One of the most frustrating things about working in Korea is that everything big and small is determined at the last possible second, leading to people being put on the spot or in difficult positions through no fault of their own. This happened twice today and it annoys the hell out of me.
The first thing was for my university camp class. I was planning to rest my voice today. After my “singing” class yesterday the lump in my throat felt more painful than normal and I didn’t want to spend an entire class explaining a story to some students. I went ahead and made a crossword puzzle to review the materials we covered in the book. It was as much a day off for the students as it was for me. Of course, this was the day that the university advertising person decided he was going to film for the promotional materials for next year’s camp. I’d much rather have my students in a group discussion with free talking and lots of vocabulary going on, not a puzzle on their desks and all them hunched over a dictionary and their text books trying to find the right words.
The videographer stopped my class and asked me to explain my activity and what I was doing to help them learn. Nothing helps you teach like a person over your shoulder asking you what you are doing from time to time with a camera to record everything. Not only that, but I looked like hell this morning. I was dressed appropriately, but I had double sets of deep bags under my eyes and I was about two days away from my last good shave. I’ve been fighting off a weak voice, and I just don’t have the time for those sorts of distractions. Even on a good day I hate being in front of a camera. Nothing makes me more self-conscious than having to come up with something impromptu in front of a camera for work.
The students were as blindsided by this interview too. They had to offer comments about my class as I was standing in front of them on camera. Offering up anything other than a general platitude when someone of higher status can hear you (for example, like a teacher who controls your grade) is a good way to put yourself in an awkward situation in Korea. They didn’t want to “lose face” by having nothing to say, but also didn’t want me to “lose face” by saying something bad about the class. The best comment I got from my three classes was, “Before this camp, I used to hate reading class. Now because of this teacher’s class, I don’t hate reading.” (I can’t remember if he added [as much] after that comment or not.) I walked over and gave him a high five for an endorsement that solid.
Later in the day, I had to teach the last remaining group of students for the elementary school camp that hadn’t seen me in class before. I was fine in the class because there was a Korean Campus Assistant (CA) present to help some of the lower level students along. The CA in class don’t do ANYTHING but some translation work from time to time. They don’t discipline. They reward with stickers, but never punish. However, it’s far less likely that a student is going to berate a foreign teacher if a Korean teacher is also present.
In the first half of the class, the activity I was forced to teach was writing. I don’t know the level of these students. I’ve never taught them before. The bar was pretty low for acceptable effort. Some students went right to work on a story. Others sat around for thirty minutes before they had inspiration. One student had a story about Spongbob and his friend Patrick the Starfish having a fight. They got into an argument and stopped talking to one another. Then, at the end of the story they reconciled and became friends again.
The girl wanted the English expression for “became close friends again”, or something like that. I told her several different expressions that I thought she was asking for. She didn’t speak in English to clarify her response, so I couldn’t offer anything more exact. She shouted at me in Korean, “Why don’t you SPEAK KOREAN so I can UNDERSTAND YOU!?!?!”, to which I replied, “WHY DON’T YOU SPEAK ENGLISH IN THIS ENGLISH CAMP?!” in English. Loud mouth teenagers are the worst.
Anyway, when I returned to her story, she had looked up the expression she had wanted in her story from a dictionary. She had thrown out my suggestions and wrote, “Sponge bob and Patrick had intimate relations.”
I told her what that expression meant. She called me a pervert. SHE was the one that wrote it, despite my objections. Moron.
It turns out that this particular batch of students was good for twenty minutes of work after their first break before they all pulled out Nintendo DS systems or mobile phones and started playing games. The class seemed a lot rowdier than usual. I looked around, expecting the CA to be telling them to go back to work. He had disappeared. The CAs are actually teaching classes and group activities once a week to get experience. Today was their teaching day, but all of the Campus Assistants in all of the classes withdrew early to prepare their lessons while they should have been helping keep order. They hadn’t told us, because then the students might find out and cause many more problems. I had to let the class descend into chaos because I didn’t have the vocal strength, or the patience, or the temperament to keep them in line.
For once, I’d like to be the first person to know when the plan changes.
