::A Geek in Korea::

My Canadian coworker has gotten himself in a bit of a pickle. Ever since he returned from Canada, he has been giving out candy to younger students before their classes start to earn their favor. This has, of course, blown up in his face, as the students walk into the room, demand candy, then call him a cheap man if he doesn’t have anything to give them. I get left alone as a surly curmudgeon that hates candy, gum, and all things sweet most of the time. Lucky me.

My coworker went out and bought a large box of sugar free candy to give out to the children. This is really nice of him, but he was swarmed with his usual mob of students looking for sweets. When he started handing them out, he was giving out one per child. Soon they were asking for an extra treat for their brother or sister. Children are very considerate about sharing. They actually do give things to their siblings. After some consideration, he had to turn them down because he didn’t have enough for everyone and their families.

The students moved on to the next person, a Korean teacher nearby. She said she didn’t have any candy to give them. Some of the students then came to me. I don’t have any candy in my desk, so I pulled out a box of paper clips. “Would you like a delicious paper clip? It’s not candy, but it’s the only thing I have.”

Several of my students took the paper clips and mockingly commented about how delicious it looked. One girl went the extra mile and started chewing on the paper clip. Just thinking about it made my skin crawl. Who chews on metal? I told her I was joking, and that she should absolutely take the paper clip out of her mouth right away. The last thing I wanted was for a student to choke on a paper clip I gave them. I took it back and put it in my desk.

Predictably, the students called me a cheap person for taking away her paper clip then walked out of the office. Next time should I just let them choke?

Blogged with Flock

Tags: paperclip, esl, joke, mock, candy, coworker, esl

I had a really lame unit in my science book I had to stretch out to last all period. The topic of the day was “Matter can be different sizes.” There were about three sentences of actual information, then a list of different items that the students were supposed to put into a “Big” or “Small” category. Lame. I had to come up with something better. I made a list of fifteen items of various sizes ranging from a piece of rice to the ocean. The students then had to order them from smallest to largest with my help to decide disputes.

Once we settled on the relative position of all the different words, I labeled each of the spaces “between” the items given, and the students had to think of something that would be bigger than one, but smaller than the other. For example, students said,  “A basketball is bigger than a book, but smaller than a watermelon.” We went through, analyzing each gap and trying to find an answer.

My class of ten students were stumped trying to think of something, “Larger than an elephant, but smaller than a tree.” I kept prompting them for things that might work. Things were either much too small, or much too large. Eventually, after a minute or two of silence, a boy raised his hand to answer.

“So, what’s bigger than an elephant, and smaller than a tree?” I asked.

“That’s easy teacher. Two elephants.”

I have to admit, I laughed a lot at that answer. But it still didn’t count. (We settled on “Swimming Pool” for the answer.)

Blogged with Flock

Tags: big, small, science, lesson, esl, smartass student

  In one of my classes we have been learning about laws and how they help a community be safer. For homework, they had to write ten classroom rules. Most of the students had pretty standard lists, with rules like, “Don’t shout,” or “No fighting!”. Some of the students had more outlandish rules, like “Don’t wrestle in class,”  or “Don’t play with guns.”

Today, we moved onto the second part of the lesson. With their homework completed, we learned about signs in neighborhoods that remind us of the rules. Speed signs, stop signs (Korea doesn’t have these. Really.) and other common signs children might see or know about. We would match a visual sign to the rule written down. We would explain why the rules and signs were a good idea. It was very interesting and fun.

I told the students they had to now make a sign for each of their classroom rules. Things like, “Don’t shout,” were easy to make, but the students really had to be creative to draw their “No Wrestling!” signs. They had a person body slamming another with a circle and line drawn through it. They’ve got a few days to work on making their signs clear for everyone. Then, I’m going to strip out the language context, post them on a wall, and have other students try to guess what they mean. Suddenly, “No Wrestling” could mean, “No Grendel!”

It should be fun.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: signs, rules, laws, class, activity, fun

Last summer break I taught this nice, cute, small boy with a decent English vocabulary.  He had a great sense of humor and wanted to know everything about my personal life. I’m not comfortable sharing a lot of details with students, because most of the time they don’t remember anything accurately. I’ve been teaching students for years that don’t remember I’m married. The more I tell them, the more potential misunderstandings that can arise. This boy, in particular, was interested in my age and marital status. I told him I was married, and he stopped asking me about it.

