I did not start teaching
immediately upon arriving in Korea, which in theory was good considering I had
absolutely no teaching experience and desperately needed the two weeks of
training that I had been promised.
Reality, however, often does not reflect theory very well. I had been excited to learn how to draw up
lesson plans and how to take common every day words that I use without thinking
and find ways to make them understood by someone to whom they sounded like
strange babblings. I had been eager to
learn about different ways to discipline a challenging class or ways to make
difficult material less overwhelming for both me and the students. But mostly, I was expecting to find out how
I, who spoke not a word of Korean, would best be able to communicate with
students, who spoke not a word of English.
By my third day in Korea, I realized that my expectations were well beyond
reach. I hadn’t thought they were unreasonable,
but I suppose I was naive.
Day one of our training consisted
of Steve and I being given a list of English words which we were expected to
incorporate into a series of games that were both fun and educational. Seriously – they were paying us to sit in an
office room for eight hours to make up silly, stupid games. For a kid, such as myself, that seemed like a
fairly fun way to spend a day. And mind
you, this was in an age before the internet had conquered the civilized world
so things took a little longer back then.
There was no such thing as google to look things up, facebook to ask for
advice or pinterest to browse for ideas.
All we had were old fashioned tools to work with – crayons, markers,
poster board, scissors and a laminating machine. Plus, if we were going to come up with
something half way decent, we needed to delve into our own minds and tap into
our own creativity. Yes, we could bounce ideas off of each other, build on what
the other one came up with and borrow ideas for some childhood classics like
bingo, hangman and Pictionary but ultimately, in the end, we could rely on no
one but ourselves. There were no magical
answers or ideas floating around in cyberspace waiting for us to snatch and
plagiarize them. So what might actually
take forty-five minutes today, did take several hours nearly twenty years ago.
Things went well for the first
several hours. Steve and I came up with
two board games and one card game which seemed to make me more excited and a
little less apprehensive about teaching. Sadly, the details of each game have
long been washed from my memory. While the games we came up with seemed to
please Dave, our supervisor, by lunch time I was getting bored. I will be the first to admit that I – like a
kid - have an extremely short attention span and I don’t have a very high
tolerance for sitting in one place for a long time. I also find it impossible to concentrate on
one particular task for too long, and half of a work day was certainly too
long. By the time Dave came to tell us
it was time for lunch, I was more than done designing educational games. Even Steve, who had a wonderful way of
meticulously doing the most mundane tasks, looked slightly bored and mildly
irritated. It’s almost like I could see
the thoughts bubbling up above his head the way they do in cartoons, “After
earning a master’s degree in education at NYU, I’m more than a little
overqualified for this.”
Dave took us out for lunch. I didn’t want anything spicy so he suggested
that I order naengmyeon noodles. Steve
ordered the same. While we waited for
our main dishes, the waitress brought a variety of other small dishes to munch
on while we waited. Everything was
pickled – radishes, cabbage and cucumber.
Only the radishes weren’t spicy but they tasted unlike the radishes I
knew back home. Popping one slice into
my mouth a sour yet sweet taste permeated my taste buds. I neither liked nor disliked them, which I
supposed was a step in the right direction.
I also had my first taste of miso soup – yuck! The fluffy globs of tofu made me feel like I
was going to gag and the broth tasted like someone added way too much
salt. I took three bites and then pushed
my bowl aside. The naengmyeon noodles
looked like something died in a bowl – a pile of brown noodles floating in
liquid that tasted like sour mustard. It
was awful. The cold noodles got stuck my
throat, forcing me to drink several glasses of water to get them down. On top
of the noodles were shredded cucumber and half of a boiled egg. The egg was soggy, so just the thought of
eating it turned my stomach. Yes, I had
been rather sheltered growing up when it came to food. I was well accustomed to Italian and Chinese
food but that’s where the ethnic exposure ended. I had been in Korea just a short while and
the food was not getting any better.
What would I do? (While I
despised the meal that afternoon, I eventually grew to really enjoy miso soup
and while I learned to like plain naengmyeon noodles, once I became daring
enough to try the spicy ones – bibim naengmyeon noodles became one of my
favorite Korean dishes. It all just took
a bit of time and much getting used to.)
After lunch Dave told us we could
take a walk if we wanted, we just needed to return to the office in a half an
hour. “What did we just eat?” I asked
Steve. My language skills which were
always deplorable were not, much to my chagrin, improving in the least now that
I was submerged in the language. For
years, I listened as teachers and professors claimed, “What you need to do is
submerge yourself in a language. Once
you do that, you’ll see how easy it is.”
