::A Geek in Korea::

My wife and I followed through with our plan to price compare strollers for Glow. We went to an upscale department store to look at a higher end stroller we plan to use for a few years. We got to put the baby in the chair, see how it folded up, and how much of a discount we could get at a physical store. The plan was then to check online to comparison shop and see if we could get a better deal. If we could get a better deal while it was on sale while at the department store, we’d pick it up in the brick & mortar store.

The lady at the baby stroller shop let my wife see that the sale they were running was having an impact on the demand for the strollers available in the country. It was on back order for a week all around Korea, but they still had two left in stock. She told us the sale ended today, and if we didn’t get it then we’d need to wait at least a week for a new shipment to arrive and put in a reservation to get one when available.

If I had my Motoroi Android Phone, the process for checking the price to know if getting this stroller immediately would have been finished in a minute. I’d have gone online, checked the price, and just told my wife where to pick up the stroller. We don’t need it immediately, but if we were getting a good deal walking home with it wouldn’t be a bad thing to purchase it immediately either. Since my phone arrives later in the week, I was unable to price check while in the store to see the proper course of action. We had to go searching for a place to check the Internet. I felt like I was a character in an episode of South Park.

Seeing as this is Korea, the chance to use a high speed connection to the Internet in a public area for a low price is about as good as finding a public toilet. The opportunities exist, if you know where to look, but just like the toilet always feel dirty and worried about picking up a virus after using it. I went to a few coffee shops to see if they had any PCs available to use for customers. Nope. Since Starbucks moved into the neighborhood they only offer WiFi service, if that. There was a hair salon that had PCs for bored people to use, but no one in the party needed a haircut. We weren’t willing to go in just to beg for a little time on the computer. We just needed five minutes, so we decided that even though we’d waste 55 minutes at a PC room, it was better than searching high and low for another place to go.

We ended up at a PC room within walking distance of the department store. This is the first time my wife had actually needed to use a machine at a PC room and she didn’t know the procedure. Heh. I stood outside with Glow since the place smelled like smoke. People must have thought we were the worst parents ever. Mom was inside getting her gaming fix while dad waited outside with the baby. She checked what we needed for the stroller pricing, determined the Internet was more convenient, and we left without spending the money at the department store after all. This process took an extra thirty minutes total. While annoying, this still beats the crap out of shopping in the United States, where PC rooms do not exist where I am from and checking the Internet involved DRIVING 30 minutes both ways to price check items.

I can’t wait for my phone to eliminate that sort of inefficiency from my schedule. I’m also  worried about the time I’ll spend playing around with my phone constantly being online. Between the house and work being wired for WiFi, and coffee shops and other places starting to offer it ubiquitously, the chance that my Internet addiction becomes free and portable is fairly disturbing. I’ll end up losing far more time just playing around online than I will save running around trying to comparison shop. Hopefully my limited data plan will cover whatever I need to do when I am online with my phone and I won’t end up with outrageous bills. Then my time and my money will both be gone.

Stop me if I get this bad.

Last night the family went to a Vietnamese noodle place for dinner. I had some mild Pho noodles and some Jasmine tea which sabotaged my weekend. The caffeine from the tea, imbibed too late in the evening, caused me to stay up two extra hours than I had planned. My sleep schedule still being wrecked from morning classes means I get up earlier every day regardless of what time it actually happens to be. I was up after only four or five hours sleep. My wife had much the same luck sleeping I did, but her troubles were causes by Glow, and not the tea, which she didn’t drink. This ruined our morning, as everyone was sleep deprived and had a headache.

When we finally got mobilized for lunch, we made a plan to do two things. I’m upgrading my phone to a model running Android, and we were going to go shopping for a new stroller for Glow. We were going to do our typical routine of trying out what we liked at a department store hands on, then going online to get the best deal. Since I had been so busy at work I hadn’t been grocery shopping in a week. We planned get dinner out, then head to the department store. If we could get that done, we would return and go grocery shopping to resupply. We had this plan worked out, but we both crashed and needed a nap in the afternoon after lunch. By the time we woke up, we had to weigh our priorities. Comparison Shopping? Phone reservation? Food tomorrow? Dinner?

None of that was going to happen on an empty stomach while holding Glow in a department store about to close if we didn’t hurry. I volunteered to cook some food we had left, while my wife went for emergency food supplies for tomorrow. When she got back, dinner would be ready and then if there was enough time we could leave to take care of business. Things didn’t work out that way, so my wife had to go out on her own, again, and make the phone reservation while I watched Glow and write this post. The phone came first, because I want to receive it in a timely manner before the Lunar New Year holiday if I am going to be taken out to the countryside and forced to spend three days in absolute boredom with my Korean relatives. Also, it followed two months of patiently waiting for my choice of an anniversary/Christmas/birthday gift, so I had put in my time and deserved to get it taken care of before I changed my mind. Tomorrow she’ll probably do the comparison shopping on her own, or with my mother in law.