He is a bit unusual in that he is the youngest child in his family by a very large margin. He’s only twelve years old, while he has three sisters in their late twenties. It seems his mother had refused to give up trying to have a children until she had a son. As such, he’s the baby of the family and can say and do anything he wants. He’s also his mother’s favorite, so he must spend a lot of time with her. I think he’s picked up a few things his mother worries about and has started to try to find a solution for her.

He told my foreign coworker, who is single, his sister’s phone numbers. He said that my coworker should call one of his sisters and go out on a date. He wants them to hook up so he can hang out with his teacher when he isn’t at school. This is both touching, and also really creepy at the same time. My coworker couldn’t believe that this young boy was telling him to hit on his sisters.  The boy kept saying, “They are all SINGLE! They aren’t MARRIED! Call them PLEASE!”

Inappropriate? Just a bit.

I was in the bathroom, and walked in when this boy was using a urinal. I’m not comfortable using the second urinal when there are children next to me in the room. This is definitely the kind of student that is peeking at things he should not be. I walked straight to the stall and went to open a door. He said, “Oh teacher, will you use the stall to go to the bathroom? You shouldn’t. You should use this urinal instead. The stall is for sitting down only!”

I told him that I was a teacher and an adult, and that gave me the privilege of being allowed to use any bathroom facility any way I saw fit. He seemed really disappointed I wasn’t going to be his piss pall and use the urinal next to him. He not only waited me to finish what I was doing, but continued to chat with me in the bathroom while I washed my hands and walked out. That’s just….icky.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: weirdstudent, pisspall, teaching

Today was another wonderful class with a group of low level students. I’ve got two students that have a Joker/ Batman like personality clash going on. One kid laughs a lot and plays mean jones, and the other thinks he’s a vigilante who can beat up people he doesn’t like. “Batman” came late to class. He’s generally despised in the class as being a total dickwad to the other students in class. As much as I don’t like “The Joker” in class either for making fun of “Batman”, Batman doesn’t do anything to endear himself to the Citzens of Gotham City…(Er, the other students in the class.) In this scenario I would be Commissioner Gordon trying to keep the Joker at bay while making Batman play by the rules, except I’m twice as tall and strong as both of them and speak a different language. Maybe that makes me Superman. Except I can’t fly. Maybe I’m Apache Chief? Inyuk-chuk! I don’t know. I never read DC comics. Clearly, this metaphor has REALLY broken down.

Anyway, while the laughing prankster student gets on my nerves a lot, you can’t let a boy that threatens and physically intimidates students in class get away with anything either. Every time I turned my back to the classroom, the two of them were engaging in a “battle of wits”. This was mostly name calling and saying stupid words in English they didn’t know about. Why did I have to teach about the planet “Uranus” today.

The laughing boy likes to misrepresent what the short tempered boy says. This gets the fatter, less popular boy upset. The laughing boy used to be the student everyone else in the class viciously hated and ratted out. He is a misogynistic asshole that takes pride in pushing little girls down, belittling women teachers, and being all around unlikeable. The girls in his previous classes banded together to make his life a living hell until he quit. He systematically made several girls completely insane enough with hatred to drive them out of the school.

However the larger boy doesn’t have any friends in class because he’s adversarial. If he kept his mouth shut and didn’t fall for the pranksters bait every single time, I’d think he be better off. He could savagely beat the boy in a fight, but he always gets upset when he is in front of a teacher, preventing him from the justice he thinks he deserves. The loudmouth boy knows that a teacher won’t allow him to be beaten into an unholy pulp in class, but knows how much he can get away with before being tossed out of class for being an ass. My best efforts to keep the two of them separated always ends up with the smarter trouble making joker getting the best of the vigilante. It never gets to physical violence in a 50 minute class, but if I had them in one room together for say, 90 minutes every day, one of them would probably gone off the deep end by now and killed the other.

There are signs at how quickly something like that can escalate. For example, the joking boy had brought a small wind up toy to class today. In the few minutes before the bell rang, I asked him what the thing on his desk was. It was shaped like a pencil case, but had a motor that would propel the car slowly forward after he pulled it back a few times. I was mocking how slowly the car was going when I saw that the vigilante boy had put his large, sharp, full sized umbrella on the table behind him. I was asking him to remove the umbrella from them table when he grabbed it and started thrusting the tip at the other boy’s head. I don’t think he had thought about what he was doing. The act of stabbing someone in the head is probably unintentional when you do it the first time, but he was doing it on purpose, if not a little half-heartedly.

