Death Of A Blog

Death Of A Blog

I think with the coming of a baby and the establishment of a family here now, I've come to find a pattern of many new bridges recently crossed. The paths seem to knit together into a picture of an era of my life spent here - too many challenges met in this strange land of Korea for me to justify continuing to explore it as a complete outsider anymore.

I think the beginning of the end came when I was shopping for life insurance here. But certainly with improved Korean listening skills, a page has been turned and the seeming impenetrable mystery of this bizarre language and place, the complete otherness that is Korea has been to some extent resolved for me to the point where most of the signage is as recognizable and predictable as in a stroll through a Canadian city, and street corner conversations eavesdropped in on constantly reveal their regionalisms, personalities and banal subject matter. Discussions become as recognizable as any on the 6pm GOtrain out of Toronto.

More importantly and overshadowing my musings on life here in what has only recently come to define itself as a personal era marked and ended, the new adventure of fatherhood has begun with so many surprises, not only within the context of myself or family, but also in terms of this country, many of them pleasant surprises (for example, Korean LaMaze classes actively encouraging expectant fathers to be supporters and coaches in the delivery process, sonogram sessions welcoming me in - this has proved a patriotic embarassment to me considering Halifax, Nova Scotia's own IWK/Grace hospital has forcibly removed at least one father from the sonogram room *after* the mother expressed her wish for him to be present. We Canadians, we think we're so smug. How many Canucks continue to roll off the planes daily with a Messiah complex determined to save the Korean women and punch out Korean men? Canadians know so little about what's going on here much of the time. Perhaps the new generation of Korean nurses should be rolling off the planes onto the Halifax tarmac and punching the lights out of the IWK/Grace Maternity Hospital staff instead!)

So I've decided I'm retiring this blog for the time being. It is interesting to witness the death of a blog's purpose. It's also illuminating to see in more clear relief how this has served the purpose of my peace-making (or peace-keeping) with this new country. I think I'm done carefully accounting how (or whether) daily Korea should affect me as the Canadian I thought I was.

Having now seen my peace-making blog effort for what it is,

I bow...

and turn my attention to the new adventures of becoming an international parent. I hope a new blog will prove useful to me in marking the footprints I will leave in this new century, and charting the path I'll take in this uncertain world stretched out before me, in new colors I only notice now.

Thanks for reading and sharing.

And yes, they're really the same as us.

EFL Teaching As Performance

I was sitting down with my wife tonight at supper and as we were recounting the day each of us had, it occured to her that my job must be quite easy and boring since I teach the same lesson all day long to different classes. She mentioned that the prospect of doing the same thing over and over again was a big deterrent to her becoming a full-time teacher.

It struck me as odd that although that was a spot-on description of what I did, from someone who knew me very well no less, nevertheless I didn't come to think of it that way at all. Yes there were moments when I was bored, but the way I did think of my job, I chose to explain to her as an expereince similar to that of memorizing an opera role to perform night after night.
Of course, what is it that classical musicians do when they learn music? After all the same damn music is there all the time, you're told pretty much what to do, right? It's not like you can change any of the notes, after all.

Well, I started thinking of a complicated run of sixteenth notes from some light-fared small-sized orchestra of the Rossini or Mozart repertoire. Yes you've got the same run to do every time, and yes you have to be healthy enough to do it, but even though you have to sing all of them in the exact same order, what happens over time is that your personality grows on it, on that music or lesson plan. It becomes like a stone wall on which vines have grown and taken shape, pulling ever so gently at the bricks, grasping at them through their pores and subtly but every so certainly, changing the contour of that wall's shape and definition.

That's very much how my personality grows on a lesson plan I have to repeat. I guess I think of it as a performance, and each time I'm polishing it or handling it slightly differently, it gives way to subtle but strong pressures that change it, the way the shape of a bone might change over time, or a thick clay pot that has not yet been baked. The first time I show the lesson, that clay pot may have a well-defined lip, nicely fluted neck and bulbous vase body, but as children ask unforeseen questions in the successive lessons, as they adapt the procedures to better fit their ideas, that metaphoric claypot lip may change to a wavy clam-shell-shape, or the vase may elongate or become more squashed.

