I Have Gone to Korea

At the start of every lesson, I have students recite four tongue twisters.  I do this for two reasons – first, so the students can practice correct pronunciation/enunciation, and second, so my students can start to think in an English mindset. I say the tongue twister slowly and clearly first, and they repeat it.  Then, I increase the speed until the fourth time, which is the fastest I can say it, and have them try to say it.

Today I am trying a new way to use tongue twisters.  I am instating a Tongue Twister Challenge – students are given one long tongue twister and are asked to recite it to me outside of class before our next class meeting.  If they read it from their paper with absolutely no mistakes, they get one point.  If they recite it from memory with only a few mistakes, they get two points.  If they recite it from memory with no mistakes, they get three points.  Points will be converted into prizes; I’m considering anything from a small piece of candy to a piece of paper that excuses a student from answering a single question or performing a single activity (most activities in my class only range from five to fifteen minutes).

I’ll use the last five minutes of class today to introduce the concept, pass out papers with the whole tongue twister on it, and practice saying the tongue twister with the class.  Participation in the Tongue Twister Challenge is optional; like many NETs employed with EPIK, I (unfortunately) have little to no influence over final grades, hence the necessity of an award system.  I could make it mandatory and provide some sort of negative reinforcement for those who do not participate, but we have a few students in our class who are English illiterate, and I do not want to accidently embarrass or punish students with low abilities.

I also like the idea of a non-mandatory challenge because I want to see which students are motivated enough to try and practice their English with me outside of our regular class time (and aside from pointing at their friends in the hall and shouting “Summer Teacher, he stupid!  Piggy!  Bad boy!” etc.).

I’ll let you know the results next week.

Challenge #1:  Slightly-shortened version of “Betty Botter’s Bitter Butter”:

Betty Botter had some butter,

“But,” she said, “this butter’s bitter.

If I bake this bitter butter,

It would make my batter bitter.

So she bought a bit of butter –

Better than her bitter butter –

And she baked it in her batter;

And the batter was not bitter.

It’s a new year here at my middle school, and the start of the semester has brought many changes.  Due to a rule that allows teachers to stay at a school for no more than five years, many of the teachers I met last semester have transferred to new schools throughout Daegu and Gumi.  This is especially disheartening because among them were almost all the people I had being to view as friends – my entire carpool, my 3^rd grade co-teacher who affectionately looked over me like a mother, the young and feisty geography teacher who took me out to dinners with her friends and went shopping with me, the music teacher who didn’t speak any English but was always ready to share a laugh.  Gone too are my third year students, my favorites, which you can read about in the previous blog.

C’est la vie!  Old gives way to new.  The first few days last week were pretty awkward; I had achieved a level of comfort with the old staff that prevented me from being that weird kid at lunch no one wants to talk to, and I was happy that way.  When they left they took that comfort with them, leaving me on the first day back to awkwardly sip my soup and face a barrage of questions in Korean from a new teacher who proceeded to laugh at my lack of the language throughout all of lunch.  This week, however, the new music and PE teachers – both ladies who sit at my block of desks in the teachers’ room – have made valiant attempts to befriend me, from including me in conversations to teaching me new Korean words.  The PE teacher has even offered to make me kimbap, since I love it so much.  Yesterday they misted me, gooped me with hand cream and tinted sunscreen, tried to get me to put on their lipstick, and showed me pictures of attractive Korean volleyball players on the Gumi men’s team.  Despite them both being in their mid to late thirties with children, I think we’re basically slumber party BFFs (although I am quick to admit they, like the geography teacher, see me more as a doll they can play with than a real person, but I’ll take what I can get).

The new students are adorable and surprisingly well-behaved for first graders.  I chalk it up to them being terrified of middle school (and it helps that my coteacher carries a big wooden stick – but don’t worry, he does not use it to strike children, y’all).  Actually, all my classes this year are surprisingly well-behaved.  However, I expect this to disintegrate into total anarchy in two weeks.  They can’t help it (I tell myself); they’re children.

One of the things I’m looking forward to this year is getting to know my now second- and third- graders better.  The third graders are at a point where they can really start communicating in English, and I love listening to their thoughts and opinions (which are mostly hilarious).  Also hilarious are the worksheet answers when they acquire more vocabulary.  For instance, this quote from yesterday’s “make a club” activity – “Do you like sleep?  Join Sleep Like Died Human.  When?  12:20  Where?  The Bathroom.”  Needless to say I know where to look if they don’t show up for lunch today.