We didn’t get much done today, but in a few days time I’ll have something new to play with.

I was nervous yesterday when the manager of the university camp I’m teaching pulled me aside. “I need to ask you a favor.”

Uh oh. I’ve lived long enough in Korea to know that’s never good.

“We’re going to have a cultural exchange activity, and we wanted to know if you would participate.”

Fuck fuck fuck! That’s a “WARNING! DANGER WILL ROBINSON” sort of signal right there. I played it cautious, worried, but interested.

“We’re going to be cancelling two of your morning classes tomorrow, and going to Papa John’s nearby. We wanted to know if you could help teach the students how to make pizza. Then, everyone will eat the pizza they made, for free, and we’ll just hang out there. Will you come?”

HELL YES! Talk about exceeding my expectations for a “cultural exchange activity”. Pizza? Free pizza? Free pizza I make with students? No preparation, and I can eat a free lunch too? Too awesome. Can I work with a manager this awesome every semester break please?

As promised we headed over to the pizzeria for “class”. They had set out dough and flour, and two different choices for toppings. They demonstrated the proper technique for rolling the dough, then we had to try it ourselves. The students worked in teams of two, while the teachers each got their own bit of dough to work with. It was only a personal pizza, so you didn’t need to throw it over your head (sadly). The employees made it look like a science, but I struggled to make a dough that was relatively flat without poking too many holes through the dough in the process. I had a 95% shaped dough with a slight lump. Making pizza isn’t like doing clay work in art class. Pizza doesn’t explode in a kiln if you make it wrong. At least I don’t think it does. I’ve never worked at a pizzeria.

I tried to design a shape with my garlic sauce, toppings, and my sweet potatoes to make it easy to stand out when they fired up the oven. I can make a distinct looking pizza even after it was blasted in an oven. It was better tasting and better cooked than I expected, since I hadn’t loaded the toppings evenly, and I know that was always one of the problems I had when I made pizza like foods at home.

The higher level students offered me a seat with them, so I joined them for the meal. It was like being invited to sit with the popular kids at lunch in high school, if everyone was a smart, bilingual, Korean woman instead. I’ll take that seating arrangement over those damn jocks in high school any day. We talked about making persimmon ice cream with my family back at home (utter failure from what I remember), and other strange foods. The students were getting a kick out of the conversations, and I was having a good time just being able to chat about things without needing to use words like, “foreshadowing” or “satiric voice” all the time. I like my book, but it can be a little heavy to discuss in class.

I thanked the organizers of the outing for their awesome cultural exchange idea. The teachers that taught the students in the afternoon got to stop by and enjoy the meal as well. Since I had half of my own pizza, and some of my student’s I let them finish off some of my left over pizza before their own professionally made one arrived. I also learned that I get a discount on pizza if I show them my school identity card and tell them I’m a professor. AWESOME. Cheaper edible pizza is never a bad discovery.

After stuffing ourselves, someone found buy one, get one cup of Americano coffee free coupons at the counter for an upscale coffee place with lots of indoor seating. Since I needed my caffeinated fortitude to make it through my elementary school camp, I told the willing students that anyone in the elevator leaving with me was welcome to my free coffee. I got a chain of students to follow me out to the nearby coffee shop. Half of us bought coffee, while the other half drank for free with the coupons. Some doubled up and drank two cups with their own coupons. We sat down and chatted for another forty minutes. Since my class ended when I walked out of the pizza place, this was off the clock. They all had funny stories or interesting questions to ask me. They got to see some pictures of my daughter, and found out about my dog. I’m still not comfortable being the center of attention all the time with a group of adults, but this wasn’t so bad.

The “Korea is a small world” effect kicked in again too. One of the women in the class lives in my apartment block, and her sister is my barista at the coffee shop I frequent in my neighborhood.It seems her sister knew me as the “Foreigner with the dog that orders his coffee like a Korean does. Always to go. No chit chat. Headphones.”

Heh. That’s me before I get my coffee all right.

This was probably the most fun I had with a group of adult students since working at the university. I tend not to be big in the socialization of the job because I think it leads to conflicts of interest and could call in conflict impartiality if a conflict between students arose. I also usually don’t have the time to spend hanging out. I’m either busy, or on my way home to see my family. School sponsored socialization usually tends to be boring or slightly torturous, but this was great. I felt bad I had to cut the meeting a little short to get to the office in time to plan my next class.

I can’t make real pizza worth a damn, but this was awesome.

