Winter and the school…

Halloween was a blast.  There are a ton of pictures around facebook of that absolute craziness, so hop on over there to check them out.  I might try to put them on here if I have the time, but it’s just so much easier to upload them there.

There was one negative about Halloween though, and that was the rain.  Midday, it decided for some reason that it was going to drop monsoon style rains on us, but since it’s October it had to be the cold kind of rain.  Made for cold night… and quite possibly heralds the return of winter around here.

Now the teacher’s around here make a lot of fun of the crazy things that have worked into Korean culture.  There’s the new one that says if you sleep with a foreigner, then you will catch AIDS.  That one’s a little extreme, but most of them are just funny.  Which leads to a Halloween costume like this:

This would be the Korean phenomenon known as “Fan Death.”  There used to be a belief (I say used to even though it might still be around in places) that if you fell asleep with a fan on, you would die.  I almost fell on the floor laughing when this guy walked on in.  Just a classic costume.  Really jealous that I didn’t think of it first.

But not all of their beliefs are so completely whacked out.  Some of them actually turn out to be true, even though at first they sound ridiculous.  And no, I’m not talking about kimchi curing everything… I’m talking about every Korean’s firm belief that Korea has four distinct seasons.

Now think about that for a minute.  My first reaction on hearing that is “duh, everywhere has that.”  But here’s the thing… I don’t know exactly what it is about Korea, but they really have distinct seasons.   Once it changes from Summer to Fall, you notice.  All of a sudden, there’s a little chill in the air that wasn’t there the day before.  Not like it’s bad, because summer is the death grip of hot around here.  Once it changes from Summer to Fall, it’s just never going to get that hot until the next year.

Now back to the rain on Halloween again.  All of a sudden, it dropped the temperature around town a good 20-30 F.  In one day.  And while I might be a little hasty about this, I’m wondering if we’re looking at winter deciding to start on this day.  Because I’ll tell you, it feels cold right now.  Temperature-wise, it’s not that cold, but because it’s the first cold day of the year, it feels bone chilling cold right now.

The cold has made the school a little different as well.  Well that and everyone seems to be scared to death of swine flu, so my classes are generally missing about 10 students a pop.  The school doesn’t have anything resembling central heating, but we do have basically giant space heaters on the wall.  It’s similar to what we had in England, but it definitely causes some interesting consequences…

Right now, my room is nice and toasty, but that’s because I had the heater on.  The heater happens to be right next to the computer, so if I want to be relatively comfortable while I’m writing, I have to turn the thing off.  This is because the heater comes with three settings: 1) Hot, 2) Need an oven mitt to touch it, and 3) Roasts a Christmas goose in three hours.

Now the thing with these is that the space heaters are obviously only good for the rooms themselves, which leaves the hallways at about the same temperature as it is outside.  As I’ve stated, it’s cold out.  So the moment you leave your classroom, you hit a blast of cold air.  Then I get back to my room, and I bit a sauna… so it’s a juggling match honestly.

I don’t know if the weather’s going to stay like this for the rest of the year, but I know that there’s a good chance that it’s all sweaters from here on out.

Haven’t put a lolcat up in a while…

Co-Teaching and 6th graders

Lead with something strong, right?  6th graders are spawn of Satan.  You’re basically looking at disrespectful, talkative, prepubescent bags of skin that just strive to make your life a little more interesting.  I don’t know one GEPIK teacher who looks at their 6th grade class and thinks “this is gonna be a great class.”  It’s usually more of a “dear God let them please shut up for just two minutes…”

But here’s the key: they’re just kids after all.  Technically, having two teachers in the classroom should be enough to handle all 30+ of them.  That would be the case in a perfect world.  Unfortunately, this world is far from perfect.

I really like my grade 6 co-teacher.  I really do.  She’s a cool person.  But we really don’t see eye to eye on teaching styles, classroom set-up, and things like that.  You know, just the important things.