The last six months have positively flown by, and I’m expecting the next to slip away easily as well. Professionally, I feel I’ve come a long way from that girl with the quavering voice who stood, terrified, in front of her first class ever last August.  I still get a little nervous before every class, but I’m beginning to understand how to get students excited (and, more importantly, how to get them to listen).  My experiences thus far have been invaluable.  I’m learning what I love to do and (perhaps more importantly) what I don’t love.  And I’m really looking forward to what the next six months may bring.

Today, my 3^rd graders (middle school) graduated.

I was told by one of my Korean teacher friends that you always remember your first class.  You might not remember all of the second or most of the third or anyone else in your teaching career (bar the class you’re currently teaching, of course), but that first class always sticks with you, even if you can’t attach faces to the names any more.

This month marks six months I’ve been teaching these students.  They’ve seen me change from a shaky-voiced, nervous girl to a confident, loud-mouthed ball of energy.  I’ve seen them change from a sea of excited shining faces into individuals, each with their own way of learning, their own way of handling problems, and their own senses of humor.

For the last half of the semester, the third grade students were working on country projects.  Each group of students created a poster with a country they invented, and in addition to the poster each group had to create a fact sheet describing their country.  These factsheets have about five paragraphs – that’s a full page of English from students who have consistently been described to me as underperforming and ignorant.  It was with great pride I helped my co-teacher choose the best and hang them in the hall for the graduation exhibition.

There are a million things I wish I could tell them, but I know most of it would get condescendingly brushed off or lost in translation—all the hackneyed advice we ignored as kids, thinking we could do it better:  “Be yourself!  Make good choices!  Never give up!”  Of course, I can never really know what they’re about to go through.  Korean high schools are notoriously difficult, with students studying until one or two am and then getting up at six to start the process over.  They’re also fiercely competitive, with only the top students grabbing all the honors and going off to the best colleges, leaving everyone else in the dirt.  It’s going to be difficult, that’s for damn sure.

But I know they’ll be ok.  They have a healthy sense of humor that allows them to bounce back from failure, they (for the most part) try in my class, and they are unbearably full of ideas and grand aspirations for the future.  Perhaps I’m just feeling nostalgic, thinking of my childhood the same way we all see our own former selves reflected back at us in the faces of youth.  I think back on the mistakes I made in my own high school years, and I want to save them from those mistakes, to protect them from the confusion and shame and absolute heartbreak that I know awaits them.

But such is life.  Without the confusion and shame and heartbreak, we could never grow as people.  They are but seeds of the people they are to be (indeed, admittedly, so am I) and they have so much potential.

I got used to calling my students “my kids.”  I love every single last one of them, even the ones who drive me completely crazy or try to take over the class with their endless jackassery. The hardest lesson anyone can learn is that nothing is ever really yours, and though they’ve been “my kids” for these last few months they’ve never really been mine.  Next month, my first class will go to high school, then maybe college, and then they’ll get jobs and get married and maybe have some kids of their own.  My hope is that, no matter what they do, they’ll do it with passion and conviction.

Today is my last day teaching at the local high school.  Starting next semester (March 2), they will have a brand-spankin’-new EPIK teacher to stay with them full time.  I’m actually very pleased with the arrangement — I really feel that the students here could benefit from having a native teacher full time for every grade.  I will miss the students as individuals, but as far as English education goes I know the situation we’ve had has not been ideal.

I don’t know about every visiting native teacher, but coming to the high school only one day a week definitely gives me more of a ‘second-class citizen’ status when it comes to the school hierarchy.  Not that I expect any special treatment — indeed, because I only come one day a week, I am not entitled to any — but it can be frustrating for the NET and for the students also.

Because I only come to the school one day a week, I feel more like a visitor than an actual teacher.  Down time at work was a weekly ordeal which I never wanted to face, and even now that I’ve been here for about six months it still is awkward.  The staff rooms at the HS are also smaller, so I don’t get the opportunity to ‘see and be see’ by the rest of the HS staff.  Essentially, the other teachers seem to still view me as foreign.  Understandable, given the situation, but hardly encouraging to myself or the other teachers to get to know me and vice-versa.

