the best field trips are rainy ones

i went on a field trip today. as i take a moment to reflect on that first sentence, i can’t recall the last time i made such a statement and meant just exactly that. i don’t mean i got lost or got on the wrong bus, and i neither fell over myself nor took any mind-altering substances in a field. students and teachers – and it is the latter group to which i still implausibly belong – went on a just-barely-educational-enough-to-be-justified excursion: we kicked it old school. or maybe, since field trips don’t only belong to earlier eras, we kicked it steady school. maybe we simply kicked it school.

stand by for kicking.

it’s been a good couple of weeks. i get to take some credit for that: some lesson experiments have worked out, a self-taught crash course in powerpoint has been beneficial, course goals have been simplified and streamlined, some motivational carrots have been implemented in the form of cheap bribes (read: candy), and a significant motivational stick has been implemented in the form of speaking tests (!) that will have an impact on students’ final grades (!!!). the rest of the credit goes to, um, time? slowly but surely, names are being learned, teacher is not so frequently a form of address i must respond to, and the once ubiquitous but simple shouts of hello are blooming into more sophisticated discourse elements: questions! unrehearsed sentences! sometimes more than one! reports of full-blown cases of conversation are beginning to trickle in.

two weeks ago, a trip like the one we took today would have come as welcome relief. this week, it was like the cherry on my sundae. it was kind of a surprise sundae, too. field trips are kind of annual affairs around these parts, with each grade taking between one and three days at different times of the year. the first graders (that is, first grade in middle school; thus grade seven, canada-wise) already took their three-day trip in april, and when i heard that the third graders (in canada: grade nine) had their trip coming up, i mentioned that i thought it would be fun to go with them. to me this was a pure hypothetical. it would be fun, but i’m not a homeroom teacher so i don’t have that privilege. and it’s not as if my work life isn’t already easier than most other teachers: many of them teach classes every other saturday. so when my co-teacher asked me if i would rather travel to the folk village by subway, bus or catch a ride with her, i was happily surprised. and chose car.

as we drove, the image i held in my mind of a korean folk village reminded me of visiting fort langley – if worlds apart aesthetically, i guessed they would both be like living museums – and talked about taking trips there in grade school, though i stumbled for a moment on defining the word fort (something like a small castle? made of wood?). turns out the korean folk village has a mild case of multiple personality disorder. there are areas to shop for traditional goods and toy trinkets (expected); replicas of traditional workshops, gardens, markets and homes (expected); a museum (expected); and an amusement facilities zone, with a small-ish roller coaster, merry-go-round, bumper cars and a 3d theatre (curious).

also there was this.

students came in different groups by subway or bus; by the time my co-teacher and i arrived, there was a gaggle of them loitering around the front gates. i realized then that our particular trip didn’t include all the third-graders; seven of the eight classes were on another trip to a science museum. i teach every class of first- and second-graders once a week, but i only see the third-graders fortnightly – so i don’t know the majority of them that well, outside of the few early adopters who’ve come to talk with me on their lunch breaks and after school. for a few minutes, standing in the rain, (i’m ashamed to admit that) i felt a little disappointed – where were my favourite, advanced, talkative students? i imagined them running through seoul’s answer to science world, warm and indoors, donning lab coats, messing with electromagnets and watching omnimax movies (almost certainly about dinosaurs). fifteen minutes of talking to the wonderful students i had as company put flight to such thoughts. turns out an excellent way to make friends is wandering, wet and muddy, around a bizarre retro wonderland. i think this is something middle-schoolers understand instinctively while my own university education had taught me to forget.

we did our due diligence in walking through the educational elements of the area, which included a world folk museum, housing domestic wares from many different cultures, but soon enough we were scattered everywhere – the homeroom teacher had helpfully provided identical white disposable rain coats to all the students, who with their umbrellas looked like wandering aquaphobic ghosts. we took a bunch of silly pictures, we got really muddly, we ate lunch under canvas tarps, we bought and ate yeot, and we rode a carousel.

this is a mask depicting a japanese demon; his prodigious nose symbolizes the great extent to which he is in touch with his feminine side.

