Gin On the Rocks: Life According To Me: Korea Part IV: Wonderland Academy

I had never lived alone and I hadn’t expected to once I arrived in Korea. Steve and I were supposed to share an apartment. It is what we had arranged before we left New York, but the agency that hired us wrongly assumed that we were dating. Even if we were, the apartment they wanted to put us in was way too small to accommodate two people. The front door opened onto a foyer that had been converted into a kitchen containing a small sink, one cabinet and a stove. It was lacking counter space as well as table to sit out while eating. Though my legs were short, I only needed two steps to cross into the bedroom – the only real room in the apartment. The refrigerator, an appliance way too big to fit in the kitchen, was the first thing one saw when entering the bedroom. Pushed up against the wall to my left were two blue wardrobes and one dresser. Seeing them I remembered thinking that it was good thing I didn’t bring many clothes with me. If I had, there would be no where to put them. Against the window were two plain writing desks that matched the wardrobes, and squeezed in the middle of the room were two beds – the mattress on the left slightly overlapping the one on the right. They were wedged in so tightly, the door of the wardrobe would not open. One could not even open the window without crawling over the beds. The bathroom was too my left, next to the kitchen. It lacked a door and was barely big enough to stand up in.

Simultaneously Steve and I turned towards each other. They can’t be serious, was the thought expressed in his eyes. For one person the room would be claustrophobic. For two, even if we were madly in love with each other, it made for an impossible living condition. Two people squeezed into such tiny living quarters, without a doubt would kill each other. There was no way Steve and I could live together in that room.

It was Steve who recovered first from the initial shock. “Which one of us is going to be staying here?” he asked Dave as casually as he could, not wanting to instigate difficulties for either of us.

“You both are.” He smiled broadly as if it were something we should be happy about. But did he honestly believe that it would be possible.

“No,” Steve shook his head but held his temper. “It’s not going to work.” He liked women too much, and living in such close quarters would disable him from being able to bring them home as frequently as he would like.

“I was told you wanted to live together.”

“We did,” I was examining the bathroom, intrigued by the fact that there was no shower stall, just a hose attached to a showerhead which hung on the wall and a drain in the center of the room. I could easily hose down the bathroom and wash it at the same time I was taking shower. “But this place is only big enough for one person.”

“So you don’t want to live together?” Why was it such a difficult concept for him to comprehend? It wasn’t that we had changed our minds; the apartment had altered our feelings.

“Not here,” Steve sat down on the edge of one of the beds and crossing his left leg over his right, he leaned back, using his arms to prop himself up. “How can we both live here when there isn’t even enough room for all of us to stand?”

“So which one of you wants to stay?” He looked at me as if hoping I could somehow solve the dilemma for him.

“I don’t think it matters,” Steve answered. “What matters is that you move half the furniture out of here and find somewhere else to put one of us.”

“Do either of you have a preference?” He asked, seemingly incapable of making a decision himself.

“I’ll stay,” I offered, not because I particularly liked the place and not because I tended to be the selfless sort. It was quite the opposite. I offered to stay because it meant I would be living alone, and for someone who suffered from social anxiety, solitude was often preferable to socializing with people I didn’t know.

“Are you sure?” Steve asked to be polite, but his face betrayed his relief. He was far more social than I was and would thrive better with a roommate, someone with whom he could converse when he was at home.

“I’m positive.” It was true that being so far away from home I might get lonely, but that’s why God created books. Once I found an English bookstore I would be fine.

Wonderland schools were a franchise and as a result they were scattered all over Korea, the majority of them, however, were concentrated in and around Seoul. The central office assigned me to teach in Kangdong which was in the far eastern stretch of the city, south of the Han River. I was happy to be in the city, but even happier not to be in the downtown area. For those of you who are familiar with New York City, Kangdong was sort of like Queens. It was part of the city but with a little more room to breathe.

The philosophy of Wonderland was essentially that students learn by being interactive with their environment. Therefore, each classroom was designed to focus on a specific real-life theme. Each month, students would rotate classrooms – there were twelve in total - so as to experience as much of the real world as possible. The rooms most grounded in reality, the ones the students were certain to experience on a daily basis were the living room, bathroom, bedroom and kitchen. Each of these rooms were furnished to look like they belong in a house instead of a school.

In the kitchen there was a sink, a working stove, pots, pans, dishes, chopsticks, forks and spoons (but no knives). Students didn’t cook, but the morning pre-schoolers (Kids Club) ate lunch in the kitchen, lunch that was either cooked by part-time employees or ordered out from local restaurants. Generally, on the rare occasion that I ate with the students, the food was much better than school cafeteria food back home.

The bedroom contained a bed, dresser and wardrobe. Having the bed was a great convenience for teachers. Those who showed up to work tired or hung-over always had a place to take a brief nap, provided the room was empty. The blanket and sheet were never changed, but that didn’t seem to matter, as long as we had a place to lay our heads we were happy.

The living room had a television that didn’t work, a couch that the students loved sitting on, an oversized chair they loved even more and a coffee table. The table was meant to provide a place for the students to do their work, but comfortable as they were on the furniture, none of them ever had the desire to sit on the floor. Therefore, their work was done on their laps.

