On the Move

My new teaching job started today, and the experience was very bizarre. My final days at Yale were very quiet and anticlimactic. Neither the Korean teachers nor my boss said goodbye last night, which was a little sad. They did tell my students that I was going back to the USA. My students took this as as a sign to ignore me and be as belligerent and rude as ever.

I bought two pizzas for a class that finished a whole series of textbooks. Their response?

I should have bought three pizzas. And then they demanded the free coke as well.

I SHOULD have bought three pizzas. So I could then make them watch me devour an entire one whole.

The whole first floor office was in the process of being dismantled and redone. It’s almost as if they are trying to erase the memory of my brief career! But really, as with most things at Yale, a random idea popped into somebody’s head and on a whim they remodeled everything. Maybe the parents complained about the size of the library. Who knows. They’re putting the computer labs on the top floor so in addition to listening to the robotic (literally and figuratively) lab recordings they have to walk up a billion flights of stairs. At least they’re exercising their muscles, if not their mind.

Oh well. I’ll be writing up something about the hogwon education, as well as a seminar I attended last week hosted by the “Seouil System” people, whose materials Yale uses. Readers, get ready to “seouil” yourself in the coming days.

Also in the coming days I’ll post my favorite memories from Yale. But first I’ll say that I’m going to miss spending the days with all my western co-workers, who are all lovely people: Steve, Robyn, Dan and Amy, and Andrea. We will now be just friends, co-workers no more.

And although they won’t read this: Jolie, you are a sweetheart. And Kyung-jin, we had our differences but you cared about the students and that is honorable. Keep on fighting against the current.

As for the new job, the first day I was sick and could only really manage some getting-to-know-you exercises. One classes’ guestimates of my age range as follows:

30, 33, 28, 46, 36, 33, 41, 39, 45, 31, 33, 28, 27, 29

That averages to about 34.5, which is over a decade over my actual age. Hmmm.

I’m very excited about my new classroom, though. There’s a projector. And a computer. And a plug that connects the projector to the computer. There’s a whiteboard. And colored pencils. And scissors. And a bunch of copies of “Animal Farm.”

The goal also is to post some photos from my big Udo Island trip from a few weekends ago as well. For now, some long overdue photographs of Kelly Leighton eating a hamburger, free of context or explanation:

Kelly is from Canada. Udo is a small little island next to a small little island off of a small nation which is kind of an island too because the country to the north is closed off. For some reason, there are pictures of Kelly’s high school classmates performing “Anne of Green Gables” at a hamburger joint on Udo.

Picture your friends from when you were in High School in photographs hanging on the wall of a random place ten thousand miles from home, and you still have no idea how random this is, because we actually WENT there.

That was the second strangest event of the weekend, after the time that girl drove her car right into the ocean.

ftw? Gadzooks! That’s right, this post ends on a cliffhanger.