Drift Reality > South Korea > First Day of Class

Of course, when he returned home the next day at 6 in the morning, I was incapable of waking up and found myself sprinting to the school at about 9:15, 45 minutes before my first class.

During the summer session at my Hawkwan, an intensive morning class was offered to beginning English students. Fortunately, I had been blessed with the responsibility of teaching this class. Call it divine providence. It happened to be the same class that I had watched Darlene teach the previous day, and from what I had seen, I expected the class to go very smoothly.

Within five seconds of walking into the classroom, I achieved a great deal of "firsts." First of all, it was the first time that I had ever walked into a room and felt like jumping out of a window. The scene that greeted me was straight out of Dante's inferno. There were small Korean boys running around the room, jumping on desks, and hitting each other on the head. Although several of the Korean girls were seated, a few of them were playing a game in which the rules seemed to be "run around the desk and screech like banshees."

Shortly after I walked in, they turned towards me and this is when the second "first" took place. It was the first time that I had ever been laughed at by an entire group of seven-year-old girls, and not in the cute way that Asian school girls are portrayed as laughing in popular media. Rather, it was a boisterous, obnoxious, hyena-like laughter that greeted me as I walked into the room, a sound that made my face turn red.

Third, it was the first time I had ever been slapped in the ass by a five-year-old boy, who incidentally was the purveyor of the fourth and fifth firsts, the first time I had ever had a five-year-old boy successfully climb up my leg after slapping me in the ass, and the first time I had every had a five-year-old boy slap me in the ass, climb successfully up my leg, and call me "Hanaboge," which I later found out meant "Grandfather" in Korean.

This was the greeting that I did not experience during my first day at my Hawkwan: it was truly a special moment for me. I was so overwhelmed by the absolute state of entropy in the room before me, that I just turned around and walked out of the classroom, and straight to the teacher's office.

Augustus looked up from her desk as I walked in and asked in wide-eyed disbelief, "what are you doing in here?"

Still slightly shocked by the manner in which I had been received by my first class, all I could muster was:

"I need help."

She gritted her teeth in firm resolve and marched down the hall, with me trailing close behind. She thrust open the door and I watched in amazement, as time seemed to halt within the classroom. The kids literally froze in their tracks as they realized who had just walked in the door. I watched as their faces turned from amusement, to shock, to fear in a matter of seconds.
Augustus surveyed the scene and an angry Korean tirade soon began to stream from her mouth. The children darted towards their desks, yanked the books out of their bags, and sat in guilty attention as she berated them.

I didn't understand a word she was saying, but even I began to feel a little scared as she began to single out students and ask them questions. They would respond by quickly nodding their head and saying "neh."

After she drilled a few individual students, she addressed the entire room. She would ask a question, to which the class would simultaneously respond, "neh." After several more inferno drenches phrases, she silently surveyed the room, admiring her handy work. Augustus then turned to me and said, "I think they will behave now." I couldn't have agreed with her more.

She promptly departed the room and I turned and looked at the class in front of me, they had become absolute statues. An uncomfortable silence pervaded the room as I headed towards my small desk and put my books down.

Throughout the remainder of the class, the students were perfectly behaved: they filled out all of the worksheets that I handed them, they answered all of the questions that I asked them, and they did not make any action whatsoever that might have compelled me to get Augustus. Not that I would have gotten her even if they had done something, I didn't want to see anger incarnate any more than the kids.

I somehow managed to struggle my way through the rest of the day and was relieved when the final bell sounded at 8:30 PM. I plodded into the teacher's office and felt immediately invigorated as I realized I would not have to endure any more classes for five whole days. I would be able to get settled in my new apartment over the weekend, I could relax and get acclimated, and maybe even go out and see the nightlife in Seoul.

Surprisingly, the Korean teachers had been much more inquisitive than the foreign teachers and had been asking me all sorts of questions about my family, my education, and even my girlfriend.