Of course I had to step in and prevent the other boy from being stabbed in the face. I took the umbrella, almost stabbing someone in the face by accident, I might add, and went to the school secretary’s desk to drop it off for later pick up. My director happened to be there, and I explained that I almost had a stabbing in class. I told them I thought that the two boys shouldn’t be in class together anymore. Much to my surprised, she agreed with me and walked back to my classroom. She told the vigilante that he would be knocked down to a lower level class. The boy protested, saying he didn’t fail any tests (lies) to deserve to be moved down. The ENTIRE class started CHEERING at the news that this boy would be moved. He asked if he could study at the same level in another class. Due to a time conflict, it seems to be impossible.

I don’t really like either of the two children in class. I know that recently the laughing boy has done significantly better in class when the other boy isn’t around. I think the change will benefit the class for about a week, then the joker will have to find a new person to pick on to be happy.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Inyuk-chuk, Batman, The Joker, class, bully, teaching

Looking over CineCine for a movie worth watching, I saw that Beowulf was available in 3-D at Lotte Cinema ONLY early in the morning. The first show was at 8 am! The last showing was 1:00 PM! Holy crap that’s early! We decided to split the difference and hit the 11:00AM showing.

From everything I hear on the ‘Net, if you are going to see Beowulf, see it in 3-D. I have already been burned once on the new “3-D” fad with Superman Returns. What a waste that was to see in the theater. I was more optimistic about Beowulf better using the technology because it’s filmed entirely in 3-D. It wasn’t like Superman Returns, where only certain scenes were barely adapted to use the glasses. (Seriously. Superman Returns in 3-D sucked. Hard.)

The last “Burly Near Naked Men Fighting” movie I saw was 300, which I came away conflicted. Now that I’ve seen 300 Rifftrax’d, I’ve made my peace with the genre and was willing to go back to seeing swords and gore in the theater once again. Beowulf is better than 300. Much, much better, and I’m glad I went to see it.

The story of Beowulf is about power, lust, betrayal, and naked people fighting deformed things. I liked how they adapted the story, and I thought that the 3-D enhanced the storytelling. It wasn’t always subtle, but they always made good use of the technology during the action scenes. As good as the effects and the digital performances are, there was a great story going on here too. Unlike 300, you can actually care about the characters. There are BRUTAL fights that are as intense as anything in 300. I wonder what the 5 year old child at the viewing we attended will be dreaming about tonight. It was entirely over the top and completely awesome.

The bizarre double standard about nudity was in full effect. The character acted by Angelina Jolie was a dripping golden goddess that had every inch of her anatomy on display for the camera. Beowulf, on the other hand, fought in an Austin Powers like set of scenes where something was comically placed in front of his genitalia. Everything SUGGESTED he was naked, but they never showed anything more than a digital ass. I mean, a CANDLE between the legs of a naked man? A SWORD? We GET what you are trying to say movie. I don’t go to movies for their nudity, but when you’ve got a guy wresting a monster ripping people’s legs off, is nudity REALLY the most shocking thing on the screen?

Anyway, the direction the movie took was ambiguously enough that I had to respect the courage of the director to end it in the manner he did. There were a few cliches along the way, but it worked on a deeper level. I’d HIGHLY recommend checking it out in 3-D. There was a scene where I actually flinched and rubbed my head because I felt like I had been hit by something. That’s an amazing effect. I really enjoyed the film, and so did my wife. We had a nice talk about it at lunch. I’m not sure if I like the early movie in the morning, but I felt like I got out of the house and did something early in the day. We had the best seats in the theater too. We might have to try it again.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Beowulf, 300 sucked, movies, 3-D

My wife tutors her younger cousins in English on the weekends as a favor to our Aunt. Right now they are both preparing for their final examinations of the year. There are two weeks before the big tests, and this is “crunch time.” Today my wife was supposed to go over to their house early in the morning. She had her coat on and was ready to step out of the door when she got a call from the family. They had rescheduled a math tutor, and needed to postpone the English class until later in the afternoon. My wife told them to just stop by our house when their classes were finished. Since we live nearby the bus stop that has a direct connection to their apartment complex too, it wasn’t too hard to get the boy she was supposed to teach over to our house without a problem.

I had already walked Yoshi, so I just kept quiet in the computer room when they were studying together in the other room. My wife is a grammar tutor, so I don’t really need to “help” her with the class. They studied for ninety minutes, and after it was over, I fired up the Wii. This is the first time we had anyone over to play the games with us. My wife and I had played a few times when we first got the second controller, but her cousin is much better at video games. It was a Wii Sports challenge! Bring it on!

