A good deal of my students have given up all pretense of trying to learn English, or just trying to behave in a manner that won’t cause me to light myself on fire and jump out the window.
I’ve had a lot of kids screaming in Korean, swearing in Korean, throwing things at each other.
Today my fifth graders complained that they weren’t having any fun. Which really kind of hurt me, because I actually WANT them to have fun. We were playing a game too, but they found it boring. Because it was an English game. And they find English boring.
Last week one of my middle school classes started to take apart the desks. I was trying to teach grammar or something and all the sudden all the tables started falling apart. Somehow, by the time I brought the big boss lady into the classroom, the tables had reassembled themselves as if by magic, but unfortunately for my students, their textbooks did not also magically reappear as well. Oops.
Possible reasons for the sudden upswing in shenanigans include:
* Spring time
*Release after a month of test-taking
*A bad case of hormonal outbursts
*Knowledge that I’m not going to be their teacher for much longer (this is me being paranoid but hogwons are gossip central).
*Subconscious response to my anxiety over this transitional period
*Disco Fever
The most popular game at Yale hogwon among students (and teachers too) is the “mafia” game, where kids pretend to be mafia, and the idea is that the rest of the class, or “cityfolk”, try to weed out the bad guys before they kill everyone.
My students don’t understand this game. Or they understand it too well, and they prefer a different version. What usually happens is the “mafia” kid “kills” a student, and then proudly declares that they were the ones who offed their classmate.
I tried being very sneaky, naming MYSELF the mafia, and therefore forcing the kids to actually figure out who the killer is. The results were hilarious. I think I’m going to do this again.
I tried to write dialogues for kids as well. This also seemed to have reasonably decent results.
My favorite from a kids’ paper today was the following gem:
“I’d like to take a car to the car museum. The car museum is really neat because you can see lots of cars there.”
I had ambitious plans to mount the volcano this week, but got up to late and so ended up walking down into a crater instead.
It’s not really a crater so much as a depressing amidst a bunch of hills. I didn’t have time to walk all the way down and I probably wouldn’t have even if I did.
Also this week, I took my “vehicle” over to the Seokbujak Museum. I even took a picture so that I would remember the name:
Even after going through a small exhibit explaining in English about the museum, I wasn’t sure what it was but overall it seems to be some kind of botanical gardens where they grow a variety of flowers and shrubs and some fruit as well. It’s a nice atmosphere but overall is pretty small and the tiny $4 entrance fee even seems a bit much since a slow walk around the grounds takes about 20-25 minutes time at most. There are much prettier natural sights you can enjoy, as opposed to this modest artificial landscaping. Nevertheless, here are some pictures I took:
The highlight of the “museum” was this weird phallic statue and its accompanying “hole”:
Is there a fit here???
I’ve been trying to get in shape for the upcoming volleyball tournament but it’s been difficult. Despite what I’d been told, protein powder does not buy itself and then appear one day inside your medicine cabinet. I’m going to have to go on a scavenger hunt in E-Mart one of these days.
I’ve been cooking a lot more. I made myself Ddeokk-bogi the other day, which are rice dumplings in spicy sauce. Initially I was infatuated with these things, essentially bloated gummy rice balls, but they really don’t have much of a taste and I wasn’t pleased with the consistency of the batch I made. The magic seems to be gone. I might be moving permanently back to pasta.
I read an interesting article about Korean impressions of English teachers, a lot of which is negative. It was an interesting read because despite the fact that a lot of impressions of the ESL teachers can be written off as stereotypes I think there’s some truth, and there’s also some value or significance to what is perceived to be the “common truth”, so that even if its not fair or accurate, its still a force to be reckoned with. I’ll write more about this later, and hopefully I can link back to the article later this week. That’s a bit of a tease.
Culture Time 