We have returned from being abroad and the effect is, well, underwhelming. A lot of people told us they ‘admired’ us or ‘really wanted to do what [we're] doing’. I don’t think they completely understand that in between the temple exploring and peak climbing and sun rises in places not on a map, is a 9 to 5 marathon of cultural misunderstanding and irritation so broad and awful it nearly led us to quit after one year.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the kids and I like the teaching and I understand fully that this is a sweet deal, but the kinds of weird requests and bureaucracies and implied expectations you face from the environment you work in is just. It’s like a fun house, but instead of those mirrors that make you look fat, there’s someone spraying mace in your eyes.

Let me relate a little story from this morning. I walk in and I get this:

“We need a picture of your scanner”
“A what? A picture of my scanner?”
“Yes. For new ID card. We need a picture of your scanner”
“Oh, a picture of me. Scanned. Like a computer picture, a JPG or whatever?”
“Yes, we need it now”
“I don’t have one now. You just told me you needed one.”
“Okay, but we need it now”
“I don’t have one. You just told me you needed it like a minute ago”
“Yes, but please understand we need it”

Those two words. ‘Please Understand’. They may as well be the official motto of Korea. These are the words they use whenever they’re either trying to screw you over (As in ‘You cannot have any vacation that week. Please understand’) or when they’re asking you to bend space time (i.e., the time they asked for 26 lesson plans to be due in HALF AN HOUR.). I’d rather press my face against a power sander than ever hear the words ‘Please Understand’ again. In any instance where they’re uttered, no sane person could ever possibly accommodate the logic needed to understand the request.

And that’s how I work out my anger.

One:

So it’s 2:45. And she finally gets someone to tell me: “Last year we told you lesson plan 1 page. But now 2 page. Now lesson plan 2 page. 2 full plage okay?” and then she goes “And next week we tol you only 2 lesson plan. But now we need all 9 lesson plan, plus the 9 lesson plan for following week”. So, 18 lesson plans, 2 pages: 36 pages. Okay, when do you need them by? “3:30″.

3:30. They want 36 single spaced pages to appear in 45 minutes. I told them that was literally impossible to accomplish and the one lady started crying because I guess her boss was telling her that he HAD TO HAVE THEM by 3:30 and that he JUST FOUND OUT himself. So everyone is on everyone else’s ass about an act that is literally impossible to perform. Everyone is freaking out on everyone else because they can’t levitate a truck or fly to the moon or make make a house out of kimchi.

I managed to get 2 of them done. They were still upset. But here’s the kicker!

3 weeks ago someone handed me a piece of paper. They kept saying “Write a topic write a topic” and when I was like, “A topic on what?” they said “We don’t know. BOss give us this paper, they say write a topic”. So I wrote a topic. At 3:30 as my afterschool kids are walking in, some lady comes in and says, “We need your 6 page report on topic by 5″. More crying ensues when I report that, sorry, white people cannot bend space-time like Korean people. I tell them I’ll have it tomorrow which no one is happy about.

I also have a hilariously stern conversation with the Vice Principal and tell her that I need 2 days notice on these hijinks in the future. She says “Sometime only 1 day notice!” and I say, “Then it’s 1 day late. Or you can cancel my classes” and she says “No late, all classes!” and I say, “Then no paper” and we go back and forth and I try and be clear about the fact that you can’t expect someone to pull 36 pages put pof their ass AND NOW I AM CHUGGING COFFEE in order to write the most passive aggressive 36 pages ever.

Two:
To give you an idea of the kind of premium they place on English education here, let’s tell a story. It’s week 8 of the semester. My Wednesday 5th grade class has been canceled 3 times, with another class canceled tomorrow. I’ve had 5 3rd grade classes canceled (But I see them twice a week, so maybe it’s not as bad?), but today they canceled so the kids could practice their Track and Field games? Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to sit here and do nothing for money, but everytime a principal says “Oh, our students are falling behind in English!” I want to strangle them because it’s like they’ve never, oh, been in charge of a school before? Here’s a little pedagogical pro-tip: If you cancel 50% of your classes, your students will probably do only half as well!

Anyway. You could very easily write a monster thesis on the problems with English education in Korea, but some of them are stupidly obvious.

I’m going to subtitute a coy opening with a bone-chilling statement of fact: I am in charge of 25 5 year old Korean children for 1 hour a day, 5 days a week. I have been tasked with teaching them English. They are not yet totally square with the English alphabet. You can imagine the hi jinx.

It’s kind of like trying to train a litter of puppies, except that these puppies are bi-pedal scheming machines who demand to be entertained in their mother tongue. 25 of them, 1 of me. No Korean teacher present because it’s a voluntary (For who?) after school class. The arithmetic is brutal and cold and weird. Let’s do a thought experiment: You’re 5 years old. You are a tiny ball of irrational energy. One day this spotted Martian walks in the door. Your teacher tells you the Martian is going to tell you to speak MOON LANGUAGE, but in MOON LANGUAGE, not English.