here prayers are written on small pieces of paper and tied to the ropes surrounding the stones. for scale, the students standing at left are approximately two feet tall.

i have no stories to tell

there’s a learning curve associated with beginning any new job, of course – determining the location of bathrooms, getting new keys, memorizing security alarm codes, learning about your coworkers’ idiosyncrasies, and so on – and teaching english is a particularly cruel example. if we consider learning curves as a biological type (a species of hookworm, for example), the one involved in teaching english in a foreign country to largely disinterested classes of nearly forty thirteen-year-olds could be its blood-sucking, anaemia-causing holotype.

actually, scratch the foreign country bit. surprisingly little of my discontent has to do with any culture shock or disorientation from being a stranger in a strange land. i’ve not undergone any shock, and the land isn’t all that strange. but i have been frustrated in resolutely attempting to hammer my square peg methodologies into this round hole system.

i witnessed, and celebrated, the progress my adult students made during their studies in vancouver. they did great. they had fun. i loved it. they were adults though. and they had between two and six hours of class every day. and when they weren’t in class, they were still ordering their coffees and hamburgers in english. many could only make friends (or talk to the cute brazilian girl sitting in the corner) in english. they had paid sizable sums of money just to be there, so they were motivated not to waste their own time. did i mention they were adults?

trying to find some key to effectively teach huge classes with limited class time is sometimes disheartening; what’s been motivating me is the drive to recapture the sense of daily success i used to feel teaching english in canada. i think experimentation is a big part of being a successful teacher, and my classroom has been a mad scientist’s meta-study laboratory for the past six weeks. with maybe a smack of chinese water torture.

"…the real torture is that farty smell…"

so some conclusions i’ve (tentatively) reached: a) my students could probably use some more structured practice. i’ve always tried to fast-track my students towards a creative production stage, but my all-korean-speaking class largely prefers to warp-speed-track right past that towards a meaningful production in korean stage. locking them in to master a smaller piece of grammar rather than letting them flail at expressing a (surely beautiful) complex idea could serve well. b) tasking myself with correcting nearly a thousand pieces of homework per week is not so much a pain in the ass as a kuiper belt of hemorrhoids on my very soul. you will consolidate some vocabulary and review some forms, and we’ll sure-as-heck correct it in class together next week. c) i’ve got to stop psyching myself out trying to reinvent the wheel and do some reality-checking more often. last week there was a three-day workshop for gyeonggi province public middle- and high-school teachers. just speaking english at a normal rate likely reduced my blood pressure. i guess it’s easy to normalize the admittedly abnormal situation of being a lone english-speaker in a school of a thousand individuals. dude has got to get networking.

what subtle vandal did this?

not wanting to give the (false) impression that it’s been all drudgery, my students and i have certainly had our moments. when i remember that in the case of my youngest students, i have a high school yearbook from the year they were born; that my own years spent in french classes sometimes saw me acting like a little turd myself; and that they deserve some sympathetic guidance and (god knows) some entertainment injected into their educational lives, we actually can have a boatload of fun. witness:

adorable…

…and cooperative

these whiteboard magnets were creatively vivified by a few students; now a chorus of anguished cries greets me every time i pluck off one of their heads to magnetize something to the board.

the jazz man can. play badminton.

represent.

the inaugural week

so more like nine days. or ten or thirteen, depending on your reckoning.

this is going to feel like giving a rundown of my resume, but here’s a quick update: i worked for six weeks at the gyeonggi english village camp in yangpyeong. it was a surreal experience – i arrived at incheon international airport at around 10:30 on december 19, drank a coffee, got in touch with my contact at the village, waited for him to arrive, learned that he was a man (the name sandy was the only thing i had had to go on before that point), and sat in the back of his suv for probably an hour and a half as we drove through – and beyond – seoul. it was the first time i had been able to get a sense of just how large the city was. we drove eastward along the south side of the famous han river, and every minute i expected the skyscrapers and neon signs to peter out and end. but they just kept on going. the size of the city is still something that impresses. we arrived at around 2 am, i crashed immediately on a pile of mats on a heated floor, and experienced no jet lag.