The worst thing about the classes is just the design of the room.  There are three long rows of tables with six kids on either side.  The students that way get to face each other, and not the teacher or the board.  Leads to a whole lot of fooling around and other b.s. during the class.  To complicate things, the teacher’s desk is at one end while the projector is at the other.  The kids have to move their heads back and forth to pay attention to the projector and to pay attention to the teacher.  Did I mention they have the attention span of a catnip-cracked out starved furball?  It’s difficult.

The other issue kind of comes from our styles.  It’s surprised even me, but I tend to be a bit of a hardass towards the kids, while she’s much more willing to just shout over them.  I’d say during a given 6th grade class, probably about 75% of the kids just aren’t paying any attention, and they never get called on it by her.  When she’s explaining something, I’m walking around the room taking books away, telling kids to be quiet, and just other things to try to keep my sanity together.  I like to have a bit of chaos in the classroom at times, but I want to know where the chaos is headed.

My personal favorite thing happened yesterday though.  Found out as I was leaving work that she used the lesson plan I made for today earlier in the week.  So I had to come in early today and make up some other stuff.  Just not fun when you’ve already got to deal with kids who think they run the joint.  Grade 6 is the top of the school, so these kids fancy themselves some real badasses.  I really wish I could go to middle school with them for a day, just to see them get put in their place a little more.  I might give up a full day’s pay to see that.

But whatever.  It’s Friday.  I don’t have to see those kids for a whole week, and on top of that, I only have to deal with them for 4 hours.  As much as they just drive me up the f’ing wall, it’s over pretty fast.  Now I get to look forward to a weekend of sleep, hockey, and a pretty little thing that for some reason thinks I’m sexy.  Works for me.

School food

I’ll admit, finishing your work day at 12:10 is pretty damn sweet.  There’s nothing more to that.  I really enjoy my Tuesdays.  The third graders are still of that age when the worst that they really do is not pay attention.  That’s a lot easier to handle than most of the stuff the older kids throw at you.

Once that clock turns 12:10, a sort of nervous apprehension kicks in.  Because it’s lunchtime.  There’s at least one constant between American public schools and Korean public schools, and that’s the food.  The quality is… well… questionable.  Understandably so, because I can imagine that cooking a meal for a school full of kids every day is a mite challenging.

Eating a school lunch here really never pushes into the “wow, that’s delicious” category.  It tends to orbit around “yep, that was food” and “Dear God what did I just put in my mouth.”  My personal nemesis at the moment is only what I can describe as a kimchied fish.  Or maybe it’s a fish covered in the red pepper sauce that Koreans put on every bleeding thing… Either way, I avoid it.

See the reason isn’t really the taste… because it really just tastes like fish that’s been covered in some sort of sauce.  I’ve had that before and it really doesn’t bother me.  It’s the preparation.  Whatever fish that they use, they just never bother to de-bone the thing.  And this fish is the bone-iest fish that has ever existed apparently.  I’ve got this thing about fish bones too, probably coming from eating fish as a kid.  I like fish, I really do, but you know, I’d rather not have to be picking bones out of my mouth when I eat it.

Moving on, there’s three things that are constant about the school lunches here.  There’s always rice, always soup, and always kimchi.

Fermented vegetables. Want some?

Those three all the staples, and often that’s all my lunch really is.  You’ll never see a school lunch without them.  Now the rest is up to chance.  It ranges from the bad (the fish I’d mentioned) to the good (Curry Day!!!) to the rid-friggin’-diculously terrible (cold sundae- just click the link). I think the day we had the sundae kind of pushed me over the edge… I vaguely remember stopping around generally in a bad mood the rest of that day.

The results of this iffy food?  Well, I really haven’t lost any real weight to speak of, even though I’ve joined a gym.  Part of it is I get out of school and have no interest in heading to a Korean restaurant unless I get a major craving for something.  So there’s been a lot of McDonald’s lately, a fair amount of pizza, and I’ve pretty much taken up stock in Subway as of late.