There have been biting, impromptu haircuts, electrical outlets WHERE I DID NOT KNOW THERE WERE ELECTRICAL OUTLETS, permanent marker face paintings, knock down serious fist fights between 3 foot combatants, crying, screaming and, I think, learning.

We’ve been together for 9 days. We will be together for 91 more. 91. Holy shit, that’s a huge number. Truth be told, they’ve been getting a little better and so have I. Just keep them busy- I downloaded an episode of Yo Gabba Gabba only to find out that it was in Spanish. No one said a word, I guess all Moon Languages probably sound alike. Crafts and crafts and crafts and coloring. I have seen the face of true ADD-addled children, only they live in a country that “doesn’t really do ADD”.

And that’s why I’m sleepy.

So, we started school again last week. This was a ‘good’ thing, ‘good’ as in the way that going to the Dentist is good for you. It begs to a higher purpose, the supposed “greater” good, things which are ‘good’ for you. It’s generally better, in my estimation, to be busy and purposeful than to be allowed to stew in your own existential juices. It just happens to bring with several aneurysms worth of struggle, conflict and Kafka-esque, eyebrow-pitched stresses. Allow me to cite a few:

They got rid of my 5th grade “co-teacher” who barely ever bothered to show up and mostly slept when she did. But they replaced her with a woman who speaks not a word of English and looks to be about 8 months pregnant. This puts me right about back where we started from, which is fine.

The 3rd Grade got a new curriculum. Good! But we didn’t have any books. Bad! They actually asked me, with a straight face, to teach the new curriculum without ever having seen the book. Wrap your head around that. This is what they said to me. They wanted me to tap into the great, shared celestial consciousness of man and somehow divine the contents of the text. My co-teacher eventually just went out and bought a copy of the book from some unnamed text book depot, which gave rise to a new quandary: The teacher’s edition of the English textbook is, front to back, in Korean.

When the kids arrived for the first day of 3rd grade instruction they all had books. I asked about this after class and no one knew where they’d gotten them from. I pushed a bit and they made some phone calls and found out that the books had been delivered 2 days prior, but no one had bothered to tell anyone. There’s a very common complaint among English teachers here that no one ever tells them anything. I’m starting to realize that the problem is not exclusive to us. It’s like an episode of LOST- No one tells anyone else anything ever, no matter how important it may be.

It’s largely your ability to just sort of. Take it in stride and say, “Okay! I’m going to teach without a book!” or “You canceled all my classes and didn’t tell me? Okay!” that will 98% determine your happiness in being here.

I’m still working on photos. It’s on my to-do list right after “Lesson plans for 5th and 6th grade, Grade 3 sessions 1 & 2 and all 5 afterschool classes this week”. Busybusy! They also gave me an afterschool class for kids who don’t know the alphabet yet. It will be, charitably, amusing.

What’s the opposite of a groove? A peak? A sharp, prickly peak? Yeah, that’s what I got back into. First day of school in Korea is such an enormous nightmare. To wit: I’m now teaching 3rd Grade, which is fine in as far as anything that doesn’t kill me dead is fine, but they threw out the old books before the new ones came in. I literally have no book from which to teach. I’ve also been told that the new curriculum has no English language teacher’s edition.

Do with that what you will.

Mostly I’m glad to be back. I like having routine and purpose. But juggling my free time is always tricky. I have that very unannounced project lurking down in my task bar, I’m still staring down a stack of vacation photos a mile high and I’m pecking my way through learning to plot waveforms in a tracker so that when I get down and out about being a miserable guitar player I can make cute little Gameboy songs to cheer myself up. I like having lots of free time for goofy projects. I am not always the wisest executor of it, but when I get under the gun (Haha, that means “Have a job”) I get kind of frantic and hop from project to project without any real regard for making progress on any of them. I need a personal assistant or something.

We’re usually tired when we get home. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just the way it is- Teaching is tiring. And yet whenever anyone asks me about my job I always reflexively answer: I love it. Trying to think on that more deeply can be puzzling: Which part do I love, exactly? Standing up for 8 hours? Talking over a room full of kids who’d rather be anywhere else? Scrubbing the moon-language graffiti from the desks?

It’s the little stuff that just. Wipes all that bad stuff right off. I have an after school class that’s a major challenge. It’s 10 kids: 2 1st graders, 1 2nd grader, 2 3rd graders, 3 4th graders and 2 5th graders. At one time. What do you teach that age range? We do a lot of arts ‘n craftsy type stuff because it tends to keep everyone equally occupied. Still, the young ones can be a handful. I spent some time last week trying to keep them from poking paper clips into the electrical outlets. Add ‘Saved Many Children From Death’ under ‘Accomplishments’ on my resume.

