22 / What

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Learning days of the week.
We have a days of the week song that goes to the tune of the Addams family.
It was too fast for the kids to enunciate really well, so instead of days of the week
it came out sounding like "tazer the weak".

I laughed until I had tears in my eyes. Then I had to try and explain why.
Best moment of this entire time.

Also, "Saturday" sounds like "salad-day".

It doesn't feel like that much time has passed since I last looked at the blog... Sometimes it creeps me out how slowly the days go by, & yet for some reason time seems to pass by really quickly. I mean, that can be said for most of my life... I still have trouble believing that I've been out of highschool for like... three years? ... Sometimes. But for some reason it feels different in Korea.

Anyway, I have some random things to talk about, because someone has been bothering me to update this. :p

1. Would you say that in the USA it is generally considered the student/parent's responsibility to make sure students get educated? I feel like a lot of pressure is put on teachers and schools to provide quality education -- which is how it should be -- but ultimately, it's up to the kids and to their caretakers to make sure said kids are making use of their resources and paying attention in class, that kind of thing. I don't think it's considered 100% appropriate to blame teachers if kids aren't "learning" or getting anything out of a class unless the teacher is truly and obviously inadequate or not invested in their job. Right? When we don't do well on tests, we don't turn around and say: Well, that's the teacher's fault for not teaching me well enough. Or at least, when I did abysmally in math in highschool, that's not what I did, even if it was true that the teacher's style wasn't helpful to me. Well... Here, it seems to be the opposite -- or so I was told when I asked. If kids don't learn, it's the teacher's fault first and foremost. The teacher didn't do his/her job well enough, and that's why things didn't turn out how they should. I don't know if that is the attitude everywhere, but it seems to be the attitude at my school. I really do like these people, and I'm doing my best to try and just accept how they want to do things -- but it's hard for me sometimes with this kind of ideology. I've only been teaching a few weeks, but I can safely say that it's not a one way street. I give what I can, and I do my best to try and make things interesting and easy to understand -- but I can't open anyone's head up and stick English in there, you know? It's the same of any subject; if the kid has no interest and doesn't want to be in the class, you can't make them have a change of heart just because it would be more convenient. In the end, you have to meet halfway, and if you can't then you can't. In my opinion, my kids are really young -- the majority of my classes are around or below 8 or 9 years old. At that age I knew what I was interested in, sure, and I did my best when it came to everything else; but there was only so hard I could push before I hit my boundaries. That's true even now. Besides that, my students work SO HARD all of the time. I'm as strict and as pushy as I can afford to be, but they need a break SOMETIME & I'm perfectly okay with giving them one. I don't feel the need to breathe down their necks. If lessons aren't working out, we sit down and just try to have a conversation together -- and that's what I was told I should focus on, anyway, not grammar and drilling. /rant

2. Babies. Mothers here carry their babies around in these wrap things: like large blankets tied around their bodies. The baby just sort of hangs out there against the mother's body. You're generally more likely to see that than a stroller or any kind of carrying thing. Personally, I like that a lot. What I don't understand, though, is... I tend to see a lot of mothers wearing jackets or heavy sweaters OVER the baby. Like... Baby is strapped in, and then covered by thick clothing so nobody can see. There's just kind of a baby shaped lump there. And these babies aren't small, either -- they're a few months old, or maybe a year. :/ And they can't see a thing! They're weirdly still and just kind of hang there. I don't know why this is strange to me. I guess because back home if you were to strap your baby to your body and then cover him up with a big old cardigan people would think he was going to suffocate. Also... If the babies are free, walking around or whatever... People here have absolutely no problem with strangers touching their children. Back home, if you were to reach over and touch a baby's head, stroke their cheek, etc... The mother would have a major problem with that at least most of the time, if you'd never met before. Right? Here it seems like most people don't really mind. It's kind of nice to have that level of trust with strangers. I never would have thought that seeing something like that would affect me, but I guess it just goes to show how implicit culture really is; yesterday when I noticed a woman reaching forward to pat a baby's head on the bus, I was ready for the mother to snap at her like woahhh throwdown. But they just smiled at eachother & probably started discussing how cute he was. (: BTW, all babies and children are adorable here. ADORABLE. Not that they aren't in the States.

Which leads me to:

3. I don't think that I'll ever get used to people's reactions to foreigners here. Of all the waygooks in Gunsan, I don't think of myself as particularly fascinating. I have dark hair like everyone here, dark eyes, and pale skin -- so if nobody sees my face, I can get by with no comment. But every day SOMETHING happens that makes me realise just how foreign I really am to everyone around me, whether it's because I do something that seems completely ridiculous to Korean people, or just because they notice I look different. I think that everyone here can relate to that. Every time I see a waygook friend, we exchange stories about bizarre situations we've been placed in the past week. I feel like it never ends. And while on some level I've just learned to expect it to happen, and in a LOT of ways it's totally hysterical, it's still super weird. I wonder how it'll feel to come home and be totally unremarkable. Nobody 1) touching my hair, 2) pushing their eyes open and gesturing at how big mine are, 3) openly pointing or talking, 4) getting in my line at the store to watch me check out & see what food I buy, 5) staring, 6) "BEEE-OO-TI-FURRR", "I LOVE USA", 7) stopping to stare at me while I walk past, etc. I've started to use my safety mechanism for GIs with regular Korean people too. :c Usually if American soldiers try to talk to me etc (I think my mom's insistence that I don't talk to young officers when we lived on a base is still in my head) I pretend that I don't know English and can only speak Spanish. Which works. If someone Korean is trying to speak to me in English, most of the time I try to talk  back & have a conversation -- but if I don't have time, or if I feel cornered, Spanish is a godsend. They don't have a lot of exposure to the language, so it kind of freaks them out? Like WOAHHHHHH a white person without English! It's really funny. :s But then I feel bad, lol.

(Not for long though.)