It's never occured to me that doing the same lesson over again could be boring, because I don't think it's possible for me to do it the exact same way twice. In comparison, the sorts of windows of variables that a jazz improv musician would have to fill in each song seem like expansive boundless nebulae of outer space, next to the work of a classical musician. I don't think I could just jump straight into it. I would need a framework. I think I've come to regard these lesson plans as a performance of a sort.

So I told her I'm always "working" the lesson, surrendering it to forces of experience that make it better the next time. I think this process of polishing can be a source of joy, although not a sensational kind. It's more like the quiet kind that comes from lots of patient observation, study and quiet notating of changes over time, the way a botanist might do watch a shoot transform into a flower.

And not only that but it is also so true that no matter what job you have you are always going to have those skeletons you discover about your job, those things about the job you will not like. You are never going to get away from meeting that skeleton no matter what the job, so you may as well get around to dusting off a place beside your seat for him to come in and sit down how to live together - because you're just never going to get rid of him. He's a blood relative of our need to overcome adversity. If there is none to be found at first, our minds will spread like weeds into the soft earth beneath our circumstances and find some to complain about, I think. As far as having skeletons goes, I think having to do the same lesson for many periods is fairly tame.

I was describing to the missus about today's lesson - actually, I thought it was one of the crappiest I'd given this semester. The CD-ROM interactive content really low-balled the kids' abilities, the chant didn't have enough to work on for song time, and the activity I'd planned - a whisper-line game - was short about 10 minutes of needed fill-in time. So in a blissful moment of rolling with it and not over-thinking, I did what any composer worth his salt would do: I let the momentum extend *itself* freely into the next activity. Let me explain.

So the whisper line game was rolling along pretty well. The kids were really involved in scoring well for their respective teams. We'd gone through all the derailers pretty swiftly (the kid who cries because he doesn't perform well got back on his feet pretty easily today, and the whiners (there's no Korean word for sportsmanship, by the way - did you know that?) were at a minimum.) Then it came time to end the game as I could feel that crest of fascination receding. I could feel I'd wrung that momentum out for most of what it was worth. But the kids were still hooked on the English, juices flowing and waiting for that next one-up event.

In a moment of inspiration I got individual team members (randomly picked) to stand up, pick competitors from the other teams and have a new contest. I would speak the Korean phrase, and they'd have to utter the English phrase as fast as they could. Making them go from hearing Korean to competitive translating was one final frontier we'd not yet gone to. It was a natural choice. First person got two points.

Well, it was a smash success. The kids wailed with excitement each round. At one point I even set them up for today's new phrase 'are you alright?' (not 'are you okay', part of last week's vocabulary set) two kids blurted out last week's and one kid blurted out today's sentence and the latter won the two points to the exquisite pain of the other teams. Koreans are so marvelously dramatic at losing. They actually contort their faces like they've just drunk poison or something when they lose. And the noises. Oh the noises they make. Like a Bruce Lee nameless-Asian-henchman getting slowly skewered with a sword, man. It's so delicious to watch especially if you're the person who won. They really shouldn't make it quite so enjoyable to beat them, but they do.

Anyhow, that simple gesture - simply extending the momentum (but more truly, letting the momentum extend itself and me standing out of its way) into the next activity - transformed an adequate-but-possibly-strained-for-time lesson plan into a naturally flowing piece of performance art.

There's plenty to be happy about with that, I think. It hadn't occured to me before how much of my having been a performer has followed me into this new career.

City birds and three-year old kids

I’m looking back at pictures I’ve collected and I saw this one that got me thinking back to a time when I was having trouble adjusting to Toronto life. One cold, grey, damp, blustery fall Toronto day, while I was crossing the intersection at Yonge & Eglinton en route to my 9-5 daily grind, I had this wonderfully random experience. I’ll always remember it - it was at 11am a busy time for that intersection on a weekday, and just as I was crossing I noticed a flock of about thirty pigeons flying round in a circle high above the intersection. It was pretty to see but I kept moving - until the third time they came around. Then I stopped. I walked back to the curb and watched.