As with everything though, there are benefits.  The cost of lunch for a month is now a whopping $44, taken out of my paycheck.  Saying there were weeks at Youngdo that I’d blow that in a week on lunch, I’d say it’s a pretty good deal.  Outside of that…

The Lions Den

Today was not a good day.

Imagine this… you walk into a room and there’s 30 sedated lions sitting there.  The lion tamer tells you not to worry, because as long as they don’t hear any loud noises, they’ll be perfect little angels, and he’s here to help anyway.  Then the tamer remembers that he left the stove on or something.  So they get up to leave the room, and decide to SLAM the door behind them.  To make it worse, you hear him bar the door behind him.

Yeah, that woke all the lions up.  They’re all juiced and ready to go now.  You’re still in there, but now you have to get some sort of control of the situation you know, before they eat you.  But you don’t have any tranquilizer darts left, and wouldn’t you know, your gun is in your other pants.

To put it mildly, you’re looking kind of boned right now.  You’ve basically got three options:

1. Try to hide in the corner. Really don’t think that’ll be effective.
2. Roar. Not a terrible idea, but there’s one minor flaw.  They’re fucking lions.  They’re not exactly going to understand you, and they might just think, “sweet, it’s a roaring contest now!”
3. Distract them with something shiny. Get your laser pointers out right now!

That was basically the day.  Coming into it, I knew that I was facing the 4th graders as the only English teacher in the room.  No big deal.  I was also assured that their homeroom teachers would be there as well to help with crowd control, for obvious reasons.  So no big deal again.  Guess what happened?

No, I didn’t get completely skunked by the 4th grade teachers, but two of them decided to drop their kids off and then take off.  Predictably, this resulted in two classes that were pretty much disastrous and two classes that went over pretty well.

I get the feeling that the other Korean teachers in the school don’t view me as any more of a teacher than a lot of the kids do.  I had four classes today, and somehow, not a single class arrived on time and there was not a thing said to me.  Like, just as a professional courtesy, if I were bringing a class of students to you considerably late and perhaps screwing with your lesson plans, I would seek you out for a quickie apology, language barrier be damned.

The school’s really not that big.  It takes maybe thirty seconds to walk from the top corner to the bottom.  Add in the ten minute break in between classes, and you’d think there would be plenty of time to get the little monsters up the stairs and to the class.  But somehow, all of my classes started a good 5-10 minutes late.

And I think that’s what’s killing me the most today is that the kids flat out don’t understand a thing I’m saying.  I know they’re not bad kids, they’re just kids.  To tell you the truth, it’s not them I’m frustrated with.  It’s the other teachers who were supposed to be there.  If they’re not supposed to be there, then fine, this is all on me.  A lot of it is already, obviously.  But if we had switched the situation, dropped them in an American school and then I bailed on them, well, I’m an asshole.

So yeah, not a good day.  I’m incredibly happy that I can lay down and forget about this day in the next ten minutes.  I’ve got to admit, this week really has me questioning the whole public v. hagwon debate.

Maybe there can be too much free time…

Nope, haven’t completely given up on the blog yet.  If anything, because I don’t work with another native English teacher, this is about my only consistent means of venting anymore.  I realized that yesterday.

So I welcome my newfound determination on this, but I also admit there’s a good chance that this won’t last too long.  At the moment though, I’m full of fight, or maybe it’s just coffee.

Now I’ve decided to take this in a little different direction.  I’m going to focus this completely on the school and the interesting crap (or possibly lack of crap) that goes on in a day.  With any luck, this will be helpful to anyone looking to go into a similar situation.

Here’s what a typical day looks like for me:

• Class from 9-12:10.
• Lunch until 1.
• Depending on the day, either 0, 1, or 2 classes to fill out the day.

I have to arrive every morning at 8:40, and am not allowed to do leave until 4:40.  Out of the 8 hours that I’m here, I’d say I average around a good 3 hours of actual work.  The other 5?