six weeks of work with new coworkers making new friends and meeting new students in a new country and everything that goes along with that can (and…will?) take up more space here later. i spent a week at the village after my contract had run out looking for a new job and a new place to live in the interim, eventually finding cramped but cozy accommodation at a goshiwon along with my buddy sean. more emails, more late (sometimes sleepless, on account of the stifling heat and limited space) nights, more worries, more shopping and carousing. i made contact with a middle school in seongnam, a rather large city but essentially a southern suburb of seoul. it’s a pretty well-to-do district, so they tell me, or at least the bundang area, and it’s just a quick hop to the city on the subway. right on. remember my mention of the runaround i went through at the immigration office in seoul? the object of my running around was all about changing my visa status – change of address and employment, and adding a multiple reentry sticker or status or whatever – so that i could finally, officially, unambiguously, begin work in seongnam.

this is the classroom where i teach. seriously.

having finished the bureaucratic runaround, i’ve now settled in for the domestic and work-related runarounds. day one at my new place of employment, sujin middle school, was monday march 8: meeting other teachers, putting new keys on my keychain, setting up my office computer, asking after course curricula, making plans to meet with the real estate middlemen who might set me up with an apartment, beginning to put together some lesson plans. par, i think, for the course. my first impressions of the school were very positive; the facilities are amazing. my class is equipped with a cnn-style touch screen board oh my goodness.

but it wasn’t until thursday the eleventh that i had any real class time with students. during the orientation period i had – hm, how shall i put this – interacted with some students. i might be greeted with a chorus of hellos, maybe a how are you, eyes invariably wide. now i love the way i feel at the age that i am: generally comfortable in my own skin, confident (i think) but not arrogant (i hope), satisfied that things are moving forward. they’re all pretty rad, but there’s an excellent episode of this american life with john hodgman in which he talks about the strangeness of accidental celebrity, especially after one has discarded the last shred of ambition to be famous. of course i’m no celebrity, and i’m certainly no john hodgman, but the anonymity i had become so comfortable with absolutely disappears in a building peopled with nearly nine hundred korean teenagers. how many times can someone hear a squealed i love you from a complete stranger before they begin to lose their mind? we shall soon see.

수진중학교 ~ sujin middle school

it’s all a lot to adjust to – and the adjusting part is absolutely crucial. the program through which i was placed at the school has improved in the few years it’s been in existence, developing programs to help equip teachers with a support structure, contacts to language services, and preparatory workshops about korean culture and the education system, but my role as an educator remains sometimes infuriatingly vague. lots of words have been spoken so far about my role as a coworker – how i am expected to behave, show respect, participate in staff outings and so on, but no goals have been set for me regarding what my students are expected to achieve. forty students, for forty-five minutes, once a week is, in my humble opinion, a recipe for failure as far as language acquisition is concerned.

so it’s been a week of diagnostics and experiments. lots of communicative activities, testing the extent of my students’ vocabularies and comfort levels with particular grammar points. it’s forced me not so much to reexamine my methodologies as try to condense what i already do into hyper-efficient chunks. and it’s a challenge. it’s certainly a strange combination to feel at once passionate about your work, necessarily defensive of your chosen profession’s reputation, discouraged by the seeming reality that a good number of native english speakers are hired to do the same job without the same training or attitude, and confused at the disconnect between the local-level investment in facilities (um, high) and the government-level investment in thought about what conditions truly provide good results in language learning (yeah: low).

we’ll see how it goes.

comedic and culinary ouroboros

a quick wikipedia check indicates that the immortal chappelle’s show ran on comedy central from 2003 to 2006; i’m not sure what i was doing at the time, but i wasn’t watching chappelle’s show. i knew about dave chappelle, i’d even heard that his show was amazing – was it even on in canada? i don’t remember – and i remember seeing him make conan laugh about as hard as i’ve ever seen him do whenever he appeared on late night. anyway my introduction to chappelle’s show came only after hearing about his supposed mental collapse, flight to africa, and decision to stop making the show. so by the time i finished catching up, i had been laughing my ass off as well as bearing witness to something that had somehow contributed to the quasi-breakdown of one of the most gifted comics of his (our?) generation.