The students, because they do not see me everyday, treat me in much the same way.  I am a visitor, a guest, more of a waegookin ornament than an actual teacher.  And as such, they are excited to see me in the hallways and outside of school, but in the classroom I am not someone to take seriously.  If I were here everyday perhaps they would see me as more of a staple of the staff and not an overpriced ignorant babysitter.

I am reminded of a trip I took as a teenager.  After I graduated high school, I went with a group of students involved in the art program on an organized, structured trip to “Europe.”  We saw Europe, all right — two days in London, two in Paris, three in Switzerland, four in Italy — so little time was spent at each place that it was impossible to soak up anything except the most superficial glance of the culture.  I feel much the same way about NETs who are used only one day a week at their visiting schools — EPIK is supposed to promote competency of English and also knowledge and exposure to other cultures, something equally important given the homogeneity of South Korean society.  Given the size of the schools I work for, I really feel a more effective use of a NET in this position would be to spread the NET amongst the two schools at at least a 2 to 3 day ratio.

From January 24^th to 28^th, I taught a small English Winter Camp at my main middle school.  We had eleven second-grade students for the camp and taught them in 45-minute blocks starting at 11:00 and ending at 12:45, with a 15-minute break in between the two sessions.

Much to my delight, my main co-teacher (the English teacher for second grade) was there the whole week to teach with me.  For regular public school class, Native English Teachers (should) always have their Korean co-teacher in the classroom.  However, afterschool and camp classes are usually different, and indeed for my afterschool classes during the regular semester I always taught alone.  I assumed it would be the same for my camp classes, but I was really glad to have my co-teacher available to help me with the camp activities.

During usual classes, my lessons are a bit powerpoint heavy.  For camp, I wanted to step away from the computer and use other resources.  I much prefer this way of teaching because it makes me feel so much more like an actual teacher and less like a presenter.

On Monday, we started with attendance.  Students were not punished in any way for not showing up to camp, but I was curious how many students would show up for how many days.  Also, attendance is a good excuse to finally learn names for some of my students.  Most NETs see hundreds of students every week (in my case, I teach almost 500) and most students only once a week, so we never really get to learn names for most of our students.  Special classes like camps, where you get to see the same small group of students every day, are great opportunities to get to know them personally.

Monday ten out of eleven students showed up.  A good start!  After attendance, we did an English survey.  I had all the students stand up, and I asked them questions.  If the answer was “Yes,” they moved to one side of the classroom.  If the answer was “No,” they moved to the other side.  Questions include things like “Have you ever been to another country?,”  “Have you ever read a book in English?,” etc.  Most of my students are low-level from a very small rural area, so most of the answers were, predictably, no.  Once they were divided into yeses and nos, I asked further questions “What country?”  “What book?” etc.

After the survey we divided into teams (Boys vs Girls, teams which remained steadfast all week) we played Team Floor Scrabble.  Last semester I used the official point and number list for Scrabble tiles and made a set of large (maybe 4” x 4”) letter tiles.  We push the desks out of the way and use the floor as our game board.  Any concept of “double word score” or any bonus goes out the window; we play just for the points on the tiles.  I like playing a large version because, with teams, it makes it easier for everyone to see what’s going on.

For our second block of classes, I did a comics lesson.  I gave students some comics with world bubbles in place but the text removed (I used a few Calvin and Hobbes strips.  This lesson works best with strips that have lots going on in the pictures.).  They had to create their own story to match the pictures.  Afterward, they presented their comics to the class.  To finish we did a round-robin style comic.  I drew four larges boxes on the board; students had to take turns drawing a picture, then writing the text, then drawing the next picture, etc.  At first, my kids were a little shy about doing the activity, and as a result the comic was a little stilted (“Hello.  Hello.  Here is your pencil.  Oh thank you.  Good bye.  Good bye.  THE END.”).  For the second comic, I started the first drawing with a man riding a dinosaur and a small ice cream cone in the corner.  From there, they managed to come up with some pretty silly things.  They enjoyed the lesson.