Can’t say I’m totally sure about that myself.  There is a relatively comfortable couch in my room, so there is some sleeping involved.  Oh, they’re completely okay with that.  I’ve walked in on my co-teacher napping at her desk after class a couple of times.  Outside of that… I’d say there’s about one hour possibly spent lesson planning and then the rest is spent on the internet.

That right there is probably the biggest reason for attempting to reboot this blog.  I’m plain running out of things to do on the net.  There’s a good chance that I’ve read every list on cracked.com, I shouldn’t really spend too much more time on ESPN.com, and now that the Rockies had to go and get themselves ousted from the playoffs, there’s no baseball I give a damn about.  NHL center ice would be nice, but I’m still debating it.

Along with that, the school has very strange restrictions on website usage.  For example:

• purplerow.com – My favorite Rockies blog… Blocked
• southparkstudios.com – Allowed
• fark.com – Blocked
• watchthesimpsonsonline.net – Allowed
• espn.com – initially blocked, but now Allowed

Still don’t know what changed with espn, but I’m rather grateful that happened.  It’s strange, things that I would assume would be blocked are perfectly acceptable, but others that are completely harmless are DOA.

(Oh, and somewhat unrelated… but Korean technological sensibilities baffle me.  Try to use Firefox on a Korean website and your computer will sulk into a corner and refuse to come out.  IE or nothing here.  Also, for as wired as my class is and as many toys as I have at my disposal, the computers they provide are painstakingly slow.  Today, I started the computer at 8:54… five minutes into class, I’m still waiting for a powerpoint to load.)

So am I still enjoying my time here?  Yes with a but.  There’s still a lot of fun to be had, but it’s not as easy as before.  Working at a school by myself is an incredible change.  I just don’t have the same kind of easy camaraderie that working at Youngdo provided.  At Youngdo, there were always other people dealing with the same crap as I was, dealing with the same books, and so on.  I still have that with GEPIK, the trick is that they no longer live in the same building, no longer share the teacher’s room with me, and now I have to put in some work to see them.  There’s no more just looking over my shoulder and saying “Let’s get some food.”  Phone calls must be made now at least.

Now I’m really trying not to complain about this.  Really, I’m getting paid a good wage for what amounts to 4 hours of work a day.  I get tons of time off.  The work is extremely easy.  But like anything, there are adjustments to be made.

So here are some things that I’m going to get into, assuming my resolve is still here tomorrow:

• Co-teaching-  So far, decidedly mixed results.
• Students-  Wow.  Just… wow.
• Lunch- Yep, school lunches in Korea suck ass just like they do in America.
• Lessons- No joke, in one of the government sponsored videos, they’re teaching the kids to say “Help, help!” when they’re drowning.  They definitely only teach the useful stuff here.

Not promising anything amazing… actually not promising anything.  So we’ll see how long I can come up with things to write about.

Karma’s a bitch…

So Korean’s are freaking out about swine flu. Like losing their damn minds about it. Everyday, when I come into work, one of the other teachers sticks a damn thermometer in my ear. They do it for everyone, so no big deal.

Well, on Sunday, we’re playing hockey in Seoul. There’s a massive tent set up right next to the rink for flu vaccinations. For one, that’s just incredible placement, because most Koreans think that swine flu is only carried by foreigners so that was worth a laugh by itself.

There were three games that day, and after the first, me and a couple of friends walked down to the BK for some food. On the way back to the rink, we were walking past a large group of Koreans who had just gotten their shots. Now we’re already covered in sweat from the game, we look like hell, and they’re probably uncomfortable being around us anyway.

Then one of the guys I’m with says, “We should all just start coughing as hard as we can right now.” Well my impulse control being what it is, I start letting out this massive whooping cough. Like a body convulsing cough. Because I was coughing, I didn’t get to see their reactions, but the guys I was with started cracking up. Turns out the Koreans’ heads just zipped over towards me and they started walking a mite faster.

Good joke I think.

