Drift Reality > South Korea > October 2000

School is finally settling down. Besides the kids calling me Hangook, which means bachelor, I think everything is pretty much fine. I'm beginning to learn how to work with these kids to get them to do the work.

Every group of children is a unique situation and I approach each of them differently. There is this atmosphere in each class that you can sense. Sometimes, a class is enthusiastic and compliant, and sometimes they are hell spawns. I'll take one class for example. The class is called E1-4A, E1 means the book series, Explorer, and 4A means the edition of the book.

Every month, the kids are required to finish one book. The class consists of five students who I taught in 3A, and three students who stayed behind and are doing 4A again. The first day, I noticed that the holdovers were answering all the questions much to the annoyance of the former 3A students.

So the next day, I decided to use this observation to my advantage. I placed the class into two teams. The first team was the former 3A students, and the other team was obviously the 4A students who were repeating. I told them that I would place stars next to the team names for every question that they answered correctly. I told them that they had ten minutes to prepare for the "game," which would be a spelling/definition competition.

I watched with satisfied amusement as they opened their books and began to study fanatically like little robots for ten or so minutes. They were quizzing each other on definitions, and reciting spelling out loud, it was great (I'm losing it). Anyway, they obviously took the game very seriously because they would get angry at their teammates for getting wrong answers, and they would point out if the other team got a question wrong.

So, in this way, I managed to get a group of ten-year-old children to unwittingly study their little Korean asses off for one hour. Hehe. I've stopped trying to force them to listen and learn because I realize that this isn't really effective. So, I think that my new tactic is to simply try and find a way to refocus their energy in a better way.

I've been hanging out with the other teachers and some of them are very fun people. Last Sunday, I went with one of the Korean teachers, Debbie, to something that she referred to as a "meeting." It turned out to be a group consisting of two Korean men and one Korean girl, and they read articles in English and practiced discussing them in English.

It was great because I felt like the smartest one there, but I think it was mostly because their English wasn't perfect that I felt this way. They kept asking me what words meant and I would rub my chin for a bit and then say things like "well, that comes from the Latin root, which means . . ." Then they would ask me my opinion on the articles, and would watch intently as I would blab a several minute long monologue, which didn't make any sense and, I'm glad that they weren't perfect at English because I think that I sounded like a pompous ass.

On Saturday night, Blake and I explored Shillim (the area where I live). We couldn't get into one club, I think because we were foreign, some areas of Seoul which are predominantly Korean, such as Shillim, are somewhat xenophobic. Actually, I've begun to notice that when I walk around Shillim, Korean men will try to stare me down. I've begun to counteract that with smiling at them and saying "Hello" in a cheerful voice. They are quite odd, because if I don't acknowledge them, they will look at me with disregard, but then they look frightened the moment I say "hello."

Well, we walked around and because it was Chusok, the Korean Thanksgiving, there was a little festival going on. There were midgets, which really cheered me up because I haven't seen any midgets in Korea and I was starting to worry that they kept them locked up somewhere. There were also carnival games and I ended up winning a Pokemon key chain because I knocked over a wooden block with a baseball. We also walked by the interesting red light district, which I did not realize, existed in Shillim. Anyway, we ended up drinking quite a bit of Soju and had a fun time.

I need to wrap it up now, but I just wanted to say that I hate the insects here. There are three kinds of insects here: mosquitoes, flies, and these weird little things that look like small flies. They are all over the place. They are all really slow (I've postulated that this is because the Korea male population has more Soju in their veins than blood, subsequently, the insects that sting them are always a bit drunk), but they are nasty. I've tried to hit them, and missed, and then proceeded to watch as they dive-bombed my head. One of them took vengeance on me (I swear this is true), the night after I killed three of them. I woke up at about 4 in the morning because the damn thing flew straight up my nose. I've been having nightmares that he hatched eggs in there, but this is impossible, right?