On Tuesday we read and solved two word puzzles.  If you want to stay low-key, you can just do print-outs; I did print-outs and typed the puzzles into powerpoint.  Once they understood the puzzles, my students solved them very quickly.  After word puzzles we answered “What would you do?” questions.  They had to answer three questions with a full sentence (“What would you do if Chilgok County was attacked by zombies?”  “What would you do if your teacher went crazy and attacked the class?”  “What would you do if you woke up and your house was on fire?”).  Then they had to pick one of the three questions and write a very short story (at least six sentences).

After we read our stories to each other, we played Pirate Word Wars.  Pirate Word Wars is a really easy word game.  The object of the game is to write as many words starting with a designated letter as possible in a time frame of two mintues.

PIRATE WORD WARS

The Rules:

Make teams.  Each team will have 2 minutes to write down as many English words they can think of that start with a certain letter.  Summer and Mr. Kim will choose the letter.

For example, if the letter is “A”, you could write:  apple, ant, ask, art, answer, airplane

You get gold coins for your words.  Look at the chart to see how many gold coins:

If your word is… You get this much gold….

3 – 4 letters 1 gold coin

5 – 6 letters 3 gold coins

7 – 8 letters 5 gold coins

9 + letters 10 gold coins and a cannon ball

Face-Off:

At the end of each round, the teams will have a face-off.    One person from each team will write the longest word they have on the board.  The team with the longest word wins a cannon ball.

If both teams have a word of the same length, both teams will roll a die.  The team with the highest roll wins a cannon ball.

Cannon Balls:

Cannon balls can be used as soon as you get them, or they can be saved and used all at once.  You can shoot the other team’s ship with your cannon ball.  The cannon ball will make them loose gold.  Cannon balls can be used at any time on your turn.

When you use a cannon ball, you roll one die.  The amount of the die times 2 is the amount the other team loses.   If you roll a “3”, the other team loses 6 points.

If you have more than one cannon ball, you can use them together.  Use the chart to see how many points the other team can lose:

Number of cannon balls rolled number times how many

1                                                                                                                                             2

2                                                                                                                                             4

3                                                                                                                                             6

4                                                                                                                                             8

5                                                                                                                                             10

The team with the most gold at the end of the game wins.

On Wednesday, we made television commercials.  The students were divided into three groups of 3-4.  Each group had to pick a product (either one I provided – face cream, glue, tuna, choco pie – or something they had with them) and write a script for a television commercial for their product.  During the first 45 minute block we talked about commercials, and I showed them a few American television commercials.  We discussed which ones were funny, exciting, etc.  Then they chose their product and started working on their scripts.  I was lucky enough to have my co-teacher doing my camp lessons with me; he was an invaluable resource to the students for vocabulary and composition.  I don’t recommend this activity if you are teaching low-level students by yourself and without a good set of dictionaries.  For the second block, I allowed them a little more time to finish their scripts.  Then each group had to perform their commercial for the class.

On Thursday, we read “The Emperor’s New Clothes” together.  This story was good because the students already know it; we read the first part in English and then they had to tell me the ending.  After we finished the story, we moved our desks into a circle.  We did a round-robin storytelling exercise, with each person contributing one sentence.  The story could end at any time after every person had contributed at least one sentence.  For our second block, we played Apples to Apples.  If your school does not have a set, be prepared with index cards or evenly-cut pieces of paper and have your students fill in cards for verbs and adjectives.  This allows them to practice their English and ensures they will be working with vocabulary they already know.

For our final day, we completed a “My Friend” interview.  Students were paired up (or placed in a group of 3) and had to asked their friends questions about their friends’ family, dreams, and favorite things.  After they had answered the questions, each student had to write a short article about their friend.  We finished and read our articles during block 2, and then we played Hot Seat until our time was up.

My middle school comes from what’s considered to be a rural, low-level area, so their English is not as good as students in the same grade at schools near Seoul or Busan, but overall I felt they did quite well on all the activities.  Attendance-wise, every student showed up every day except for two, and each of those students only missed one day (one said he was sleeping, the other said he forgot we had camp and went to his hagwan instead).

Overall, I would say my camp was a success.  I worked with no budget and no outside materials except for a printer, a pair of dice, and my Apples to Apples game (which could very easily be made).  It was very refreshing to step away from the computer, allowing me more movement within my classroom, and I enjoyed making the students think harder than they normally would in class.  The best part is that most of these activities can be adapted to higher or lower levels, so it could realistically be used for anywhere from Elementary grades 5 and 6 up to High School 1.  Regardless, it was fun to teach.

