saturday afternoon

my mouth feels funny

tonight i met a korean man for coffee. i posted an ad to trade language. hangul--the korean alphabet--is completely phonetic, which makes how the words are spelled a total hoot. they are constructed both horizontally and vertically. i'm not going to suggest that i even understand most of it, but the little i was exposed to makes perfect sense.

add to that, i feel great, and that i can actually learn this language. it seems like alot opened up to me, even tho i still know very little. park jin woo (to get all korean on yer ass) or jin woo park as we would approach it (i think i mentioned this earlier, but his name is really baek nam jun) was very kind. the notebook i have for learning korean (thanks to buck downs enterprises) looks like a visual poem. a mixture of english, romanized korean to help with pronunciation, tho it is a just a bridge that needs to be dumped quickly as, as mentioned, it is phonetically based, and hangul/korean. in fact, korean appears like a gigantic visual poem. i imagine dyslexia may be hard to come by in this country? i want to ask my co-teacher about that tomorrow.

we got in his car, which is literally from japan, so the wheel is on the opposite side of american and korean vehicles, and he programmed my address, and viola. of course, before that i took the subway to meet him. we agreed on an exit, and my description was simple: 'Okay, I will be the westerner with a beard--should be pretty easy to spot'.

i'm too excited to type coherently. i will just say i am eager to learn more, and think i actually can.

i've been thinking alot about romance languages, the ones i attempted to learn in middle/high school and college. i think the problem was that they were too similar to english, so i would fight them. like many other things in my korean (limited) experience, if i just lay myself down and am humble before it, it is a much more useful approach. am i aging and gaining maturity? who knows.

there is so much to report.

'guiness is scottish dark beer?'

kevin glitter

for the hard of reading, pictures

good advertisement, if you can see it



authentic asian neon


my co-workers son, who by the end of the evening was calling me hara-beoji (grandfather)

basics

the majority of my walk to work

i teach 21 classes a week. at most i would teach 22, some of the native english teachers (as we are referred to) have 18. in my school there are 3 grades (it is middle school) and they are they are considered grades 1-3. each time they move up (from elementary to middle, from middle to high) they re-set to grade 1. so i have 7 classes with each grade & section (1-1, 1-2, 1-3, etc). 3 graders are by far the worst. i see each class once a week.

my classes, on average, have about 40 students in them, which is quite a lot of students, but since they sit in groups of 2, it somehow is less intimidating to see four rows with 5 units in them.


the scenic last 5 minutes of my walk to work

some basic differences in how the school is organized vs my experience in the west:
teachers go from room to room, the students have their space. this has positives (the emphasis is on the students, not the teachers) and some negatives (i cannot, for example set up an 'english zone' so that when students walk in they know they are in english class).

students have 7 periods, lunch is separate, and school is basically from 9am to 4pm. lunch is about 30 minutes, and they have two 15 minute breaks between periods throughout the day. they have class for half a day, two saturdays a month. i think that is a nice structure.

i have 4 co-teachers (their korean english teachers) and 3 of them are great, 1 is okay (competent, but shy) the other--and surprisingly the most experience--i dont like teaching with. she essentially abandons me, which is nerve racking as sometimes they do not want to talk, which is often when the korean co-teacher steps in to get things moving again.

this week has been horribly repetitive as i am just showing a power point of photos and talking about them. i only need come up with 3 lesson plans a week, but at least that will be 3 different 7 packs of lessons (i imagine the students later on in the week will benefit from the monday beta-testers) as opposed to "these are _ _ friends at my going away party" etc.


quickly learning power point

one thing i do enjoy quite a bit is the respect given to education as a whole, at least as i have experienced it. they seem to think it is interesting that i know about poetry and art, etc. also, when i show the slide with _ _ friends justin, ekrem, divya, and steve they all are very impressed when they find out they are getting advanced degrees or PhDs. literally 'ooohs' and 'ahhhs' and 'smart friends'.

that's enough for now, i need to prep a bit for next week.


the 24 convenience store (where 'billy' works) and i can sit and drink a beer not even in a brown bag

what i used to kill the last few minutes of one of my classes today

then i had to explain the joke at the end to my co-teacher. it took a bit to actually explain the entire set-up, etc, but finally she said, 'oh, that is funny'

babel fish translation of an instant message sent by a co-worker

When the electronic document drafting, [a_lay_wa_kath_i] to change an address, wishes. [Document information] - [in address] column: Seoul Metropolitan Government ocean celestial sphere zelkova route 68 (the New Year 7 eastern 325-8) with the fringe land wishes certainly. Informs late and, an obstruction to business causes, the unit only is sorry.

Informs late and, an obstruction to business causes, the unit only is sorry.

what an absolute beauty of a sentence.