But then I wake up on Monday and realize… man, something just don’t feel right.

Yep, I’d caught Seung Hee’s cold.

The lesson in all this?

Karma’s a bitch.

First week of “work”

The new job is rather interesting right now.  Safe to say, there’s really nothing to do after a point.  There’s no classes until Thursday, and with it being Monday, that means I have three days of just kind of sitting around doing nothing.  I’ve got the internet and a couple of movies I brought from home, so there’s that.

It looks like I really won’t understand what’s going on here until I get to see the first days of class.  Right now, I’ve got the books and I’m free to come up with ideas for teaching them.   So for now, I’m sitting in my room, under the air conditioning, writing ideas on a chalkboard and laying around.

To give you an idea of the day so far, I came in, talked for an hour with my co-teacher about what the curriculum looks like, then have spent the rest of the day reviewing it.  Actually, when I say reviewing, I really mean sitting and watching Rockies-Giants from yesterday and then youtube.  I’m not even sure what, if anything I’m supposed to prepare at this point.  With that in mind, I’m casually working on some things, but nothing too crazy.

It looks like I’ll team teach the 3rd and 4th graders for one class a week, then have one class a week with the 5th and 6th graders.  All of that adds up to about 20 hours of teaching.  On top of that, there’s a science class that I guess I’m in charge of kinda I guess maybe perhaps…

Right now… I just don’t know what the heck is going on.  I still don’t know what the schedule is, and my co-teacher’s left for the day already.  So yeah, I’m lost.  But I’m comfortable.  That’s gotta count for something.

Back in Korea

And I couldn’t be happier.

Just a word for anyone who’s thinking about flying this way.  Do not fly a western airline.  Fly some sort of Asian Airline.  I flew Singapore Air yesterday and I’ve never had a better flight.  Great food, a 100 movies on demand (no joke), lots of TV on demand, tons of music, video games, language lessons, an outlet to plug your computer into, and unlimited drinks.  I ended up staying awake nearly the entire time and wasn’t bored.  Well maybe a little… it was a 12 hour flight.

Got into Anyang around 8pm last night.  The new place is pretty cool.  I’ve got an apartment a stone’s throw away from the subway on the 14th floor with a hell of a view of the hills and the stadium.  I’ll take some pictures and try to put them up here when I get the chance.  It’s a one room place with lots of light.  I’ve spent the day cleaning the place up and settling back into the flow. 

Now I’m waiting to get my internet set up, so it’s back to the fun of a PC bang for a couple of hours.  Think I’ll have a big meal and go see some friends here in a little and then continue the move in. 

Oh, and the weather’s been decent today, but on the flight they told me it was 31C yesterday.  You sure can feel the humidity… I’m remembering what its like to have your clothes stick to you no matter what you do.

Why I’m still stateside…

Alternative title… How to royally flub a visa run.

To give you all an idea, those of you who haven’t been around to hear me bitch about all of this, I hoped to be back in Korea by now.  I had hoped that there wasn’t going to be any problems with my visa, but instead, everything that could go wrong really has.  Of course, I’ve got no one here but myself to blame for not doing the research and getting everything together myself.

I thought I knew what I was doing… or at least that’s my excuse.  The reason I’m writing this is so I don’t forget anything when I go through this mess again.  Also, if this helps anyone sift through the red tape that a visa run brings, well then I’ve done my good deed for the next year.

Step 1: Landed the job.  WOO!!!  Signed the contract, had everything set and ready to go.  Or so I thought.  Decided that I really should take care of all of the paperwork stateside, instead of rushing to get everything done in Korea.  This was probably mistake #1, but I forgive myself for this because having to deal with the move and the old job and the new job and immigration… well, it kind of made my head hurt.

Step 2: Hit the ground running (July 1).  So I land back in Denver and promptly take a day off to collect myself.  The next day, I attempt to get everything together… and run into a big problem.  I get some terrible information from a lady who does the criminal background checks for the State of Colorado.  She tells me I’m looking at two weeks to get my check done… which seemed like a huge problem.  At the time.