Today I woke up feeling fine. I get up earlier than I’d like, but I’ve almost adjusted to my schedule. I went to take my shower to get ready for the morning. Right as I reached down to turn off the water, I got a sharp, nasty, stabbing pain in my back. It was horrible, like someone stuck a knife in my back, right under my shoulder blade, and it had gone straight down through to my heart. It was so painful I had to gasp and take stock. “My left arm isn’t totally numb, so this probably isn’t a heart attack. Well, at least this terrible pain isn’t going to KILL me.” I got out of the shower with intense difficulty. The process of getting a towel off the rack was tough. I couldn’t lift my arms much higher than my waist, or turn my neck.

Luckily, my lovely wife had been preparing my breakfast and noticed my distress. She massaged my arm a little before she microwaved a heat pack and found some medicated strips to place on my muscle. I think it was a pinched nerve or a muscle that just didn’t like how I had been sleeping the night before. Usually a warm shower helps my sore muscles, but this was the opposite. I was really wondering if I was going to be able to work today in the pain I had as I walked out the door. There are no sick days in Korea, even if I couldn’t move without intense pain, I still needed to show up and make it happen.

I managed to ride the bus without screaming in pain whenever the bus took a wild turn or stopped quickly enough to throw me around. Luckily for me I only have three stops to wait before I get off the bus. When I got to school I was able to take off my coat, gingerly, and even get my scarf off, which wasn’t something I was able to do alone at the house. I told my first class that I was in bad pain, so I wasn’t going to be able to write much on the board. The second class was more of the same. By the third class I had limbered up enough to write on the top half of the board.

The junior camp classes had a Golden Bell, where I had to help emcee. I was 80% by this point, and was able to walk around and have fun with the students. Addressing 100 students at once with a microphone, or without, is just part of my day now. Stage fright? What’s that. You’ve just got to do it.

By my last class I was able to break up a fight between a boy old enough to grow facial hair and a teenage girl that was taunting and pinching him. He’s big enough to hurt someone, but dumb enough not to realize it. Calling him out for picking on a girl was pretty satisfying too.

I’ve still got a ton of work to do, but at least I can move under my own strength without medicine.

I got a “surprise!” text message and email from the children’s camp director shortly before I was supposed to teach today. This usually is a signal that disaster has struck and I’d quickly need to find a solution to put out any fires started by this abrupt change. Instead there was an improved plan for the classroom activity today! Instead of rehashing the same materials I had used in a previous class, I got to try something new. We had to make a poster to represent the class. Interesting.

Since I had the “B” class, the students needed to represent themselves somehow with the theme of the letter “B”. This is the theme I chose for their poster, as it was the only thing neutral and harmless for them to all agree upon. We started by brainstorming “B” words suitable for a poster.

The winning words were:

Bear, Bird, Book, Bee, Brain, Big, Best

I then handed out six small white boards, assigned teams, then let them prototype different designs with any words they wished to use from the list. They had to draw, write, and design everything on the white board first with their teams. Then I collected the white boards and did a secret class vote for which designs they liked the best. The top three winning designs were selected.  The teams were enlarged to include the other three teams that didn’t win, and then these larger teams had to recreate one of the three winning posters on the final poster board that would be hung up in the hallway outside to represent their class to the rest of the camp.

The winners were great! First place was a cute bear mascot that said, “B Class is Best!”. It was a group effort by six girl students that got this one colored and looking perfect. It could have been sold in a store it was so well designed. I designed the second place poster myself with the theme “B Class has BIG BRAINS!” My poster had a girl at a desk, the top of her head removed, and a giant, pulsating brain popping out of her cranium “Mars Attacks!” style. I wanted the students to use a scary font for the word bubble, but they didn’t get it done fast enough to even get it colored. The fusion between the cute and the horrific was captured very well by the artist in the group I put in charge when I went to sort out some of the other group’s problems. I took all the troublemakers into my group to keep an eye on them personally, so I didn’t get much work done with them. The other winner was made by a group of boys that was designed by students was a large mural with lots of animals that started with the letter “B” that said “We are class B animals!”.

Advice for those willing to try this some day:

Korean students get overwhelmed when you have them try to design something without a lot of hand holding at the beginning. Give them a target you expect, or show them an example before too much time passes and they get distracted.

If you don’t watch a group of boys carefully, any male stick figure they draw will inevitably have a penis dripping fluids if you give them enough time. Just don’t let them get that far, or get bored.

Girls do not like letting new people into their group if they think they are in control of every step of the progress. Be sure to delineate each student’s role perfectly so that everyone can participate at each step of the way.

Do not tolerate any sabotage of a group activity by a bored member that has bad ideas and wants to derail everyone else’s fun. Kick any student that is unhelpful and petulant about others out of any group. As soon as someone gets upset because their ideas aren’t liked by the rest of the group, give them their own paper, and tell them to work alone instead.

Secret votes help save fragile egos, but make sure students know what they are voting on.

Establish firm time limits for the design and final steps, otherwise students never get to work fast enough.

Good luck!

Keyboard Cat ultimately will have to play itself off.