The ball has dropped on 2010, and this morning I officially welcomed the New Year with a mug of Korean wine and my fiancé  (courtesy of Skype).  This time last year I would have never imagined I would be teaching, much less teaching on the other side of the world.  I feel like I’ve learned a lot in the last four months, but I still have a long ways to go before I can feel like a true teacher.  Here are my resolutions for the upcoming teaching year:

1. I resolve to be more patient with my students.  Learning a language is difficult, and unless you are struggling to learn a new language yourself, it is easy to forget just how difficult it is.  For every new word or grammar rule I grapple with in Korean, I remember my students and our efforts in class.  Learning takes times, and I must not expect perfection the first time around.  I resolve to work on problems until they are solved.
2. I resolve to grow as a teacher.  I will work harder at planning my lessons so they are more effective at helping my students learn English.  I will create a cohesive semester-long plan that will piece together the English language in a logical order.
3. I will LEARN MORE STUDENT NAMES.  I teach over 500 students a week, but that’s not really a good excuse.  I only know the name of one of my current students.  Now that I can read hangul, there’s no reason I should not be making more of an effort to learn them all (or at least the most vocal ones) by name.

Three simple goals, and I’m sure more will come along as the year progresses.  This should at least give me a good start.

In the last two weeks, I have spent five out of ten work days desk warming.  Desk warming is when you have to go to work but don’t have any classes to teach; as such, you spend eight hours sitting at your computer, wondering how on earth you’re going to pass the time.

Now, desk warming can be a good thing – I have no classes on Friday, so I have one whole day every week to desk warm.  Friday mornings are usually spent putting the finishing touches on my lessons for the coming week, leaving my weekends blissfully free of work.  I put in a few good hours of worksheet and powerpoint making, carefully planning my lessons and researching new and exciting ways to teach my students English.

And then lunch hits, I get a brief reprieve, and I return to my desk.  Usually, at this point in the day, I start going cross-eyed from spending so much time in front of my computer.  I start to compulsively check Facebook – two, three, ten times an hour.  All notions of productivity fly out the window.  I’m antsy, bored, and have some sort of lesson-planning creative block.  I soldier on, either trying to wring out anything useful from my brain for my classes or practicing my (still terrible) Korean.  Finally, 4:30 hits, and I get to go home.

I can deal with this one day a week.  Multiple times a week – it gets a little difficult.  However, not as difficult as it will be soon – I believe I have about 3 weeks of desk warming to look forward to this winter.

Korean schools have their longest break over the winter holiday.  My school will be closed from December 29th until March 2nd.  Some of the time I’ll spend doing other things – I teach two weeks of Winter camp, a special series of classes students can take during their break if they would like to study more English.  I have two weeks vacation (which, as of this moment, should find me in warm Thailand).  And the students come back to school for one week in February to… well, I’m not sure why, but I know the third graders will have a graduation ceremony.  So, five weeks I will be kept busy, but for the remaining three weeks – desk warming.

Now, it’s hard to imagine desk warming as a bad thing – getting full time pay for three weeks of essentially sitting on my butt?  Sounds sweet at first, yes – but I’m one of those highly-neurotic people who start getting a little kooky if I don’t have enough stimulation.  All the other teachers will be on break, so a few may show up to school from time to time, but for the most part it will be me, maybe the principal and vice principal, and perhaps a few ladies from the office.  Also, a lot of Korean schools don’t turn on the heat in winter, so I may spend all my time sitting in an icebox office freezing my fingers off.

One of the reasons this also irks me a little is because it seems like a misuse of perfectly good time that could have been spent either working on something English-related for the schools or for me to explore Korea.  It also seems like a waste of money by the POEs – if we come in, they have to pay us.  If we don’t come in, they don’t have to pay us.  We come in with no classes to teach or plan for and therefore just go bonkers wasting time, and the POEs waste their money by paying for absolutely no services.  I think I’d be a fan of a contract stipulation that exchanges desk warming for no pay.  I couldn’t afford to take all of the time off, but maybe a half-time schedule could keep all parties happy – like a three day work week.

