11:00 Did I say yesterday that I didn't see enough people, and I missed the boys? It was true, but now I feel like I have been surrounded by too much boy.
My first period class, 2-1, 2-2B, was quiet and friendly. Mr. B helped me in that class, and he wants to make sure I use the textbook next week, and I will--I just wanted week one with the boys to be introductory and easy, so I could test the waters before diving into grammar. And truly, Mr. B is right that we don't have quite enough to do to fill 45 minutes of class. I will remedy that next week, but for 2-1, 2-2B, it was mostly enough today to get to know them and to work with each of them on their papers. Once they know me, they'll be more likely to talk to with me when the real schooling begins.
I got one really nice letter from Yoontae in 2-1, 2-2B, also. He came to the front of class to deliver it to me before I left. It's a variation on the "I like pizza, I like to play computer games" list we had been doing: "I like baseball. I like YOU. I like Taylor Swift. I like Leigh." My name was bolded in orange highlighter, and followed by a small packet of information; his grade, his class number, his student number within that specific class, and his name in English. It was the student equivalent of saying "call me sometime," and the kid seems darling, not threatening, so I thought it was terribly cute.
Then came 1-9, 1-10 B. Oy vey. It's like they took every loud child in first grade, and wedged them into one room. On the downside, the class was insanely unruly and filled with more punching and wrestling and desk-jumping than I've yet seen. On the upside, I made a lot of friends, we really get along with each other, and now I know to take an energy shot before I enter their classroom. I really love that bunch, but I feel sorry for Main Co-Teacher, trying to help me keep order.
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1:00 PM Huuuuuh. Well, my final regular class was an amazing bunch of A-levels, the 2-5, 2-6 group. They were energetic and friendly, and I tried a new game with them at the end and at the beginning--10 Questions. They had to ask me questions in English to guess an animal (took 8 guesses to get "tiger") and at then at the end, to guess a K-pop group (5 guesses to get "Big Bang"). KBR-Teacher had to ask me to clarify the rules of Rule-less Bingo, because the B-level kids don't question it, but the A-levels want to know how to win.I told her I'd have better stuff next week, and she seemed to understand that the game had not been functioning like I expected. :-)
KBR-Teacher and me have been getting a little closer. I like her and I think over time, we're starting to converge. But I'm worried that she somehow thinks I'm better than her.She told me after class that the students have been comparing her and me, saying that "the difference between us is like China and Korea," meaning that we're nothing alike. She said they've been comparing our faces and our personalities, and that they really like me and don't like her.
I told her no, that they love her--all through class, the boys were sweetly asking her for help, saying "Sem!(affectionate form of "seonsengnim"or teacher) Please! Here!" I think I even heard one of them call her "noonim," a very formal way to say "big sister". So I know they think she's grand. KBR-Teacher is beautiful, classy, and very professional, so I'd never want her to compare herself unfavorably to me with my hyper-disorganization and good intentions. We can have different styles and still both work well with the kids.Tomorrow, I'll bring KBR-Teacher a present, to show her I care.
AND NOW....
We come to the weird bit of the day, where I temporarily saved some second-graders from pepper.
How to even start. No one was injured,but this incident was an eyebrow-raiser. After lunch, I realized that I'd left my school computer locked in the English Room because Minwoo was hurrying me out during the last class period. So I went to the 2nd-floor teacher's office to get the keys. While grabbing the keys, I saw one child crying in the office, and a teacher patting his arm and getting him water. I thought he'd fallen down.
Then I looked to the office door, where another boy had run up to the glass, yelling and looking like he was going to throw up. One of the other teachers closed the door to keep him out. I thought he might have been kicked.
When I left the office to walk to the English Room, a pack of 8 or so lovely 2nd-graders (14-year-olds) offered me a weird-looking cup of red stuff. Now, when grinning teenage boys offer you something to eat, you say no and you run. They said it was deokbokki (dumpling?), a "good Korean food." Yeah, sweetheart. It's deokbokki and who knows what else. I declined their offer, but I still wasn't putting two and two together.
I got my computer from the English room, and as I was closing the door to lock up, a kid tried to come in. I said I was locking up, but he looked really intent to get inside. When I locked the door anyway, I saw why he wanted in--the pack of boys with the cup were approaching us. They offered him a piece of red-coated dumpling, held out with chopsticks, and he ate it. Then he went sprinting down the hall, and I realized that the boys hadn't spit in the cup, as I suspected...they had put pepper in it. Gochujang, specifically, a very potent hot paste.
Whatever, I thought. Boys pull pranks. I didn't see anyone being forced to eat; they were just being offered the pepper dumplings, and they accepted them, like a dare. But after I took my computer downstairs, I couldn't just sit down. What if it wasn't just a funny prank that everyone was enjoying? What if the boys who had accepted the burning food were being subtly bullied into it? I needed to get that cup of dumplings. Right then. When I walked upstairs, I couldn't find the boys with the cup. I asked one kid where they were, and he said they were in the bathroom. When the bathroom door swung open, I saw a row of kids with their heads under faucets, washing out the pepper. I sent one kid in, telling him to get the boys with the cup. Leigh-Teacher wants to see them.
They came out, happy as clams. "You going to try?" I said no, and I took the cup from them, with a smile and a thank you. 4 of them followed me downstairs, asking for the cup back, but I went over to a window and dumped it out, still with a calm attitude. They followed me to a bathroom, where I washed out the cup to get rid of the last remnants. I started coughing and choking in the bathroom, just from washing out the residue of the pepper-cup, so who knows what it did to the mouths and throats of the poor kids who ate it.