i think of the pixie sketch, from one of the lost episodes – in which people struggle to avoid reinforcing stereotypes of their own race – and wonder if that wasn’t just the straw that broke the camel’s back. it’s one more tool in the bag of satirical tricks used to highlight hypocrisy, but there’s this reflexive, self-aware, parody-as-reinforcement, event horizon, snake-eating-its-own-tail element to it. trying to figure that all out is like trying to untangle christmas lights.

so i had dog for dinner tonight.

i had been given something of a heads-up by my co-teacher earlier in the afternoon. there would be a staff party, a beginning of the semester meet-and-greet (er, and drink), at this fabulous restaurant and can you eat dog?

can i? i can use chopsticks and my jaw isn’t wired shut and i’m not a vegetarian, but…

now my co-teacher is a truly sweet lady – friendly and helpful; committed to working together; attentive in a not (yet) unpleasant way, making sure that i’m understood and equipped to do my job well. anticipating, i think, that many if not most of the teachers would be ordering the carnis familiaris (that’s a latin pun), she made sure we were sitting together and that our section of the table would be eating samgyeopsal (that’s pork). the in-table grill next to us was going to enjoy the more exotic meal, so i would be given the opportunity to try. solid.

but the best laid plans, gang aft, uh, towards eventually eating something you didn’t expect. the boss walks over to our table and insists that i join him. my co-teacher gives me a wistful look, and i sit down before a sizzling stone grill of dog, onions, and greens.

as i was watching our meal come together and enjoying glass after glass of soju – everybody seemed to want to share a drink with the new canadian teacher – i realized that the strongest objection i had to the meat in front of me was the stereotype it represented. korean people eating dog? come on. that’s a walking (or in this case, sitting and chewing) cliché.

thinking back, it feels like ever since i’ve known the word stereotype, i’ve understood that stereotypes are silly ideas. who in their right mind truly believes that all old people smell bad or that all asian people are bad drivers? who even uses the word asian? these ideas might be funny to us still, but the humour doesn’t come from ridiculing whole groups of people so much as the thought that at any time anyone used to enjoy ridiculing whole groups of people. pffaw.

but there i was, witnessing something that might otherwise have been mentioned in hushed tones by a spiteful blockhead. “you know what? i heard that they eat dog. canyoubelievethat?” dismissively chuckling at just about any stereotypical idea had kind of conditioned me to expect people to be stereotype-iconoclasts.

turns out it tastes a bit like duck, less gamey. not really like chicken.

i’m moving out of my tiny goshiwon today, into a hotel for about a week and then on to a real apartment. excelsior.

new country

(the news is all good)

a brief aside before i begin talking about feelings. while the calendar to your right has a shiny link to my first post on the first of march, the blog you’re reading was set up only days after my arrival nearly three months ago. that constitutes a not-sneeze-at-able chunk of time in which i had a blog, yes, but in the same sense that i have an affection for warm socks. true statements both, but neither represents anything that other people can interact with.

i saw an interesting ted talk a few days ago about entropy (if you’re so inclined, take a look at it at here). now i’m absolutely not a cosmologist, in case you were wondering, but at one point mr. sean carroll, a stunningly and refreshingly clear speaker on matters pertaining to the nature of space and time, explained entropy as a function of mathematics. consider all the possible ways a pile of papers could be arranged neatly on your desk. there may be millions and millions of such ways – a little to the left there, a millimetre closer to the edge here – but the number of ways they could be not arranged borders on the unfathomable. take those papers, place them randomly on the desk, and perhaps a quadrillion-minus-1 times out of a quadrillion, they will be a mess.

i’ve spent a bunch of time reading strangers’ blogs, especially blogs written by expats living in korea. one common element is the presence of at least one entry beginning with sorry it’s been so-and-so many days since i’ve last written, but… i’ve been busy or i’ve had a baby or i was in thailand or my face was burned with acid. me? the nature of the universe demands that my blog remain empty.