I know a lot of teachers use desk warming time to goof off, and I can’t imagine that I won’t be among those, at least some of the time.  However, I love feeling “accomplished,” so I’m trying to think of big projects or tasks I can complete over the holidays.  A lot of these plans may be dependent upon where I’ll be working (my school moves to its new building this weekend, and as of right now I do not know if I will have an English classroom or if I will remain in the teacher’s room).  But here’s a bit of a list so far:

- make a semester-long lesson plan for all grades (ambitious, yes, and this will probably not get accomplished in its entirety.  There’s only so much lesson planning I can do at once without getting completely burnt out.  However, having the first month or two covered would be AMAZING)

- practice more Korean (mine is atrocious.  I can introduce myself and ask what something is – that’s about it)

- decorate the English room (if there is an English room… FINGERS CROSSED!)

- research graduate programs (I’m thinking of going back to school for… uh… something)

- enter some writing contests (put my time to good use and try to get some awards to put on my resume or something)

- pretty much find ANYTHING to beef up my resume

- blog about desk warming (hey, look!  mission accomplished!)

These are my ambitious activities.  If I happen to be working alone most of the time (and I think I will), these may fall way to the time-sucks of Youtube, Facebook and lolcats.

This was a (very) short essay I was going to submit for EPIK about my biggest challenge as a teacher.  However, it wasn’t quite right for what they wanted, so I’ll post it here.  Please excuse the occasional cheese.

“Teaching and Classroom Management”

When I was accepted into the EPIK program, I was overwhelmed with a number of emotions:  excitement at travelling to a new country, sorrow for leaving my family and fear for the job which lay ahead of me. I deeply appreciated EPIK’s 10-day orientation program which I attended in Jeonju.  At orientation, I was given a crash-course in teaching and left feeling confident in my abilities to select a language target and plan an effective lesson.  My fears were abated somewhat, and though I was nervous as I stepped in front of my first class – my third graders, the oldest students at my middle school, who stared at me with a mixture of curiosity and were much taller than I expected – I felt I could do my job well.  However, what orientation failed to prepare me for was the most incredible detail about my job here: the overwhelming amount of love I would feel for my students.

My students are funny, intelligent, and above all deeply caring people.  They work hard and, for the most part, are genuinely interested in English class.  I am not ashamed to admit that I love each and every one of my students, even the ones who like to drive me a little crazy.  Because of my students, I have been here for three months and have not had a single bad day at work.

Unfortunately, this love, while being an incredible result of my employment here, is also the cause of my biggest struggle as a teacher. I simply find that I am too nice to my students.

This is not to say being nice to your students is a bad thing.  Korean middle school students are more over-worked and sleep deprived than any other students in the world.  A little friendliness is often welcome, but a successful teacher must remember to draw a line between being kind and fostering a lack of discipline in the classroom.

I like being a fun teacher.  I like making jokes with my students and keeping the atmosphere of our classroom light so they are not afraid of English.  However, I don’t like when my students interpret a light atmosphere as one that encourages a lack of respect.  I don’t appreciate when students speak out of turn when I am teaching a lesson, and I don’t like students who refuse to complete the assignments that I’ve given them.  I love my students, but I know I was not invited to Korea to act as a surrogate parent; I am here to help teach them the intricacies of the English language which only a native speaker can wrangle, and I can’t teach if they don’t respect me.

I hate punishing students.  However, I prefer to do it myself than have my Korean co-teachers do it.  Putting total responsibility on the shoulders of my co-teacher only reinforces the idea that I am powerless in my own classroom.  To be a successful teacher here, you should take the reins and let the students know when their behavior is unacceptable.  During my last lesson, three students were goofing off and throwing paper balls across my classroom when they should have been working on a group project.  I separated the boys from their groups, made them stand in the back of my classroom and did not allow them to speak to the other students until class was over (only a period of about seven minutes).  They didn’t enjoy it, and one student (the class clown) looked genuinely upset. When class ended, I took the three boys aside.  “I like you,” I said, “…but today you made me angry.  Next week, you will be better.”  With nods and shamefaced murmurs, they shuffled away.  I very rarely get visibly angry in my classroom, so when it does happen, I hope my students know I am serious.

