I arrived in Korea Saturday evening. I knew I would begin work the following Monday, but it didn’t seem real until mmm… maybe 4’oclock that day. Classes begin at 4:20. While I had been hanging out with teachers from my school that weekend and found out some details through them (when school starts.), I was still expecting some kind of formal contact with the administration beforehand. I think if David had not picked me up from the airport (of which I was fortunate) and one of the administrators had instead, as is the custom, I would have felt differently. But anyway, by chance I ended up running into, Mike, one of the senior foreign teachers, around 2:30 on Monday afternoon in the lobby of our building. He took me out to a nice Vietnamese lunch with him and his girlfriend and then led me to the school around 4 o’clock, 20 minutes until I would personally be teaching my first class. Since one of the teachers, Emily, was away in the U.S. that week there was no room for me to observe any classes, so I had to dive right in. And I did. I was given books, a desk, and a few notes from the previous teacher and when the bell rang I was to go to my first classroom full of little Korean students and teach them English. At 4:20 I went straight into my first class, wrote my name on the board, and got introductions underway. The first day was a bit overwhelming, but I think I did pretty well considering it was my first attempt at teaching. At 11pm when classes were over it felt great to head out into the streets of Korea with my fellow foreigner teachers ready to go out for a drink and continue my immersion into my new country and culture.
At this point I think it is worth telling you a little bit about my school, the Korean education system, and my students. I teach at a school, that has recently split off from the rest of the family chain of Seoul Language Institute and adopted the new name of “Leadersville.” I’m not sure if this means our school is now a village or some kind of strange reality TV show. Maybe both. Both the teachers and students seem to find this name absurd. Like many examples of Korean borrowing of English sloganage it doesn’t make much sense. I think one of the foreign teachers even said this name was actually submitted as a joke when they were looking for a new name for the company, but to their horror, it ended up being chosen as the best title to represent who we are. We are Leadersville. As David commented though, I will definitely be putting Seoul Language Institute on my resume.
This is the new multi-story Leadersville banner hanging from our school building. I forgot to mention that at Leadersville everything is huge, even our president (featured above)… he’s a giant. It’s weird. (photo courtesy of Alex Pollack)
Anyway, Leadersville is not actually a village full of leaders. It is a Hogwan, which is essentially an evening school where Korean students come to learn English. What that means is that for my students, like many Korean youths, they wake up every day around 6 or 7 to go to their regular school for a full day of classes and in the middle of the afternoon when regular school gets out, around the time when I would normally have been home eating Cheeze-its and watching Ricki Lake, these students begin an additional 3 hours of Hogwan classes, which include speaking, writing, and listening training from foreign teachers (me) and English grammar lessons from native Korean teachers. This means that by the time I get my box of Kore-O’s each day many of them have grown a bit stale. Not only do they have evening classes, but they have school on the weekends as well. When I come in to class each day and ask my students how they are, some common answers are “fine,” “baduh,” or “so so.” When I ask them why, the reasons usually have to do with homework, weekend academy, or exams. I’d like to tell them back in my day it was worse… but I don’t think it was.
“Go Ricki, Go Ricki…”
Anyway, this being said, there is still a good amount of personality, enthusiasm, and responsiveness in my classes. Each of the students chooses an English name for him or herself. This is both good and bad. It is good because I can pronounce and write their names successfully. It is bad because they choose names like “Yes,” “No,” “Something,” “Nothing,” “Everything,” “Anything,” “Hungry,” “No Homewark,” “Throw Vision C (our textbook) Away,” “Stomach,” “Ipod,” “BMW,” “Sponge Bob,” “Abraham Lincoln,” “George W. Bush,” “Audrey Hepburn,” “Angelina Jolie,” “Goofy,” “Cookie,” “Kwak,” and “You.” You try admonishing someone named “George W. Bush” or “Stomach.” It isn’t easy. Every time I go through the attendance and call out “No Homework” the class cheers. Anyway, while I do sometimes feel like the monotone Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I am enjoying getting more familiar with the little personalities that do exist in my classes and I imagine my students will be an entertaining resource for future blog posts.
“Bueller…Bueller…Bueller…”