these kind of apologies to anonymous persons strike me as unnecessary – i’ve been to maybe a dozen rock and roll concerts where the band arrived late to the stage; they never apologized, and their flesh-and-blood audience, who they were paid to entertain, was standing in the same room. so why do i feel necessary to provide some explanation? stay with me. now, on to feelings…

(don’t worry about me)

i haven’t put down anything resembling roots here in korea yet – i lived in a dormitory-style room at my last job, and until i move to my next (holy-smokes-its-actually-a-real) apartment, i’ll continue to live in this tiny residence, essentially a six-foot cube. other nights have been spent in the ubiquitous love hotels. i’ve been carrying around a visa with a fast-approaching expiration date on it for a while now, and the idea of purchasing anything that couldn’t be carried comfortably on the subway along with everything else i brought with me in the case of a move has only seemed absurd. all of this points to a lifestyle in which the future is an abstract concern. i could always fly back home i could always take off to china i could always start a band.

i guess i could still start a band, but walking out of the seoul immigration office in mokdong today kind of smacked me in the face. walking in presented to me the comforting hallmarks of bureaucracy: a printed ticket with a number on it; a realization that the appropriate application required a photo (not present); a whispered prayer for an english-speaking clerk and a slowly-spoken question posed at the information desk; a computerized voice uttering a hana (one), dul (two), before a picture was taken in the photo booth in the basement; a trip upstairs downstairs upstairs downstairs again; a miscommunication; and of course a final resolution. i would have a new visa mailed to me. good for twelve months.

(the sun is now shining down on me)

so that’s what did it. smacked me, made me feel like either apologizing or blaming the universe. i’d signed my new contract (in triplicate), visited my new school, looked at a handful of apartments where i knew i would be living for a year – but leaving the immigration office is what did it. i wound my way around people entering the building through the metal detector, pushed the door open and saw seoul. there was no part of my brain that could claim i was passing through, or on a working vacation; my visa specifies four weeks during which i can leave the country.

so my friends and my family, with whom i’ve had only scattered contact, are now more concretely out of reach (hi guys). and that infinitesimally small space, that blip in the starfields of mathematical probability in which the pile of papers is arranged, is a place i’ve really got to get to. suddenly this is important, letting people know i’m okay. i’m okay.

(oh maybe i’ll go see the world / there’s plenty of places to see)

in medias residence

do you remember that time the time that you couldn’t remember what time it was and all the neon signs were leaving afterimages on your contact lenses or maybe on your retinas and the sounds from the clubs and the bars and the noraebangs kicked out sharp enough to shave your head ?

or the time you peeled yourself off the superheated stove of a bed at noon the next morning wondering which weekend this was and if you could remember where or what or how to pronounce where you were ?

or the time that one time when across the aisle of the bus the mother kept flicking her son’s chin back towards her because it kept pointing towards you as if you were an actual wizard who was doing magic with his face ? or maybe that one time you noticed that even eight thousand kilometres away from home the sea smelled the same and the trees looked the same and the rocks could look weathered or ragged the same way they do at the beach five minutes walk away from your apartment in vancouver. ?

we’ll get there.

my passport claims that i arrived here – or close to here, at incheon international airport – on december nineteenth two thousand nine: seventy-one days ago. that’s just over ten weeks of inadequately-documented poorly-remembered events, which i’ll do my best to get back to. but to inaugurate a blog today seems as good a day as any.

two days ago sean and i took the subway to itaewon to catch as much of the olympic hockey semi-final between canada and slovakia as we could. we squeezed through the door of the rocky mountain tavern and hardly moved again for the next hour or so. the crowd cheered the hits and the clearings, they worked themselves back into a roar after a couple of goals against quieted the room, but the greatest show of focused noise came after the game had finished. the two tvs, miraculously showing a ctv feed, shot up a screen of an intimidating goalie, next to the words canada and vs. and usa and february and 28th and 12pm pacific time. this simple slide of information had the unexpected quality of food porn crossed with a rebus puzzle.