The bathroom was disgusting. Whoever conceived of it should have better envisioned what would occur. The room lacked both a bathtub and a shower but it did have a sink and a toilet bowl. The toilet bowl was real, it just wasn’t hooked up to any plumbing. The older kids knew that when they had to pee they needed to ask permission to go to the real bathroom, but the younger boys (always boys and never girls, perhaps due to the fact that peeing is a more complex action for girls) sometimes got confused. On more than one occasion, one of the boys relieved himself in the classroom. Each time the toilet was cleaned, but the smell got into the rug making that classroom a complete nightmare to teach in during the summer months.

There were five rooms designed to teach the students vocabulary they would need in order to survive on a very basic level in an English speaking country. These rooms included the airport, bank, McDonalds, world room and sports room. The airport was my least favorite in this grouping, mostly because it was the most cramped. The back of the room was set up to resemble a check in counter at an airport. It was meant to facilitate role play between the students, but many of them were too shy to play the parts I attempted to assign them. There were four clocks in the room, each indicating time from a different city – Seoul, Sydney, London and New York. I found them to be the most useful tool in the classroom, and often found myself focusing more on time than travel.

Many of the students had great interest in money and they were fairly good in Math which made lessons in the bank relatively painless. One of my favorite lessons in that room was to have each student open a bank account. Each time they did something good, answered a difficult question, or behaved they were given a (fake) dollar. At the end of each day they got to count how much money they had. I bought various trinkets and put them in a bag – pens, pencils, and erasers, various things the students would find useful in school. Each article was designated a certain price, and if the students had enough money they could buy what interested them. Of course the entire transaction occurred in English. If the students required help in formulating their thoughts or recalling the correct vocabulary I would help them, but if they didn’t bother to make an attempt on their own, they had to wait until the following class – when they might be more agreeable – to make a purchase.

MacDonalds could just as easily been called the restaurant room, but I suppose that whoever envisioned it, believed calling it MacDonalds would spark far more interest in the students. I can’t say if they were right or wrong, but only so many lessons could revolve around fast food joints so we expanded it to include restaurants in general. Often lessons taught in MacDonalds were an extension of the ones taught in the kitchen and vice versa.

The world room was where students had the ability to expand their knowledge of geography and where I learned how inept my schools had been in educating me about countries around the world. Students learned the names of various countries, oceans, continents, lakes and rivers. When applicable we incorporated some history in our lessons. It was my favorite room, mainly because I often caught myself gazing longingly at the map, wondering what it would be like to visit various countries.

Despite my love of sports, I found the sports room extremely boring. There were only so many times you could review the English names for the more well known sports. These the students tended to pick up quickly, and once they did I utilized their knowledge to focus on verbs. Most of them found verbs boring, but when used in conjunction with the sports they played it was much easier to hold their attention.

Finally, there were the fantasy rooms, rooms I was certain were designed to keep things from getting too mundane. Whether this was done with the students’ best interest in mind or the teachers I could never quit decide, but mostly the teachers dreaded being assigned to the fantasy rooms.

The first of the fantasy worlds was the movie room. This room was designed with the intention of creating a world of illusion for the students. It went on the premise that each student in the class had the innate ability to become a movie star in The United States. All that was required of them to succeed was to learn the lingo of Hollywood. If students could master the required vocabulary, then certainly they had the potential to make American movies. It was one of the hardest classrooms to design lesson for so most teachers ended up using it as an excuse to show movies – especially Disney cartoons – in English.

The walls of the universe room were painted with stars, comets and meteors and hanging from the ceiling were the nine plants revolving around the sun. Since none of us were scientists, there wasn’t one teacher among us who knew specifically what they were supposed to teach. Once the planets were memorized, a feat usually accomplished in the first week of the month, there wasn’t much new material to cover so we tended to focus more on work from the textbooks.

The most unrealistic room of all, the one they had to have built for no reason save the fact that they ran out of other more practical ideas, was the Jurassic Park room. This was intended to train the students how to respond in the event that they ever encountered a dinosaur while walking down 5^th Avenue in Manhattan. I had never seen one, but most of my friends accused me of being a cynic. If I wasn’t, perhaps there is a lot I would not have missed out on in life. What specifically we were supposed to teach I was never entirely certain. Again, without a background in science, I was severely limited in my knowledge of dinosaurs. Sure I knew the basic brontosaurus and triceratops, but that was one lesson. After that I attempted to forget where I was, and focused more on building grammatical skills than developing the student’s scientific curiosities.

Students in the school ranged from age four to age sixteen. The preschool children attended Kids’ Club in the morning, the elementary and middle school students attended class in the afternoon after a full day in their regular school. And high school students had classes on Saturdays. In the school where I worked it was an unspoken rule that teachers who taught Kids’ Club did not have to teach on Saturdays. While that was a strong incentive to work the mornings there were many teachers who either could not force themselves out of bed before twelve or found it extremely difficult to relate to the little ones. No one taught the little ones when they first arrived. Teachers, I later learned, had to be securitized closely before being asked to teach the pre-schoolers. When I asked what they were looking for I was given an evasive, “We know the right teachers when we see them.” Something in the tone of voice and the way the eyes rolled over me head to toe told me I was not currently under consideration. I was just a little sad but not overly upset. There would be time to force the issue later on, once I became better acquainted with Wonderland, my supervisors and teaching in general.

Teaching in the bathroom classroom