I walked back upstairs with the culprits, chatting with their limited English and asking their names. Dongmin was the ringleader. They're in 2-8. I couldn't see any other teachers around, and felt sure that there was more pepper hidden somewhere, but I didn't know how successful I'd be if I asked the boys to hand it over.
I wasn't sure who to tell about the incident, either--some other teachers didn't seem to care about it, so I wondered if it was considered normal. About 15 minutes later, Dongmin was marched to the vice-principal's office, and I knew it wasn't a small offense. One of the male teachers had found Dongmin with an entire bottle of concentrated pepper juice, which was confiscated. I don't know how Dongmin was punished, because they left the office, but I know he needed to be punished. I like him, what little I've talked to him, but the strong, assured people can't be allowed to march all over the gentler people.When they do, the scenery gets real ugly real fast.
So I don't know if I actually saved any of the kids from eating pepper, since Dongmin had more in his stash, but I did try. And now I know that my school doesn't tolerate behavior like this, which will give me recourse in the future. From what I've heard from other blogs, this incident is mild. It can get so much worse than this, and if I see cruel behavior, I want to be able to deal with it in a safe, proper manner.
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3:30 I teach afterschool in an hour, and something has gone weird with my video files, between two computers, so I can either play the boys a subtitle file on my Korean computer with no video, or a video file on my English computer with no subtitles. Gahhhhh. But I will figure out this film issue in the future. I will! And I'll pause the show often to check for comprehension.
Saturday-Jeongmin came by the office again, to ask if I knew whether they found the keys to the computer room. Of course, I have no dealings with the computer room, but I loved his conversation opener, assuming that I'm all up in the teacher-gossip of the office. Saturday-Jeongmin and I looked over my school schedule and determined that unfortunately, I am never teaching him, ever. I think I only teach 400-500 of the boys at this school, which leaves a lot that I'll never see in class. However, we'll always have Saturday!
Deokryeung came by the office to remind me of his name (which is the only one so far to trip me up) and to ask me in Korean about my smartphone, and whether it has a Google search function, and to say that his phone is a 4G, which is better than mine. None of this was said in smart-alecky manner, he just wanted me to know that he possessed superior technology.
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6:30-- Afterschool was great! More later, but Peter-Pan Taehoon really shone.
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9:00 PM: I had expected afterschool to fall apart again, since I lost my Korean subtitles and was going to have to play the whole thing on my laptop, BUT the boys know how to work the projector in the English room, so we got the movie playing on a screen half the size of the wall, plus booming audio from two speakers.
All we needed was popcorn.
I had prepared a worksheet with 7 questions and I explained that if each team answered those questions, they would have a chance to win a prize. I told them I would not bring I prize every day, but that sometimes I would. They seemed way more excited at the prospect of random prizes than the idea of regularly-scheduled ones. I played the movie and they seemed to follow it really well with just the English subtitles. At the funny parts, they were parroting the lines and at the serious parts, you could hear a pin drop.
And I brought an extra activity for my slackers in the back. As I sat at my desk for 3 hours, fiddling with my wacked-out media player, it occurred to me that I had planned the perfect afterschool class--for my good boys in the front two rows. But what about the guys in the back who are trying to slunk and skulk and be non-present? I gotta have something for them, and I realized that I didn't.
I didn't have time to invent a new, incredibly quiet game for the back-row kids, so I packed up three giant bundles of nametags from previous classes, plus a packet of crayons I had bought, hoping that I could swing something.
For every class I go to, I've been making them make nametags for themselves, writing their names in Korean and English, then I collect the nametags and wrap a rubber band around them, thinking maybe I'll get to bring them back next week. These nametags may not survive another week, but at least they help me memorize about 3 kids per class, which is bounty enough. For my afterschool boys, on a whim, I outlined their names, Korean and English, in blue crayon, to make the names pop. I decided that while the geniuses watched the movie, maybe me and the other boys could add color to the nametags for my earlier classes.
Sure enough, the movie starts and 12 kids are all eyes and ears, absorbing the story, while Jeongmin, Joon, and Taehoon aren't going to budge in their indifference. So I go back to them. I pull up a chair and a rolly-desk next to Jeongmin and trace one name tag in green, so he and Joon can see what I'm doing. Then I handed each of them a crayon and a stack of nametags, and we set to work. After we had done about three each, I called to Taehoon and waved to him to roll his desk and chair closer.
Taehoon had been playing on his phone, but put it away the second I called him, clearly just waiting for me to recognize his awesomeness and ask for his help. While Jeongmin, Joon, and I split a stack of nametags at a gradual pace, Taehoon whisked through one pile all to himself, as if trying to prove his worthiness. By the time he finished, he was ready to do his worksheet with me. He had no team and no partner, so he was a team of one, but I was determined that he was going to have a shot at winning that candy bar I bought. I made him laugh by asking him silly questions, but he figured out all the answers by himself, and I wrote them down.
He was happy. He almost got the chocolate bar, too, but Joon won the rock-paper-scissors battle. (I had read that it's good to make prize-winning kind of randomized, because otherwise the same kids will win every time.) As I watched him smiling over his worksheet, I realized that Taehoon wants absolute attention. He doesn't want to be one of many; he wants your full focus or nothing at all. I can't give him that, but I can spare some extra recognition. I've said that Taehoon reminds me of me, and his need to be sought-out and totally adored also reminds me of one of my family members. It's like this kid is family, transplanted across the ocean.
And from here on out, so help me, I've got to have something tactile/kinesthetic prepared for the kids in the back to do. Every. Day.
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