We started out by making a “Mii” for him. The first spirt we tried was Boxing. I went “easy” on him. He knocked me down a few times before I cleaned his clock. It was closer than I’m willing to admit feeling comfortable about. He had a harder time keeping up with me in tennis. Getting the timing down is always tricky, but he did very well for a total novice. We moved to baseball, then into bowling. We also did some training modes to let him practice some of the skills needed for playing some of the games. He really liked Home Run Contests, and serving in Tennis. He served an “ace” a few times with his jump serve. I’m still unable to do that, and I refuse to jump around and anger our downstairs neighbors.

He was having a blast. If I had to switch controllers to set up a menu or choose an option, his controller was sweaty. I kept telling him if he wanted to take a break and drink some water it would be ok. He got a nice workout and was blowing off some stress about his tests. Every once in a while he’d take a walk over into my computer room to check out my Nintendo DS games. He later told my wife when she was walking him to the bus stop that he forgot the word, “borrow”, so he didn’t ask me to take a game home. Too bad he has to study, otherwise I’d have let him have a game to play for a while.

Since this was the first Wii Sports party we’ve had, I think we learned a few things. We need to make sure we have a bottle of cold water on hand for everyone. We also need a bigger living room if we ever have more than one person over to play. With two people on the couch swinging around, it’s easy to get a Wiimote to the head if you aren’t careful. I’ve also got to get more mulitplayer games on the Virtual Console when people need to take a break from swinging their arms. I’m looking at “Bomberman ‘93” (or not, since there is rumored to be a WiiWare version the works.) or “Gunstar Heroes“.

Having games to play with people when they come over to the apartment is great, but I’m still really looking forward to Super Smash Brothers Brawl, the real reason I bought the console. That game is a party game, as well as an online brawler. Even if I have friends over or not, I’ll be playing it for a very long time.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: wii, wii sports, video games, cousin, relatives

Our plans to have a Thanksgiving turkey ended when my wife went to Costco and saw the only birds they had for sale were as large as her torso. She gave me a call and I called off the whole deal when I heard they cost upwards of 40,000 won. I like turkey as much as the next person. Doubly so on Thanksgiving, but there are limits. Three weeks or more of solid leftovers and a ridiculous price tag was my limit.

I called my parents, as well as my brother over Skype to catch up over the holidays. This is the first time I had talked to my brother after returning from Europe, so we had some things to talk about. He had purchased a new house, and would be spending the first Thanksgiving in America with the family in four years. I don’t even remember the last time I’ve been in America for Thanksgiving. I don’t think I’ve been in the country for either Thanksgiving or Christmas since I came to Korea. My contracts just never work out that way.

Since I wasn’t having Turkey I wasn’t too into the holiday. I had a smile on my face regardless. I got a nice message at work that told me she had found a chicken at a grocery store she would be cooking for us. Roast bird of any sort is very welcome.

It turns out this is the first chicken my wife has ever done by herself. My mom cooked turkey with her when we visited the United States together. She had to prepare the bird at home by herself. My wife is ornithophobic and has a strong fear of birds. Even though the bird was dead, plucked, and headless, it wasn’t a pleasant time for her.

When I got home, I got to eat a nice roasted, cooked bird to eat. She could only poke at her meal because she had lost her appetite. She worked really hard, only to get a small snack out of the deal.

“It’s a little like finding out what is in a hot dog. After that, it’s really hard to eat one.” a friend said when I related the story to him. I guess he’s right. 

She told me that if I really want to eat roasted anything, I’ll have to prepare it from now on. I’ll probably be willing to do that too, if the mood strikes me.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: holiday, expat, turkey, thanksgiving, cook, wife

Last night, during my last class, there was a huge commotion going on outside of my room for several minutes. I opened the door when I saw my foreign coworker “walking it off” down the hallway. His face was red and flushed. I wanted to find out what was going on, because there were still students shouting at each other after about twenty minutes. Something was going down.

It turns out the reason my coworker’s face was flushed was because he had to pull two elementary school students apart from fighting. He said the two boys were fighting each other so intensely when he arrived that the two Korean teachers on the scenes weren’t able to break them apart. He said one of the boys was basically trying to kill the other. They had scratched each others faces and punched each other enough to draw blood. They had grabbed pencils, tried jumping over tables to stab each other, and only by getting one of the students in a headlock and pulling separating them was my coworker about to break up the fight. Crazy.

The students had been put into the directors office, and were trying to be “cooled down”, but they were still screaming at each other 30 minutes later. This was whining, or complaining, but more like, “I’ll kill him!” sorts of yelling. Trying to tutor my student while someone down the hall is screaming about murdering a fellow student was not conductive for class.

