. Speak English in class, or I’ll start to get angry at the way you are talking to you."

All the other students in class were like, "What are you doing? He speaks Korean, and he understands everything you are saying!"

When called on, he would say, "I don’t know!" in Korean, but in a tone similar to "Eureka!" as if I was dumb enough to fall for such a trick.

He wasn’t satisfied with that, however. When told to read a paragraph for repetition, he refused. Other students in the class were volunteering to read, but he tried to set the terms of when and how he would be participating. No deal. I’m the boss in class,not some smart ass kids.. "Read, or I’ll be sure that my director sees every minute of this tape."

He then tried to call my bluff. He replied, as if I was a complete moron, "The director has class now, so she can’t be watching this tape. You can’t punish me. That’s a close circuit television. No one is watching."

I got a rather wide grin on my face. Everyone in the class turned around and said, "You don’t know? They upgraded the system while you were in The United States! She can record, re-watch, and hear EVERYTHING now. These are NEW cameras!"

I turned around and waved at the camera. I had a large smile on my face. "Say, Hi!"

When class finished and we were writing down homework, a student asked about his trip to The United States. He commented about how he said rude things in Korean to everyone he met. I commented he must have made lots of friends that way. He also didn’t know where he had gone, and was unable to list a single place he had seen. I hope his parents are happy on the money they spent on that trip.

After the class, I talked to his usual teachers, wondering as to his behavior in previous classes. Everyone was shocked as to what he had said and how he had acted. The Korean teachers theorized that the trip to the United States had turned him into some sort of devil. My director agreed to watch the tape of the class. She said that the audio was muddled, and the only thing that could be heard clearly was my pose for the camera. She promised to watch the footage with the students again and give the student in question hell. She took my word for it, even if the audio wasn’t definitive. I’ll have witnesses too, since most of the students in the class are rather nice girls that like me. Since my director shares the class with me, the student will be under scrutiny for half the time he is at school too.

I’m worried. The student I have the most problems with also went to the United States and will return to school this week as well. If their trip turned a previous nice kid into a sarcastic brat, what will happen to a student I want to throw out of my class nearly every day?

There is an exhibition of paintings from the Louvre museum currently at The Nation Museum of Korea. Considering my sole interest in going to Paris during our European vacation will be to visit the Louvre, I was very interested in going to see this visit. I was never really an art museum kind of guy until I went to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. If you hate are after walking through place, you have no soul. My wife and I haven’t traveled out of Daejeon in ages. Schedules, work, winter, and a dog have effectively stopped our short trips around Korea these days. For art from the Louvre, we were willing to make an exception.

Some of my wife’s students and coworkers attempted to make the trip last week. We were warned that the lines are extremely long, and that it is extremely crowded like everything else in Seoul. We were told to get there as early as possible. We set out alarms for 6:30 AM, planned out our route in advance. and went to bed at a reasonable time.

Then we completely overslept. Seems I had set my alarm for "Monday through Saturday" D’oh! I set up Yoshi’s feeder to dispense snacks and food throughout the day, then we packed our snacks and bags and went out on our trip. We caught a quick KTX high speed train, then headed for the National Museum. The crowds were growing, but honestly weren’t that bad. It was a very nice building and the exhibit was very well presented. There were a lot of families walking around, people with art books trying to appreciate what they were looking at, and a lot of bored kids. Same as every museum.

We didn’t stay to look at the other Korean traditional historical exhibits. We went to Yongsan Electronics Market. This marks the fourth or fifth trip to that place without a purchase for me. While they are now selling more Nintendo DS units and games, and I got to see my first Wii console, there is just nothing of interest for me there anymore. Either I can get it locally at a much better price, or order it online and not deal with shady people or people selling pirated materials. I think it’ll be off my travel plans from now on.

From Yongsan, we went to Seodaemun Prison History Hall. This was where Korean independence fighters (called Patriotic Ancestors in the materials) were tortured and kept during the Japanese Colonial period. They had a lot of exhibitions showing torture and abuse to Korean people done by the Japanese. They even had "try it yourself" sorts of torture methods, like a wall coffin that let you feel what it was like to be locked in a very small space for a long enough time to take a picture. Some of the torture techniques were very close to what I saw in Poland. There were some occasional English signs, but by far the most interesting part of the experience was being able to just walk through the prison and imagine the horrible conditions people had to suffer to live in such a place. 8 people in a cell the size of my bathroom, with no toilet, no light, and very little food. Absolutely terrible. I had issues with how some of the exhibits were worded, again, but it was written from the "survivor" point of view, so I can understand the feeling behind it.

From there, we navigated through the mazes of subways and trains it took to get back to Daejeon. We were totally beat after our trip, which doesn’t bode well for our travels in Europe. If we can’t last a day with light baggage in good weather when we know where we are going, we’ll be doomed in Europe when we actually try to find the Louvre.

I ran into an interesting experiment online. It challenged people to look through their refrigerators and find all the foods owned by subsidiaries of companies that were in some way connected to cigarette companies. I never really considered the company or their practices before buying food items before. Contents, nutrition, price, and need usually were the factors I used to choose what lines the fridge. What about ethics too? Since I lost a grandfather because of illnesses related to smoking and tobacco, I thought this was an interesting idea.