If I were to give any advice to a new Guest English Teacher, it would be to make sure you establish your authority early on in your teacher career.  Korean students are very conscientious and intelligent, but they are also stressed children looking for an outlet – any outlet – and you don’t want your class to be viewed as recess.  Much like a ship is only as strong as its captain, a class is only as strong as the teacher who steers it, and it is ultimately up to you to maintain control of your class to guide it to a better understanding of the English language.

I don’t think I’ve actually got a full night’s sleep since arriving in Korea.  That sort of thing is understandable in the first few days or weeks – jet lag, moving to an entirely new country, adjustment anxiety, etc – but I officially hit my three month mark last week.  Theoretically, after 3 moths, my body should have started regulating itself to my new surroundings.

Instead, every night I go to bed (and not at any ungodly hours – usually around the boring time of eleven-thirty) and roll from side to side, tossing to the left and then the right as my body feels the need to get comfortable.  Two minutes in one position leads to discomfort, and I adjust myself again in a vain effort to lie in a way that allows me to casually drift off to sleep.

Even if that does happen, I don’t stay asleep very long.  I wake up at least once in the night every single night.  Usually I wake up a few times (I’d say three on average, sometimes more), roll over and anxiously check my alarm clock to see how much time I have left until it starts ringing.  Inevitably, the time comes when I check it, exhausted, certain that it’s only four in the morning, and my eyes are greeted with 6:23 – only two minutes until I get up.  Are you fucking serious?

As such, I’m in a near constant state of exhaustion.  Dragging my sorry self out of bed seems to take an immeasurable amount of willpower.  Now that it’s getting remarkably colder, I have even less motivation to wake up.  Why not just stay in the warm serenity of my covers?  Why thrust myself painfully out of such a delicate womb and into the harsh reality that is my sleep deprived life?

Because I have a duty, of course.  Because the good nation of South Korea is paying me way too much money to come be an English-language entertainer for its public school children.  And they don’t particularly believe in sick days here – the Korean school system does not employ a pool of substitutes, so most of the Korean teachers come to our school when they are sick, provided they are still physically able to walk.  This, for a country so obsessed about the spread of germs and disease, does not seem like a logical move on their part.  My contract states that I do indeed have eleven days of paid Sick Leave available to me, but I would like to wait in case something vaguely life-threatening happens which requires me to use them.

So, every morning I drag myself out of bed, drag myself into the shower, halfheartedly blow dry my hair and apply my makeup, and manage to get pulled together in time to walk the fifteen minutes in the cold to meet my carpool.  The walking wakes me up some – but one cannot walk forever, and all too soon am I ensconced in the warmth of my carpool and the heat produced by 5 bodies in a tiny car.  I’m the last one picked up, so I sit by the window.  It takes all my willpower not to lean my head against the glass and snooze the full ten minutes to school.

Finally arriving at school does not make things better.  For example, today is Thursday, and on Thursdays I arrive at 8:15 but don’t teach until 9:55.  I spend the time putting fishing touches on my day’s lesson and trying valiantly not to fall asleep.  Today is worse than other days – when I bent down to start my computer, I almost didn’t come back up.  I am staring at the monitor, every so often blinking violently in an attempt to wake myself up.  What I would really love would be either (a) to push my notebooks aside, lay my head down on my desk, and nap for the hour until I have to go teach or (b) a gigantic mug of black coffee.

Of course, neither one of those are viable options.  Very seldom I see a teacher take a nap at their desk, and usually it is one of the very old male teachers who are just a few years to retirement anyway.  I get the feeling that a lot of the teachers here don’t particularly consider me to be a member of the staff (and I’m not, since I will be leaving in nine months) and throwing my head on my desk to drool and snore while everyone else works isn’t an effective way of saying “No, really, I’m here to do my job!”

As far as the coffee goes, Koreans are crazy about coffee, but I have yet to see an actual drip coffee pop anywhere I’ve gone (and that includes the coffee shops).  When you go out for coffee, the best you can expect is an Americano, which just does not taste the same and requires about 3 shots to really give you a kick.  The preferred alternative is tiny individual packets of instant coffee, usually laced with sugar and powdered creamer (and by “laced” I mean “taking up about 2/3 of the pack”).  This is the mixture I’m drinking at the moment – a tiny (I don’t have a mug here, so I drink my coffee out of a tiny paper cup – it’s more “hygienic,” I’m told) cup of sort-of coffee with most of the sugar/creamer ending up in the trash.  Not my ideal energy drink, but it’s hot and it’s here, so it’ll do.