Turns out that was a flat out lie.  But… I didn’t know that at the time.  So I come home and promptly do some research online to try and find a way around that.  I find something that says that you don’t need a state level check, but only a local level check.  I think “great!”  I run over to the police station, get a local check, get it apostiled, and then… I do nothing for a couple of days.

Of course, I missed something there… local checks only work for Canadians.

Fail rating:

Step 3: Mail the documents.  For some reason, unbeknownst to me now, I wait until the 7th of July to mail things.  Er…

Fail rating:

Step 4: Documents arrive and are submitted to immigration.  Yeah, remember that criminal background check?  That gets rejected.  Also, turns out that one important piece of paper wasn’t included in the packet put together by my school for me.  So I had to send two more pieces of paper out.  This is the second delay, which costs me about a week.

Luckily, thanks to an incredibly helpful lady, she told me a trick about getting my criminal background check done quickly, which I exploit.  I send off my new paperwork the next day.

Fail rating:

Step 5: Resubmit the paperwork. Things go through this time!  Of course, this also comes with the news… it’ll be 10-14 days for immigration to process it.  This is kind of a theme here, but of course, it takes 12 of those days.  For some reason, I get the feeling that I really should get another copy of my transcripts.  I don’t act on this feeling.

Fail Rating:

Step 6: Prepare for the consulate interview.  Because of all the delays, I’m pretty much set on having to return back to San Francisco for the interview, something that I was hoping to avoid.  Finally I get the email that says everything’s processed and ready to go.  I start dancing around the house, excited to be finally going back to Korea.  I book a ticket to San Francisco (refundable thank God) and a rental car.  Things are looking up right?

So I call the consulate to see about getting an interview set up… they tell me that I have to fill the paperwork out first and submit it before they will decide if I need to be interviewed for my visa.  Also, they only do interviews on Monday and Wednesday.  They email me the paperwork, I happily tell my girl that I’m coming back to Kore… and then I see the front page of the email.  Turns out that I need a copy of my degree, which was in Korea, and another set of transcripts.  I had already used my last two sets for the GEPIK application.  Yep, that means I have to order new ones…

Fail rating:

Step 7: Order set #eleventy billion of transcripts.  Done last Thursday, paid with credit card.  I love online statements, because then I can check to see that things went through.  I don’t see anything on Friday.  I tell myself, no big deal, that credit card always takes a little bit of time to show charges anyway.  Nothing to stress about.

I check Saturday.  Still nothing.  Sunday.  Again, nothing.  Monday comes, and there’s still nothing showing up on the statement.  I’m not worried until I go to the mailbox to see if they’ve come… and there’s nothing but junk.  Of course, I do what anyone would… have a minor freakout.  I immediately call Mizzou to demand to know what’s happening out there… only to look at the clock and see that it’s now 3:45 pm.  Which means it’s 4:45 in Missouri.  Which means that the transcript department had snuck out 15 minutes early and is now closed for the day.

I come up with many different ways to get my transcripts here quickly, because there’s still no charges on my statement.  Now why I didn’t just do this in the first place… I don’t know.  I settle on a way to get them here tomorrow by 8am, costing me a fair amount of cash, but also perhaps allowing me to get to San Francisco the next day with a possibility of getting into Korea by the weekend.  This does depend on Mizzou not sending my transcripts yet, because if they’re gone, well, then I’ve just got to wait.

Guess what happens.  I call at about 7:45 am this morning and talk to a lady in transcripts.  She tells me that they were either sent in yesterday’s mail or have just gone out.  In other words… I is screwed.

Fail rating:

So… now I’m waiting again.  Hopefully you can tell that I’m trying to put a brave face on this… but I’ve buggered this up something fierce and have caused myself a fair amount of frustration.  At this point, I’ll be happy to get back by the middle of next week.  Unless something else happens.  Which is always a possibility at this point.