Ok...so this truly is just an excuse for me to rant about the country and culture that I currently find myself in. Please excuse the inevitable typos. It's Canada cold right now but no heat in the schools. Needless to say, my hands are frozen and a little too stiff to type. Oh the humanity.
School is going ok. "Good, not great", as Dwight Schrute would say. (oo, that rhymed). Anyway, I've been trying to have a new attitude and "love the heck out of korea" as one of my last posts showed. It's just that... it seems that Koreans just don't want us here. They want us to love the heck out of their country, that much is for sure. Unfortunately, you can't really have one without the other. You can't have your kimchi and eat it, too. You can see these contradictory attitudes in my students and all the way up to the laws that effect us as foreigners. There've been many instances where I feel so resentful towards my students. Most of the time, if instructions are longer than the standard 2-word ones (I.e. "read", "write", "listen", "be quiet", "don't hit", "sit down", "no kicking", "knife away"...you know) then their attention is completely gone and they're yelling over me asking the Korean teacher to translate. But when I see my students on the streets, they are falling all over themselves to talk to me in English. I mean, forget that they will, straight up, ignore me when I ask them a question in class or **demand** that they're taught in Korean because they don't understand English. Well, DUH, you're never going to learn it unless you shut the hell up and listen! Ahem...ok, that was a little rough. My apologies.
Anyway, I just read a blog entry by another teacher in Mokpo where she was talking about this new reality TV show where 2 sets of foreigner couples go on it and have to do a cooking competition. Anyway, I agree with her that it's a great and fun idea, but (as she points out), the producers leave the foreigners in the dark so that they have no idea what's going on in the show and look like idiots. When the contestants have to speak Korean and make a mistake, big, bright letters flash across the screen making fun of them. Haha...just imagine if we had a show in Canada like that. Hunt down immigrants with accents, put them on TV and then make fun of them. It just wouldn't happen. Oh, Toto. Just another reminder that we're not in Kansas anymore.
5 comments:
i know this post is a little random and not very informative. I just get SO angry sometimes and...this series isn't called "I've learned to love the heck out of Korea". I'm learning. Slowly. Slowly. Slowly.
So are you a teacher in Korea then? What do you teach?
Thank you for stopping by my blog, I wonder if the Partridge is supposed to be Christ. Anyway, some of the other points were a little stretched!
Merry Christmas!
Hang in there babe.It won't be long before your back in Canada for a while. Can't wait. Love you
"How's my breath?"
"Good, not great"
...love it.
what a great/crazy experience, being the foreigner....but there sadly always seems to be a bit of a double standard when it comes to tolerance and racism and prejudice, doesn't there? i had a south asian lit class once that from time to time would turn into a hate on for the dumb, white, canadian. not great. (luckily my prof put a stop to it each time)
Whit-
Unfortunately, South Koreans are notorious for being a little racist. Well...really racist. They are really concerned with thier international reputation, though, so they want you to love them. It's a real love-hate thing. I can barely handle some of my students, but other Koreans, I love love love (like my taekwondo teachers).
On a different note, my co-teacher was away today and I had to teach grade 5 (shudder) all by myself. 2 classes went amazingly well, the other two...well... not so well. In my first bad class, i sent 7 or so boys back to their homeroom to get their textbooks and told them they had 3 minutes to get back. LIke 10 minutes later, they start to trickle in and only 4 had textbooks and I wasn't in the mood to go down without a fight. With only 5 minutes left in class, i wanted to play a game with them but no one would be quiet, so I just stood at the front, completely quiet and slowly started dismissing students who were quiet, too. By the time I was done, the only ones left were the boys who said they were getting thier books and didn't. They had to stay in class and write "I will not lie to the teacher" 15 times (not enough) then I delivered their signed sheets to their homeroom teacher. My last class was worse, though. As I was watching the dialogue clip along with the class, i noticed that one girl student was standing on the other side of the classroom with two handfulls of a guy's hair and he had two handfulls of her hair adn they were reefing. GAWD! I was like "WHY? WHY? WHY?". This is totally typical of them and I was so freaking angry. This one kid who causes problems every day started yelling "Lee Young Sun, phone" over and over again (that's my co-teacher's name). I was well-prepared to use"NAJAT!" (get out) on him if he caused me any problems so I sent him out. Instead of standing in the hall and repenting, he had his face pressed against the class door, so I threw it open so I could keep an eye on him but he slammed it back in my face. All the while, another boy student was having a total meltdown and I had no idea why. I told the class to be quiet and put their heads down on their desks and I marched the door-slamming kid down to the VP's office (he was away) so we walked to his homeroom and, by this time i was insanely flustered, told his homeroom teacher (the sweetest woman) "NO ENGLISH! NO ENGLISH! I'M SORRY. NO ENGLISH!" and then ran back to my class. To my absolute shock, they still all had their heads down and were chatting quietly. JUST WHAT I NEEDED!
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