It looked like the pigeons were playing a game, either against the wind or following the leader. But more interestingly it looked like they were playing an identifiably human game, one that very small children often play. It kind of looked like they were play-imitating the busy-ness of the traffic below, in the best way they could, by circling around and around, much like a child might do in a room at a social setting. They were swooping and moving in that uniform organism motion that birds often do, but they were going around 5, 6, 7 times, a gloriously free-formed contrast against the forbidding concrete lines of the skyscrapers’ architecture enclosing them, playing against these boundaries surrounding them at the corners of that space high above us. You know adult birds have the minds of 2 or 3 year old children. It was really beautiful to watch, but by the time I had my camera out ready to film it, they had settled down into the square in front of the Eglinton Mall. City birds being often quite hungry scavengers, they tend to save the energy-depleting act of flying for moments of necessity. So this was quite an unusual athletic display of playing.

It reminds me of lyrics to the band Adema's song, 'Brand New Thing'

“everybody wants to belong~
everybody's singing along~”

TWO KOREAN FORTRESSES OF INDIFFERENCE: CO-TEACHERS AND THE NATIONAL TEXTBOOK

Lately I find myself really wishing I could change my K-co-teach.


She doesn't present my case at all to administration, I feel. Having been at the same previous school for five semesters, I'd forgotten to establish the climate most useful in Korean-to-foreigner work relationships - a passive-aggressive war of attrition. But I'm back on the ball starting Monday.


So far this is the way all of my concerns have gone... (minus the imagining part which only developed recently) If I walked to her and said, 'I have an axe in my forehead and it really hurts! Could you help me?' then going by the way she's mediated everything else to date, I'd have to conclude that she would then have a long meeting with the administration while I bled, and then come back, sit me down and in torturously slow yet perfect English, explain to me that they have determined that the reason I am suffering is because I have an axe in my forehead. And that would be the end of discussion. She would sit there, smugly accomplished, dutiful, suddenly interested in inspecting her attire for any possible dust, quietly waiting for me to go away, possibly wondering why I haven't yet.


I would sit there and (only for the briefest moment) imagine the fascinating and beautifully-spotted red mess it would make on her prim black suit were she suddenly decapitated at that very moment.


I calmly tell her that I already knew that when I spoke to her and could she please help me and she would say, 'sorry you have to suffer that.' That's what talking to my co-teacher about every issue is like. I don't think there was any doggie-doo in the small welcome cake I gave at the beginning of the year, but maybe I should have taste-tested it first just to be sure.


It's too bad that war of attrition (i.e. until the principal notices *and* decides the atmosphere needs to change (and that can be a long time unless you're an especially gifted person at bringing about change even across languages)) seems to be the only way for foreigners to get things moving forward in this country's teachers' rooms. But I'll be fine, I've decided. I've still got the battle armor locked away in the storage room somewhere. Ah here they are: selective language difficulties in requests for favors, the policy of saying yes but doing what you were going to do anyway regardless of what you just said, and of course the golden rule in Korea: it's better to say "sorry" afterward, than "may I?" beforehand. They still fit well.

Discussing problems embedded in the Korean national English textbook is kind of the same experience. EFL teachers of many stripes, young or old all seem to be united in their hatred of the series, which runs from grade 3 to grade 6 and does not start with any alphabet or phonics, but rips straight into 'My name is Minsu' from no precedent (unless you count Hangeul) (which of course ought to be a no-brainer for Korean toddlers, right? Just think back to your first experience with any non-arabic letter-based language. Did it not just immediately jump out at you too? No? Well we can't all be blessed with the chromosomes I guess. )

On my earlier point, I heard today about a fellow waygookin ELI who asked his co-teacher to get the IT guy to fix his projector and a week later she said, "Oh, the IT checked your internet, it's fine." Great, but he wanted the projector fixed! I'm sure that if that IT note were just scribbled out in Korean, it would probably have been done faster and handled correctly. How frustrating it must be for non-fluent speakers of Korean to be here.

But as regards the national textbook, I've had a hate-love relationship with it. Yet even in the dark of night, a light appears to have come. Let me explain.