Anyway, they’ve been getting a little worse as the school year nears it’s end. They’re all arts and crafty for about 5 minutes before they rediscover the joy of RUNNING AROUND ALL THE TIME ALL DAY. Today we were supposed to be making little paper craft Christmas presents. One of the younger kids approached me with his scraggly box in hand. Before I could congratulate him, he begin tearing it to pieces. This seemed apace of things, so I offered a token, “No! It’s nice!” and let him go for it.

But he had a plan- He’d made a small gold star and tucked it inside the box. As he finished ripping apart his completed assignment he presented me with the star. Adorable, dude. That’s the little stuff.

Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined? — Bertrand Russle

Fortunately, the semester is kind of winding down, so maybe we’ll get to all of the things we didn’t talk about yet. Like Samgyupsal and heated floors, the great huge pleasures of a Korean lifestyle.

To give you an idea of why we’re not as write-y write as we always claimed we would be: I came home from work and set about making a lesson for my 5th grade class. That took from about 5 until 7, when I took a break for dinner, I took from 8-9:30 to finish up the lesson. Now I have an After School class to a do a lesson for and when I’m done with that I can get to work on my 7 lesson plans due next week. I love my After School class, but the additional work load has been severe to say the least. The good news is that if we choose to stick around for a second year here we can re-use all of this stuff and pretty much put it on Cruise Control. Phew.

Also, those content pages above will get popped soon. We’re buy deciding which ESL stuff to upload. Between the two of us I think we could publish a full curriculum for our grades.

Those of you who have known me for more than 15 minutes know that I am basely inept in sports. It’s not that I’m particularly bad at one or the other, it’s that in the innermost core of all sports is a series of deeply unified skills: Depth Perception, Coordination, Reflex, Not-Being-Afraid-Of-Being-Hit-By-The-Ball. These are the atoms of sports. Sports are made of them. They are toxic to me.

I’m a thinker and not just in that haughty, “Oh, you didn’t read Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics?” way, but in the ‘There is a ball coming towards me. I have several options, can one of you PAUSE TIME so that I might deliberate on the best outcome?’. But even if you could pause time, even if I suddenly developed the iron will to know what to do and when to do it, I lack the skills required to enact that solution- I will whiff the ball. I will fumble the catch. I will miss the lay up. Barring a sudden re-orientation of reality, these are garaunteed feats.

The point is: Playing sports in America is the only thing I can genuinely count as ‘embarassing’. I am a roll with the punches dude, but when it comes to sports I feel like I’m 7 again and completely helpless. So when Thursday rolled around and it was revealed to be ‘Sports Day’, I shook.

When I was looking at colleges I blacklisted any that had a Phys Ed requirement. I have not been in ritual, mandatory exercise situations in 7 or 8 years. This is a good thing, I am very, very comfortable with this. That ship sailed. It’s not even on the horizon anymore. I’m just chillin’ out on the beach. I had forgotten what a, uh. Well, let’s dial it back a second: At first there was sunlight. Then people were like, “Oh, UV” and then gamma rays and x-rays and whatever. Our knowledge of the spectrum increased dramatically. Do you see where I’m going with this?

Sports Day increased my knowledge of the embarassment spectrum enormously. Because here’s a thing about being bad at sports: Everything thinks they can redeem you. Drunk on every romantic sports film cliche ever set to celluloid, every apt Sportsman believes that you are a star quarterback unfulfilled. You must be nurtured! This is bad enough in English. If I’m hiding off in left field or shooting for the gutter, it’s not because I’m waiting for a mentor. It’s because I want to get it over with and with as little fuss as possible.

In Korean, this is twice as bad. I’m now not only fending off the good intentions of the able, I’m trying to interpret those intentions through a miasma of hand gestures, fumbled balls and broken English, all while trying to make a good impression. My face started to do that thing it’d do at trade shows when I’d been smiling too long, it got all quake-y, like arms do when you try and move a couch by yourself.

So I’m trying to fake my way through bi-lingual Volleyball and I look off in the distance- The female teachers are tossing a plunger into a bucket. That looks like it’s my speed.

Fortunately, my awfulness has the kind of universal, “One World, We’re all Brothers” appeal that Oprah would kill for and it becomes apparent that I’m not a flower waiting to blossom, I’m the house plant that’s beyond watering. They give up passing and asking me to serve and I give up the ALL SMILES ALL THE TIME thing and everyone is satisfied. The game ends and we drink beer and eat pig feet and pork belly, which makes it even-steven by me.

Ugh. Sports day.

FUN FACT: All Koreans own a FULL TRACK SUIT waiting to be deployed at a moments notice.

FUN FACT: I do not.