holy. there’s more hockey coming; world-class, white-knuckle, screaming-at-the-tv hockey…

okay, so 12 pm is 12 noon, and time here in seoul is seven hours behind, tomorrow, so that will be monday march first for us, at…

five am. the game was going to start at five in the morning. there was a brief period during which all the customers – having generously patronized the rocky mountain tavern by having four or five ales before noon on nearly empty stomachs – did the math, and then chants of FIVE AY-EM – FIVE AY-EM – FIVE AY-EM erupted from around us and the floor above. the bartender shrugged, finished pouring some just-ordered beers, and protested that he didn’t have the staff. members of the crowd volunteered immediately or jostled the wait staff, who were still slinging plates of bacon and eggs around. not two or three more minutes was enough for him to relent and invite us all back at five on monday morning. we could tell he was really excited to have us back again so soon.

so sunday night sean and i have a terse talk before bed. like we were colonels organizing a night raid.

“i think we should be out of here by 4:30.”

“agreed.”

goodnight, soldier. we were outside hailing taxi(s) at ten to five; in a cab just after five. the internet had told us that puck-drop would be at five fifteen. the weather was evocative of a typical vancouver winter; sean and i remarked on the rain almost in unison. we’ll make it, we thought. how many canadians, much less the specific set that are hockey mad, could all go to the same pub at five in the morning? it is a question no longer reserved for sociologists or aerospace engineers: the answer is more than can fit in the rocky mountain tavern.

following a small group of equally disappointed, easily identifiable canadian hockey fans, we asked where they were going to watch the game. phillies. in haebonchong. just around the corner, minimum cab fare. done. taxi driver drops us off in the middle of a five-way intersection of small roads and alleys. certainly not heavily trafficked at any time of day, much less before sunrise. we trekked down one street, couldn’t find a single lit storefront, doubled back, looking down alleys, straining through the rain for the sound of cheers. finally i ducked into an easy mart to ask if anyone had heard of a ‘phillies’. anyone turned out to be the one lady on shift. she couldn’t understand our english but seemed inclined to help us. she called someone, then told us to wait for a minute: a friend of hers, it seemed, was on his way, and he could speak english.

teriffic! we thought. a spot of good luck! and then the police pulled up. this woman, obviously in fear for her life and the safety of her store, had called for help. except that’s not what happened at all, and i’ve found both strangers and police officers to be almost unreasonably helpful.

we explained, pained that we had nothing more than a hockey game on tv to justify their being called, that we were looking for a pub, we were canadians, we were very sorry to trouble them – and ‘phillies’ just wasn’t something they knew about. maybe if you could write it down for us? sean scribbled ‘phillies’ on a piece of paper, and the cops eyes’ lit up: ah! feelees! of course we know that. it’s super close. let’s give you a ride.

we scrambled into the back of the police car, peered through the rain ahead of us, and noticed first a p and then a ph and then we were there. the cops pulled over, opened our doors, and my enthusiasm for finally finding what we had been looking for helped eclipse my usual trepidation at speaking any korean. i shook the driver’s hand, said gamsamnidagamsamnidagamsamnida, and we walked into the bar.

here i can mention the specifics of place – the handful of shirtless fans, canadian flags and jerseys draped around their shoulders; the americans sitting at the bar, alternately blending in (when about to lose) and standing out (when victory was possible); the clack of the foosball table at the back, played i suspect by two bored girlfriends; the stickiness of the floor – but the specifics of time are beyond me. the globe and mail, the hockey news, and a hundred other blogs and newspapers have done a better job than i could do. one thing i can contribute is my observation that the shot didn’t ring out only from coast to coast, but from coast to coast to coast to coast. across the international dateline, in fact.

not much later, plans for streaking would be drawn up by the most enthusiastic of the fans (the plan: “we’re going streaking!“), two different girls would show their boobs, taxis would shuttle us all off to wherever we were all going, sean and i would eat bacon and eggs and potatoes and toast and coffee.

and when we left, it was snowing outside.