After the bell rang, I went over to investigate. Some of the middle school girls were being really helpful and had separated the students while the teachers tried to get the story out of one of them. The girls looked after the boy in the hallway while the teachers called parents and tried to stop the bleeding. I tried to prevent the scene from being more traumatic than it already was for the boys with the whole, “Nothing to see here, move along” sort of procedure that absolutely never works with children. Students are drawn to suffering and irregularity like moths to a flame.

From what I know of the students, one of the students is a hysterical crybaby, and the other is a goading ass. The story I got out of the students in the class was that the jerk got the older boy upset by putting his books on a desk where they didn’t belong and disrespecting the upperclassman. The older boy tried to teach the younger some “Respect”. The younger boy just used it as an excuse to get into a fight. It’s the same student I used to teach that got separated from being with certain classmates when he threw his bag at a girl’s head in class. He had run out of classmates that didn’t hate him in his own age group, and was put into a class of older students because the teachers thought he wouldn’t start anything with students bigger than he is. Both of the students have black belts in various martial arts, and it’s only because the foreign teachers were bigger that the fight stopped.

This was by far the worst fight that had happened in the school, and I hadn’t seen it. I got the play by play from my coworker, but I was curious to see what had set the students off. Nothing that could happen in a classroom warranted the reactions I had seen. The other teachers were occupied, but I didn’t know how to work the surveillance system to see what happened in the class prior to the fight to see if the students really had fought over something as silly as were someone put some books.

Today, the mood was sober in the teacher’s office. The boys in the fight had to go to the hospital to properly bandage the wounds to prevent scarring. Our director told us that students with bad attitudes must be “controlled”, not by yelling, but with “Manner” and “Poses”. She told us not to start any classes without having the full attention of all students sitting down and being silent in class. This is much harder than you think. We weren’t to yell, but any students disobeying would be sent to the director’s room for “video study.” They would be allowed to follow the classroom instructions by watching the video without disrupting us.

I had done this before, but I had always needed to track down the director when I wanted to sit a student in her office. I didn’t know how to use the machine that recorded all the classrooms and displayed them in the directors office. I asked my director if we would be trained on how to use the surveillance equipment in case she wasn’t around to monitor the students. She told me the foreign teachers could find out how to use it right away.

I’ll admit, while I wanted to learn how to use the machine to see what it could do for myself, I also wanted to rewind and see what happened on the day of the fight. My director must have read my mind, because she queued up the action for us and I got to see the play by play. It was as brutal and intense as my coworker had said. He barely had a handle on the students to break the fight up. I would have loved to toss the punk kid that caused problems in my class out on his ear if I had been “tagged” to break up the fight.

Now that we can use the camera system, it’ll be much easier to bust students doing bad things around the school.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: fight, cctv, surveillance system

One of my expected “duties” as a teacher in an English speaking academy to bring value to our students education is to let them learn about my country’s culture. I’m already teaching American books in my Social Studies class, and we talk about “American Cultural Heroes” from time to time.

I really don’t like books that too culturally dependent. If there is an exercise about an American President or leader, I make sure the students always tell me about a Korean President or leader too. Give and take. Cultural sharing.

Today, my students were supposed to list the presidents featured on money, and list them to the proper denominations. This is too culturally specific. Only Americans would be able to answer who is on the $10 dollar bill. Everyone knew Washington and Lincoln, but really, Grant on the $50? Hell, I didn’t even know WHO was on the $2 bill till I checked.

I printed out a picture of all the currency currently in circulation in the United States on one piece of paper. I issued a “challenge” for students to do research and find out who is on every bill. The book had several answers, so I threw in coins too for an extra bit of work. I helped them identify about half of the notes, then told them the names of the coins, and how much they were worth. They have to provide the rest.

The students wanted to know what was on money in other countries of the world. I told them about money I had seen when I have visited places, but I didn’t know what Canadian currency had on it specifically.

Since I only teach half the students in the school, and my Canadian coworker has the rest, I thought it was silly that we’d have half the school unaware of what my class knew. I talked to my coworker about making a “Cultural Challenge Board” in the school. Each week, or month, we’d issue a cultural “Challenge” where students would have to do research about questions from different cultures. They’d submit their answers to us, and we’d give them prizes for the correct answers.

My homework for today would be issued as the first “Challenge” to all the classes. It would be an optional way for students to get outside education, and we could reward them for learning about other cultures. I’ve just got to set it up with my director and get approval for the idea.