Our Children Isn’t Learning

Apparently I have a very expensive back. I’ve spent about two hundred dollars on my back over the last few weeks. The first procedure, a back wax, was supposed to be very painful, but turned out to be at worst slightly irritating, and actually could be described as a nice way to spend an afternoon.

But that may have inadvertently led to a far more painful experience and a trip to the hospital this past week. Do yourself a favor and don’t look up folliculitis. Or do yourself a disfavor and look it up anyway. There’s a really good and disgusting haiku that’s yet to be written about such things.

I’m getting very excited about my new job. Not to be premature, but getting my contract terminated early seems to have been the best thing that could have happened to me while I’m here. It’s possible I might even be forced to go to China (again! sort of) or Japan for a weekend at someone else’s expense before I come back. It kind of feels like a promotion.

I’m learning all the wrong lessons from this. Maybe I should try to get fired every four months or so! I could work my way up all the way to director of a hogwon by next January!

Although it’s not as easy as it sounds. It’s actually very difficult to get fired from most hogwon jobs. I think I deserve a lot of credit for the hard work I put in to make it happen. In my experience, I think it “helps” to have a penis motorcycle. Then you get a bad reputation. But I’ve mentioned the bike to my new director, and it seems as if a bad reputation can just as easily be seen as a MOFO BAD REPUTATION BITCHEZ, as in “cool this guy can BIKE to work!” Which I’m going to do all the time Too bad I’m not going to use my bike anymore.

But more importantly, following a month of Test Prep, I had the rare opportunity to teach middle school students at Yale without the aid of  textbook or a soul-sucking midterm exam study packet.

I say opportunity, and not privilege, because I realized how low their level of English really is, and how badly most of them are served by the hogwon system. Not just Yale, and I’ll be careful to point that out, even as my time with them is winding down. Yale is in it’s own way much better than a lot of hogwons. Just look at the name: it’s like the Ivy League of hogwons!

But anyway, these kids, who’ve probably spent at least 4-5 years already, if not more, after school learning English, can not do very much with the language outside of a very structured textbook. They can’t put together sentences correctly. They don’t know parts of speech. They  don’t understand critical thinking. They have a very limited vocabulary. They are so scared of making a mistake that about half of them don’t even try unless they are 200% certain that they have the correct answer. Most damning, a lot of them don’t even understand phonics, the most basic building block of the language.

I know this because I wound up playing a game with my seventh and eighth graders that was a modified version of what I do with my second graders, who are just starting to learn vowel sounds. The middle school kids could barely do it. A simple word that had more than three or four letters, such as “octopus”, baffled a lot of them.

This wouldn’t be a problem if they were first-time learners, but theoretically they’re not. Supposedly, they’re knee deep in the English language by now. The Yale standard textbook for middle schoolers, “Hey There!”, has some complicated reading and grammar for them to do.

Basically the students have been rushed through the system with major gaps and misunderstandings almost every step of the way, so by year 6 or 7 or whatever they are pretty lost and the whole thing is kind of silly.

I think there are a number of reasons for this, but I’ll save a more thorough critique (and some anecdotes) until I’ve actually switched jobs. And I’ll continue to mention that I don’t think any issue is going to be specific to Yale, but rather all major giant quasi-corporate hogwons (which I believe my new school is not).

The students’ lack of understanding isn’t anything really new either, but I was given a fresh reminder all the same. It’s startling to realize just how far back they are. One of my co-workers suggested months ago that basically every student needs to go back to phonics, square One, and then work their way up. I think I agree with them now, and not just as a joke. Otherwise, 90% of these kids aren’t going to learn English.

In other news, rainy season is over (????), or rainy season has just begun, or rainy season is occurring in fits and starts, much to the dismay of my laundry.

The gross evil jumping spiders are back for the summer. Either that, or my turtle has mutated into a grotesque form as it hopes to terminate a “contract” of its own. I haven’t decided yet if he/she’s making the journey north.

The back crap took up a lot of my time this week. I’ve also started to try to do more cooking. Tonight was a disaster, with soggy hash browns and some kind of half-assed unfrozen bagel mess that was barely saved by the overpowering taste of burnt tomatoes.

I might need a recipe. Or a woman who can cook for me. Or a woman who can just hold a recipe book while I learn to cook for myself.

Finally, it was a terrible week for the Mets. So I’m going to conclude with a rant about one of the worst cities in America: Houston, Texas.

Running underneath this greasy metropolis are miles of pipeline transporting dirty oil to refineries on the coast. Ever taken a cruise from Galveston? If yes, I’m so sorry.

Houston is a newer American city, built on the backs of greedy oil barons. Like most cities that have sprawled like a pimple caused by folliculitis  over the last 50 years, Houston is really just one giant suburb, with the city center really just a lame excuse so people who live there can pretend that they have a ‘there’ they are going to, instead of a messy blob. That means lots of highways, lots of congestion, lots of smog.

Houston annually competes with LA and Philadelphia to see which city is the dirtiest nightmare in the union. Houston wins a lot.

Here are some pictures:

Goodnight.