Today was the market play where young students got to prove their English economic skills. We were handed a set of stock English shopping phrases to teach. The students all brought in their own used items that they wanted to trade away. Their parents had given permission to let them get rid of these items. We set up a fake economy with photocopied money. The students all started out with the same amount of money and had to try to get whatever they wanted by negotiated with one another in English.

The students were at the perfect age where they know money gets them what they need, but don’t really understand how money works. It was fascinating to see how paper with arbitrary photocopied monetary values suddenly became viable tender for a thirty minute window. After I explained all the expressions and ran through several mock purchasing dialogs, I explained some rudimentary economics to them.

“Right now, this paper is like money. It can buy you things. It can get something you want. But in thirty minutes…” I then looked at my watch, “this paper will be garbage. There is no point saving this money until tomorrow. This money is garbage in thirty minutes. You really want to get rid of all this money and get something new before the market ends. Don’t save the money, because you’ll never spend it again. Now, GO!”

They went to the other classes and took a look at what they had for sale. Students all spied the Nintendo DS game one student had, or the comic books another student brought. Some students went for the items that were brand new, and never used. Others went for practical things. I wasn’t participating directly in the market, but I saw things I thought were neat too.

One of the students in my class took my meaning about the faux-cash at heart and dominated the market. Whenever there was a book for sale, he would negotiate them down to the same rate he established with some of the other students in the class as the “going rate” for books. He would then pressure them to see at the same rate and snatch up everything they had. By the end of the market he had seven books, a baseball, a wallet, a pencil case, a plastic Pokemon toy, and a few other trinkets. It was incredible to see him corner the market. He was a true shark.

Some of the other students in my class got into a contest for collecting the most cash they could gather in the thirty minutes. They would run around the market screaming, “I’m rich! I have the most money!” Whenever they would run into someone that was buying physical products with their money, they’d scoff. I tried to explain that they needed to unload all of the cash bidding on one of the higher priced items one of the students had if they were actually planning on using that money. They would tell people, “I’ll pay you tomorrow for your expensive item. Today I’m saving my money.”

They just wanted to collect the money for themselves to play with at home. I guess if they got something out of it, it’s worth it. I suggested that the campus assistant allows them to purchase “stickers” as a reward for each dollar they collected over the base amount given to each student before they figure out their collected money is otherwise worthless and complain about being taken advantage of by the more market savvy students.

My class took more stuff than they sold to the other class, but I don’t know if the items were offered on parity. Everyone went home happy enough, and no was was complaining about being screwed over, so it was a success. It was also a fun thing to study as an observer. I don’t know how long this sort of activity would work. When do students actually figure out the value of money?

“Hello, I am having a Taekwondo exhibition.”

In my second set of children’s classes for the camp I teach in the afternoon, I had a seemingly impossible task. Teach twenty students how to write a story in under forty minutes, then get them to write their story in another forty minutes. Luckily I had a method for teaching, and really enthusiastic classes that were eager to learn.

I did a demo to teach basic writing to young students I really enjoy. I’ve done this same example about a dozen times and it never fails to get a good story started. I draw a simple picture on the board, then slowly add one detail at a time. After each time I add a detail, I let the students tell me what the story is that explains the picture. I started out with two stick figures. One was running from another, which appeared dead on the ground. I asked what was going on. Students replied that one stick figure had killed the other. Then I add a first aid kit. Now one stick figure was going to get medicine for the hurt stick figure. The story evolved into an elaborate tale as I went along adding details. The students kept up, changing the story each time. By the time I had added the final details, they had changed the story ten or fifteen times. Each time the motivations for the actions the characters were undertaken were put in a new context, which required new story with the same two characters.

We then talked about the elements of a story. There needed to be characters, a setting, a conflict, and a resolution. I told them to brainstorm for a few minutes, then prepare their own story. I then handed out a paper with four boxes and a space for a caption under each box. They had to illustrate and write their own story. Then they had to rewrite it with corrected grammar on a second sheet.

We finished the first part of the activity, explaining the story structure and going through the sample story in the first class. It was my intention to let the students think about a potential story during their break time, then come back and write during the second part of the class. Several of the students remained at their desks during the break and refused to go on break.

“Teacher! I don’t have time for a break! I’m writing my story! I’m too busy for a break now.” They were really into it. I know how those kids feel. I hate to be interrupted when I start a blog post too.

They plotted out each picture and illustration. Some students were better artists than story tellers,  but that’s fine. As long as they wrote something intelligible in English it was rewarded. If they let me fix their grammar and recopied it to a paper without any illustrations, and the story still made sense, I gave them a second reward. Students also volunteered to share their story, which was awesome. If I hadn’t run out of stickers myself, I would have rewarded them again.

I’ve got to do the same lesson three more times in different levels. I hope they all go as well as this one did.