While other people were reporting refrigerators filled with products that supported cigarette companies, albeit indirectly, it seems that I was spared the dilemma of deciding what to do with all that ethically questionable food. I own only two items produced by the Altria Group of companies. I have some Oreo cookies, and some Kraft horseradish, but everything else was either Korean made, or (gasp) actual non-processed home made food or ingredients! Thank goodness for family members that can cook from scratch!

While shopping at the local superstores, there are plenty of alternatives that to my knowledge aren’t owned by Altria, which means that I can get different kinds of cookies, and even a different type of horseradish (!) for now. Hurray choice! This means that I don’t face any real sacrifice from this "challenge" until I hear about Korean  food companies acting unethically. I’m sure if I methodically went through news sites and worried enough, I’d be locked in a consumer quandary and never purchase anything again. For now, I’ll keep my little shopper’s crusade to myself and hope that my string of luck in finding alternatives continues.

My lowest level class for this month is made up of a mix of students I’ve taught before. I’ve been teaching some of them as long as I’ve been at the school, and some of them I’ve only started teaching in the past month. The interplays and dynamics between students as they join new classes is always a problem. Let two talkative students sit together and you have problems. If two class clowns end up in the same class it turns into a competition. Add in new materials and new settings and you can have a surprising result for students you think you know very well.

Today was my first day in this class with a pure "speaking" style book. The book series we chose was a listening heavy book because the students have done phonics and reading and needed a change. It’s fairly clear that the students have never done a listening intensive book either. Teaching listening involves dialogs, dictation, and repetition. Lots of repetition.

I teach the class following this self created procedure:
Listen to the dialog four times with the book closed.
Repeat the dialog several times together, book closed.
Students Open the book.
Students do the dictation by filling in blanks by listening to the dialog and writing.
Students close the books. Students get out notebooks.
Students listen to the dictation again, and write the entire dialog from memory without spelling help.
Students listen to another activity and write the answers in their notebook. One chance to listen and write.S
Students open the books up, check answers.
We do a listening "test" where students answer comprehension questions about dialogs.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat. I’ve got the book series to an science after more than fifty lessons in the past month. I can do lessons in the time given perfectly with lots of time for helping and making sure students understand the material well. Today was the first time these students witnessed my procedure in action. Since they’ve never done a listening book before, they kept messing me up.

The two youngest students were like a comedy duo, going back and forth. Every time I would press play on the radio, they would start speaking, "What did he say? What? One more time! Please?!" We listen to the dialogs over eight times before the students are responsible for writing it from memory. I didn’t matter if they only heard it once, or seven times however.

They just never learned "how" to listen before. One of the problems was that since they couldn’t get the first line, they would freeze and stop listening to the rest of the dialog which might have been easier.  I tried to break them of the habit and tell them to write line by line, and not as one huge dialog, but it was difficult.
Another weird problem they would have is the disconnect between speaking and writing. While the students can spell the words, speak the words, and even memorize the dialog. If you give them a notebook and tell them to write it down, they couldn’t. We could close our books, recite the entire dialog from memory. I would have the radio playing as they wrote. They would still miss words when writing. The words were not homophones either. Strange.

What I did find was that the students that had the shortest attention spans and were the most talkative did the worst. Every time one of talkative students was caught not listening or making a mistake, I would jokingly tell them to clean out their ears and listen again. We repeated the dialogs enough that I expect the students to be able to memorize them for a speaking test for next class. At least the talkative students should be good at reciting what we studied if they can’t listen as well.

Today was the first day back at work for me. With the new book materials, new classes, new schedule, and new students, I expected it to be a lot more difficult than it actually was. Instead of great fear and loathing, I was on easy street again, since we went out of our way to pick good books for our classes once again. The only problem is, of course, knowing what to do when lacking a syllabus, any sort of directions, or knowing what you should be doing in each class.

The only thing I was handed today was a schedule of classes, a book list, and a set of homework guidelines. My director mad a speech before we started classes to explain the situation with the previous classes last month. She said that while the students were very happy with their books and homework, the mothers were not. It seems that students were finishing their homework too early, and the mothers wanted much, much more. At least an hour per class for each teacher. Figure some of our kids are in school for five to six hours a week, and that’s a substantial amount of work to be assigned. Our homework guidelines bordered on the sadistic, but our director admitted that other schools were doing more work than we were. We must shrink the homework gap!

Everything else was supposed to be left to me. We are sharing multiple books across multiple teachers in multiple classes through the day. I went into classes as the first teacher twice today, which means that I had to give the students books, as well as start the lessons. Since I was first, I was setting the pace. I was careful not to go too far. I was only told what to do in two of my three classes. In the third, no one told me how much I was supposed to be doing. I started the first lesson like usual and went on to assign homework.

Only after I had finished the lesson was I told that all the other teachers would be using the book as well, and that they had divided the book up into sections. Even though I was the first teacher, I only wasn’t assigned the first section of the book. Since they didn’t tell me what the sections were before I went into class, I was teaching the wrong stuff! The next teacher had to shift all their work around because the head teacher forgot to tell me what I was supposed to be doing. I actually had to go back into class and assign more homework too, since I didn’t torture the students enough.

Other than that slight debacle, the classes were very easy to teach, and I had new students to interact with and meet. For the first day of classes, it was relatively painless.