I hated the national textbook (for the subject of English) when I first arrived. And on its own, yes it's quite awful. Zero strategic competence promoted, next to zero socio-linguistic competence promoted. I say next to zero because the applicable situations for use of its target language are obvious and well-presented, but because none of the necessary pliability/removeability of the language is introduced, no near-parallel situations and no other situations in which most of the target language could be useful are studied, explored, understood, or even imagined. It just does not reflect the way language is used, and so does not help at all in the natural process by which humans are going to dissect and use the language naturally anyway.

It's almost approached like programming, the way a robot would try to use language... patiently waiting, perhaps eternally, for extremely narrow prerequisites to be met in order to summon the studied target language recording. And although we're dealing with humans who should be able to see that and jump over it, unfortunately, with no hint of reality (i.e. bendability) in the lessons, this rigid army-method is what's promoted - indeed, it's what's rewarded in Korean English language classrooms.

Having acknowledged that, I have to say that my relationship with the national textbooks has changed drastically this year due largely to my elementary school co-teachers having published their own excellent companion workbook (student workbook and teacher's guide) which bridges a lot of gaps, and secondly the enormous amount of work that the twenty-one school teachers leading grades 4 through 6 have done here to have all materials made, properly boxed, labeled and shelved for easy reference.

All of the textbook lessons now have at least two (and some lessons as many as four) supplementary periods, both pre-lesson preps and post-lesson work (and sometimes mid-lesson) for the standard four-periods-per-lesson textbook series. And what they do is great - instead of eight cards for one-line bingo, we usually have twelve which you can do a lot more with of course. Pre- and post-lessons consistently design each unit to move from controlled learning to an end result of open or uncontrolled learning i.e. independent composition, open substitution drills, role-plays and basically freer use of the language. It's not as free as it could be, but it's a lot better than what the national textbook would leave you with. I'm thinking of making or buying a copy of each grade and bringing it to Gwangju for the next teacher's meeting and showing what my lesson plans have started to look like. In short, I am no longer dreading my textbook lessons but look forward to them. However, they still need to go a step further than they do.

Another thing is that I've started to develop a small running inventory of the unwritten but high-currency values that Koreans having in estimating what constitutes good classroom games in experimentation. I've started, therefore, to bend the rules a bit with variations on their old workhorses, knowing a bit better how they relate to the national textbook.

So my concept of the national textbook has changed. Now if I could just get the co-teacher changed, I'd be all set.

Chintsy Foreigners In Korea - A Comparison

Well it's long been known that ESL in Korea attracts a diverse group of foreigners and while some of those are the types we'd like to get to know, many - it is not secret - are not. It doesn't take being here very long before the stories rack up.

When I first came to Korea, I'd replaced a fellow who was nicknamed 'hamburger teacher'. He was thus crowned because after having flown to Korea on his employer's money, he declared on his third day that he was quitting because there wasn't a 'decent hamburger stand' nearby. Clearly it was hamburger teacher's intention to use his employer's ticket to find a second job and bill them for the same ticket. In the three days that he'd worked at the kindergarten academy (the kindie hagwon) his English lessons consisted of Day 1: having the children draw the best picture of teacher's face, and Day 2: photocopying the best of which and making the kids competitively color this portrait. Sadly, not even a prize was offered. I believe he now works for a poly institute somewhere in Incheon.

The war-chest of stories of Korea's line-up of finest freaky foreigners occupies a thread of some thirty to forty pages on Dave's ESL cafe, under the title 'freakiest waygook contest'. But less sensational, though equally freaky, are the chintsy foreigners of Korea (of which there is a spicey variety) equally capable of superhuman feats of penny-pinching. I've been in Korea for a cumulative total of three and a half years and I've seen some funny posts from departing foreigners. Among the most memorable was a guy looking to sell his own socks for a dollar each. Not serious, you say, but they were declared as brand new and guaranteed never used. He was in fact trying to sell his school gifts.

There are the less-interesting, more standard variety of penny pinchers who go on strict gimbap-only diets for months on end (for those never-beens, a california roll - or gimbap - is available with side dishes and water for a single dollar (1000 Won) at any gimbap mom and pop shop in any Korean city. I even knew of a foreigner who knew the exact delivery date for the cheaper 700 Won triangle gimbaps for the Korean 7/11 store (Family Mart) and would show up just after the truck arrived and buy 20 - 30 of them for meals for the next few weeks.