If this was my own fault, I don’t think I would mind as much.  If I was dragging ass every day because every night I went out with a bunch of friends, had a great time, and got heavily intoxicated, at least I would know who to lay the blame on. Not only that, I would know what to do to finally be able to get some sleep – not go out.  However, that’s not the case, and the only thing I can think of is maybe my green tea has too much caffeine in it.

Overall, I love my job, and I love Korea – however, this lack of sleep is starting to drive me a little crazy.  Maybe if I can figure out why I can’t seem to get to sleep at night, I’ll be able to actually experience and enjoy both the aforementioned.

When I graduated from college a year and a half ago, my stepfather bought me a new laptop as a present.  I chose a sleek, shiny MacBook to replace my gigantic ghetto-rigged mostly-broken Dell laptop.  From the first moment, it was love – gone were the ridiculous automatically installed programs (come on, who really needs five different types of solitaire?) and crazy security flaws.  I’ve had my computer for a year and a half now, and it has given me no problems whatsoever.

Until coming to Korea.

For a country who touts itself to be one of the most technologically advanced in the world, Korea sure hasn’t embraced the Mac.  Apple does not have an official presence in Korea – instead, it sells products through the store Frisbee, which as far as my knowledge goes is the only actual store licensed to carry Apple computers and computer accessories.  And of course, the only Apple stores are located in Seoul and Busan – while it makes sense that they would be located in the two largest cities in Korea, it doesn’t make it very convenient for waegooks like myself to get the products or service we need.

Not that I expect anything about Korea to be convenient.

That being said, everywhere you go you see a PC-dominated nation.  All of the school’s computer setups are geared toward having a PC.  This is understandable, given the price – Macs are way expensive, and my main school couldn’t afford to buy computers that could play DVDs.  So price is definitely an issue.  In order to use my personal laptop at my high school I had to purchase a special adapter for my computer (for the low low price of $40) so I could plug the monitor cable into my screen.

My high school also uses wireless internet, but unfortunately for me the tech supports guy don’t really know anything about how to set up wireless for Macs.  If they would just give me the damn DNS/ISP numbers I could probably do it myself, but a big part of Korean culture is not “losing face.”  By saying I could do it better, I would cause the tech support guy to “lose face” – that is, look like he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing (even though he obviously doesn’t).  As a result, my internet works sometimes and the rest of the time remains dormant.  I’m not really sure what he did to my poor computer (I was cringing the entire time he was typing), but this touch-and-go signal is certainly not because of the router (the other teachers don’t seem to have a problem at all).

Also, I have a problem accessing the majority of Korean websites on my Mac.  I have to do all my online banking and any Korean product ordering at my middle school.  Most Korean website require Active-X control security measures (which, by the way, have ridiculous security flaws and really aren’t safe at all).  Active-X controls require you to download special add-ons to your browser – and the only browser that supports Active-X is Internet Explorer.  When was the last time Explorer came out for Mac?  Oh, about 2003.  I’ve heard of a program called Parallels for Mac which makes it look like you’re using IE, but I’m not exactly sure yet how that would work for my banking website.

Of course, if I had done more research before coming over, perhaps I would have been able to know these things for myself.  However, I would not have been able to get another computer – it’s ludicrous to think I would spend a thousand dollars just to be able to order Domino’s Pizza online.  But if you have the choice before you come over, and you intend to be in Korea for over a year, I would suggest getting a PC, for the sake of your sanity if nothing else.  And besides, if you’re with EPIK, you’ll be able to afford a new Mac when you get home anyway.

It’s just amazing to me that a country who prides itself on it’s violently growing technology sector – fastest internet speeds in the world (speeds which must be relegated to Seoul only, I think, because even when I’m plugged in at my apartment I still have to wait 5 minutes for YouTube to load), smartphones out the wazoo, and an addiction to video games which is so strong it causes kids to be sent to offline recovery camps – is so stubbornly unwilling to integrate the Mac into its culture.