Shooting Myself in the Foot

Sorry that this blog is late. I thought I e-mailed it in, but I just
saved the e-mail as a draft.

Well, I made a big mistake on Monday. I'm not sure how it will affect
my job here at Hogye, but we'll wait and see.

One of my co-workers asked me how I like the school. I didn't know how
to answer, so I avoided the question a little.

"The people are very nice. The school is beautiful. The children are
mostly good."

I didn't tell her the part about not enjoying my day-to-day work here.
Her next question was more to the point.

"How about next year ... do you want to stay here?" she asked.

"Oh god, no!!" I answered too emphatically, almost cutting her off.

She was understandably shocked, and forced me to explain the feelings
I was trying to keep hidden.

"I don't really teach anything here. I don't use my teaching skills. I
worked for many years to improve my teaching skills. If I stay here
for long, I won't be a good teacher any longer."

So she asked me the obvious question.

"Where will you go next?"

"I'll probably work in the area. Maybe Changweon," I answered.

"But another public school will just be the same."

I knew that her reply wasn't correct, because I have friends at other
schools who range from virtually no teaching responsibility to 100%
control over all lessons.

"I probably won't work in public school," I answered in order to make
the conversation simpler.

Gale is pushing me toward university next year. The schedule would be
great, but I like teaching children. Who knows.

UPDATE:
After that conversation, my co-worker gave me a lesson to "help" her
with. I get creative control from top to bottom. The last two days
have been great fun.

Expat Meetings

When I lived in Thailand for many years, I rarely spent time with the expatriates (expats) there. I didn't like to focus on the negatives of living in Thai culture, and groups of expats naturally start talking about everything that annoys them about the culture. Focusing on all that negative stuff all the time leaves many people bitter and angry. I didn't want to be affected like that.

When I first moved to Korea three years ago, I tried to spend my time with Koreans, learning Korean culture and enjoying what it has to offer me. I didn't even know any other expats for the first year and a half. I made friends with many Koreans and kept a fairly busy social life, though I didn't join anyone who asked me to drink on weeknights: I don't drink before work because it affects my performance and that would make me seem unprofessional. Eventually, though, I lost almost all my Korean friends because I'm not Korean and have certain habits or beliefs which come from my western heritage and which aren't accepted by many Koreans. When a Korean would demand that I change my opinion about something and I politely declined, I would generally lose that friend.

Eventually, I got tied into the expat community in Dong Hae. Since EFL teachers are generally a little strange, expat meetings and parties are always very ... interesting. Many of the people we met regularly were either alcoholics or on the road to alcoholism. Some of them had lived in Korea for so long that they no longer spoke English well, but rather spoke a kind of pidgin. The parties would last until dawn and often ended with people passed out in the restaurant, vomiting in the bathroom, or even pissing themselves.

I was kind of happy that Gale and I took some time to stay in Thailand, away from all that. We were able to focus on our goals more than social interaction. We accomplished a lot in the three months we stayed in Thailand.

Now, though, we're back into the expat scene. There's too much drinking. We want to meet our new friends often, but we can't afford to drink so much so regularly. We keep saying that we'll stop drinking so much, but it doesn't seem to happen.

For example, this weekend, we had a party with some friends over. We ate and watched movies until about two a.m. Over the course of the night, we drank several bottles' worth of soju and beer. The next day, we went to a friend's apartment and started drinking at about seven p.m. We didn't stop until seven on Sunday morning.

This is just too much. We can't keep going like this. We have goals and dreams. We don't want to drown them in a pool of Korean liquor.

On Literacy in EFL Situations

I had about five things I wanted to write about this week, but I try to limit myself to one topic per blog entry. Maybe I'll add another one tomorrow on a different subject. The topic for today is literacy and teaching English.

I'm constantly surprised by my students' inability to read English. When my co-worker first told me -- about a month after I started -- that students studied English starting from the third grade but didn't learn to write until the fifth grade, I was shocked (the idiom I want to use is "floored," but I guess you won't know that one). How, I wondered, could third- and fourth-grade students study without writing?

The answer, which came to me the next second, is that of course they don't.

Whoever wrote the national syllabus appears to have tried to follow natural language learning principles, but failed to understand that first and second languages aren't acquired in the same way. Sure, first-language learners learn language long before they learn to write, but that's because the human brain isn't developed enough for literacy at that point. Heck, even a large percentage of boys aren't ready to read and write in second grade. By third grade, however, almost all the dyslexia problems have disappeared and students are increasingly relying on writing as a form of studying and memorization.

As a result, third- and fourth-grade students, whose lives -- especially in Korea -- revolve around studying and literacy, write down what they've learned, but what they've written is in Korean. They have no choice in the matter: the want to write, but the don't have the tools to do it in English. The reliance on the Korean alphabet brings about pronunciation problems. I suspect that whoever planned the syllabus this way did so precisely to solve speaking and pronunciation problems. Sadly, his or her choice led to exactly the opposite result -- students whose pronunciation is awful.

Sure, I've taught straight listening and speaking without literacy, but the target audience was of pre-K to kindergarten age, when the brain isn't ready to accept literacy-based teaching. Any student who is learning to read and write in his or her native language in school is prepared to learn to read and write in English. In fact, by third or fourth grade, the student's brain is so geared toward literacy that not to teach reading seems absurd.

The result is that we have sixth-grade students who have been studying English for over three years yet still neither spell nor speak, can't understand simple commands like "stand up" or "turn to page 5," and have no chance of truly speaking English.

There are exceptions, of course. The exceptions are the students who study reading and writing at academies after school.

Over the Hump

Well, I'm well past my three-month depression now. I stopped being
angry at every little thing some time last week. My depression,
however, was replaced with something else that I get every once in a
while in Asia -- food poisoning.

I grew up in a very clean environment in North America. Even with all
the hygiene there, I still managed to get sick fairly often. I guess
my immune system just isn't as strong as some people's. Combine the
weaker immune system with a million kinds of Asian bacteria and
viruses which my body has never encountered, and you get food
poisoning or some other major illness a few times a year.

I try not to miss work over these because they aren't really
contagious to Asians, but Friday was a different matter. I can't teach
with diarrhea and vomiting. In fact, I could barely stand up on
Friday.

I'm happy that I had a million different vaccines while I was in the
U.S. Army. Because I was with Special Forces, I traveled to Asia often
and received vaccinations for most of the really bad diseases here:
yellow fever, dengue fever, typhoid, tuberculosis, and many others. I
had three vaccination boks full of the vaccine stamps.

None of the vaccines stop the random Asian virus or bacterium, though.
Those guys just walk on through my immune system like they had a
security pass for unlimited access to my body.

All this means that I need to be very careful about what I eat. I used
to be reckless, going to anywhere in China, Thailand, or Laos and
eating anything off the street. I did that until I had gotten deathly
ill two or three times. Now, I'm much more careful about where and
what I eat.

If the food has been boiled or fried, I'm generally safe, but raw and
rare food scares me here. I stay away from shellfish, innards like
liver and brains, and blood because those things spoil so quickly. I
do what I can to look at how the food is handled in the kitchen. I try
to cook my own food as often as possible.

Even though I was careful, I think I got food poisoning from a local
restaurant whose name I won't mention. They are generally very clean
and probably just made a little mistake somewhere. I may not eat there
for a little while, though.