In my previous city there was a foreigner who had a habit of breaking toilet tank covers when he would descend on foreigners' homes in moments of urgency to use their bathrooms. Rumored to have been embarassed over a legitimate and unfortunate bowel problem, he would work himself up into such a tizzy over the toilet flush not being strong enough to flush everything away, he would then proceed to open the tank and play Mr. Fixit, and in the process break the toilet tank top in his little spiralling black vortex of anxiety. He did this more than once. Freaky yes, but what's chintsy about him? Well, instead of covering the cost that the tenants would now have to bear, he'd shown up later at one thusly victimized home with a bottle of krazy glue in an attempt to save himself some money. I believe the report was that the krazy glue didn't work.

What binds these folks together and alows them to hide within our mostly innocent ranks of otherwise balanced foreigners who are also here to save money? Well, very few people come to Korea anymore to do culture tours (e.g. I'm just here for the culture, and I don't care about the money) and that is, to an extent, understandable. Korea pays the best of any Asian country and a lot of Westerners come here to pay off debts. But there is a point where normal thriftiness departs from the land of the sane, where said foreigner becomes, in a very different sense, a stranger in a strange land of penny-pinching craziness, and of these there are no shortage in Korea - westerners who won't even talk to Koreans in English without being paid, westerners who play church groups off of one another to see how long they can stretch out the trend of free weekend suppers, foreigners who yell at taxi drivers because the meter's 1800 won rolls over to 1900 Won close to their stop, and so on.

But in the games of socially retarded chintsy foreigner olympics, it may be possible that we've found a Gold Medal contender this weekend.

Striking out on a new evolutionary plateau of chintsiness all his own, it turns out that, recently, one foreigner deep in the countryside of Korea has been playing his own friends off as mules for his personal profit under the false pretense of 'covering house expenses' for an annual Hallowe'en party. It's widely known that said foreigner has been bragging about how much money he made last year off the backs of his friends, how little the party actually cost, and how he plans to repeat the formula for another killing. Here is an example of another strain of the same brand of socially retarded foreigner in his most flamboyant strut - to do this, he smears another local orphanage fund-raiser Hallowe'en party, plastering fundraiser posters with his own party poster, and hijacking the invite list online to distract party-goers. Now, what kind of a bottom feeder would actually go to these lengths to secure another year of 'bragging rights'?

And they wonder why Koreans are so suspicious of us.

Back home in Canada, what would happen to someone who'd have done this? No doubt an ass-kicking would be in order, or at the least, a demand for a party at the expense of the host. Let's hope this is just all a big misunderstanding and that, in fact, our chintsy foreigner will at least be opening his purse-strings in good humor and providing free booze to stave off the anger of any foreigners he duped into his charitable 'expense-covering' cause last year. Perhaps next year, holding one or more of the orphans hostage for ransom will also get tossed around as a possibility for making just one more dollar.Assuming of course the police don't arrive on a tip of drugs being distributed.

No doubt, a special edition in the chronicles of Korea's chintsiest waygooks.

COUNTRYSIDE FOLK ART BIKE TREK



I've taken to heading out before sunsets and riding my new bike through the expansive fields of rice paddies that lie beyond Jangheung's brief limits. Dotting those long stretches of farms are the homes of most of Jangheung's real residents, scattered far out across the landscape, indicating their presence on these crisp autumn evenings with tiny plumes of smoke coming from the tops of tin stove-pipes poking out from corrugated tin rooftops, or blue-tile Asian style curved roofs.

On those country road evening rides, the air is just so fresh and cool, so sharp in the nostrils. As I coast down narrow farm roads that weave through endless tall-grasses, the wind carries a kind of fresh essence up off the tips of the grasses and into your lungs. It just cleanses one deep down inside like the good feeling you're left with after the burn fades away from a really good strong wasabi.

On this evening, I ran into these aging, weather-beaten and faded yet really cool throwbacks to an old Korean tradition - a kind of totem pole warding off evil spirits which may otherwise consider visiting a village. The faces are meant to scare evil spirits away. But if you continue along, the faces get warm and welcoming, presumably because you mustn't have been an evil spirit to have made it past the bouncers (I guess.)

I made it past the first set of scary condemning faces,and the next faces sure enough were warm, smiling, winking, bowing - some with lipstick on, and there's even one of a Korean noble with a woody sticking out at the passerby! Hello, what's the Korean word for immodest?








Fall is always such a beautiful time to catch photos of the sky battles between the receding warm weather fronts and the advance of the northern winter winds.

JOKKU INJUSTICE RECTIFIED

(This note is dedicated to Neal Adams and all community-fostering EFL foreign teachers who stayed in Mokpo between 2006-2008)

Some of the nicest, community-oriented foreigners have left Mokpo.

Although it's always sad to see good people go, in our case (that is, in the case of the foreigner EFL community in Mokpo) it was especially sad because of an unresolved injustice that was visited upon us one Monday night when our group had just started to get enthusiastic about playing weekly jokku.

(N.B. Jokku, for those of you not in the know, is a Korean style of volleyball played with the feet and head (and chest) only, and the net is lowered to a tennis net level. The game is imported to Korea from the Vietnam war (Koreans fought alongside the Americans against the Viet Cong) and the soldiers brought it home. As it's considered a lowly 'soldier's pastime' one can have great difficulty finding Korean teachers who'll indulge in the sport - they tend to lean to mamby-pamby sporting activities like badminton. I find the game a *great* workout because it gets all of the big muscles (namely, one's ass and legs and the whole ab area) moving more often, yet does not wear out joints like with jogging or running. The perfect balance of flexibility and mobility for those of us who are 'mostly' in shape, and who just need a slight push, it offers a lot of fun to keep motivated. Oh, and I fully intend to bring it back to Canada one day.)

Anyway, as regards the foreigners who took to this marvelous game, everyone who was there knows what happened - at first a Korean group of jokku (Korean-style foot volleyball) players played on the same court and we tried to make sure our game was after their time. However, eventually they were gearing up for some tournament they were probably going to lose anyway, and they didn't want to share either of two courts so they started a campaign of Korean-style passive-aggressive grief to the foreigners one night, they tried to bully us off the courts which resulted in a brief confrontation. In typical Korean passive-aggressive style, the police were called and sided with the Koreans presumably because we were playing too late. A sign was put up in the community park later that week that clearly stated no playing after 10pm. Then after that, the original Korean group got back to playing, until well after 10pm. Of course no police were called any of the times that they played.

It was more than a bit of a souring experience that never really got resolved for us, the foreigners. But I always suspected someone in city hall would care and do something had we the opportunity to explain. I also presumed the issue may have been about the space having been paid for and/or reserved, much like with our city parks recreation services back home in Canadian cities.

Well to my friends Neal, Crystal, Richard, Shannon, Abby, Jason, and anyone else who may've been initially interested in jokku but gotten turned off by that experience... this one's for you:

Finally I mentioned to my wife today that I had been interested in contacting the correct city recreation department so I could go about learning how to book and reserve the appropriate park for future jokku games, so as to thwart the future efforts of any foreigner-hating Koreans. What I found out was this: my wife located and spoke to the right city hall officer and he got so angry about the stories I'd told her.

First he clarified

1) that the parks are already paid for and

2) it is absolutely the right of every foreigner paying taxes here to lawfully use the parks as they wish, to the same extent as the Koreans do.He then went on to give his personal phone number to us and asked us that if anything like this ever happens again, we were to please call him directly and he would clarify this matter immediately. He also offered to explain our position to the police should we need to call the police, and

3)he furthermore (I love this part) offered to plant ANOTHER sign on the very same parksite where the first sign was placed, with a warning from the city to all citizens to allow the foreigners to play in the park at the same courts and times as all the other Koreans. He said he'd do the latter if we called again in the moment of another similar problem.

My brethren and sistern, we now have the muscle of city hall on our side. He really said that. I especially liked the story about offering to put up a warning sign not to harass foreigners anymore. Too bad you're almost all gone.

But with that news, and the new incoming group of foreigners, I'd like to raise anew the foreigners' interest in the great game of foot-volleyball Korean style, a.k.a. jokku, and recommend that we *all* come out, or even just ten of us, and play any sweet old time we damn well please (when the courts are not already in use of course.)

Amen.