To all those people who ever told me that with a confident air and cocky
grin, I now say with a smile build on experience, “You don’t know what you’re
talking about.” I am language challenged and nothing is going to change
that. You can submerge me up to my
eyeballs and hold me under until I’m kicking and screaming to draw a breath,
but it’s not going to change anything.
My ears are made of Teflon when it comes to foreign words. Nothing sticks, that’s just the way it is. “Naengmyeon,” Steve answered. “Naengmyeon,” I repeated aloud, again and
again and again as we wandered down a busy street in the middle of downtown
Seoul. “Naengmyeon, Naengmyeon, Naengmyeon,
Naengmyeon.” I tried to embed the word
in my memory. “Naengmyeon, Naengmyeon, Naengmyeon, Naengmyeon.” It should be no surprise that all Korean eyes
were poised on me. It was bad enough
that we were the only white faces around, but add to that a lunatic that keeps
repeating one word over and over again, no wonder Steve tried to cross the
street to get away from me. It would be like walking down a street in Manhattan
and hearing someone say, “Cold buckwheat noodles, cold buckwheat noodles, cold
buckwheat noodles,” over and over as they walked block after block. You’d have thought they were crazy too.
Since neither Steve nor I were
eager to return to game making land we stretched out our walk twice as long as
we were supposed to. It didn’t
matter. When we returned to the office,
Dave was nowhere to be seen, so we slipped back into the room we had worked in
earlier and did our best to create one more board game before giving up the
fight and opting to read instead. The
first couple of games had gotten me thinking about how I might begin to make my
students understand some English words, but reality was reality. I could create six dozen games and that didn’t
mean I was qualified to walk into a classroom and teach.
“Busy work,” I looked up from the
book I was reading and looked at Steve.
A book was open on his lap but he was staring at the white wall, his
thoughts God knew where. I wondered
briefly if he regretted coming to Korea, but I didn’t mention it because I
wasn’t sure if I wanted to think about it.
“What?” He blinked, coming out of his ruminations.
“The whole teacher training
business was a farce.” The truth was slowly beginning to dawn on me. “There is no training program,” I ventured,
“so they simply gave us busy work to keep us quiet.”
“No,” Steve shook his head. “I spoke to Dave last night. He wanted us to do the games just to sort of
gage where we are and what we know about teaching.”
“And you believed that?
Really? Then tell me, since you’re the
one with experience, exactly what can he determine about our teaching skills
based on those ridiculous games.”
Steve shrugged, “I don’t know but
he seemed confident.”
And that was just the beginning
of my teaching career, a career steeped in all things ridiculous and illogical.
Day two of training Dave ushered us
into a different room in the central office, one set up to resemble a
classroom. It was there that I met
Lauren and Lindsey, two other teachers recruited by Wonderland. Though we would all be training together,
Lauren would eventually teach at Olympic Wonderland, not far from Kangdong and
Lindsey would find herself assigned to a school in one of the suburbs of
Seoul. They looked as bored and disillusioned
as I.
Things seemed to be starting out
more promising than the previous day, but it was too late, my expectations were
now deep in the toilet. I do not
remember a single thing that Dave attempted to teach us that morning, but I
clearly remember sitting there at my desk and repeatedly thinking, “And how is
this going make me an effective teacher?”
Yes, we all sat there for several hours, staring at the clock, yawning
at the floor and listening to the rumble of each other’s stomachs. No one took notes, no seemed enthralled, no
one seemed to care. Just throw us to the
lions, and we’ll figure out how to survive on our own. How difficult can it be to teach anyway? When
the rumbling of our tummies finally started to drown out the drone of David’s
voice he dismissed us for lunch.
After lunch I was ready to quit
and go home. Instead of resuming the
lesson from the morning, Dave thought it would be an awesome idea to introduce
us to a bit of Korean culture. Now, I
wasn’t opposed to culture in the least. I mean, after all, wasn’t that why I
wanted to travel in the first place, to learn more about other cultures? But what I was opposed to was stripping down
to the skin around people I would possibly have to see again. No, that was just an awful idea. One that made me want to jump on the subway
and head directly for the airport. An
afternoon at the sauna definitely was not a good idea. And I fiercely objected. Oh boy did I object,
but to no avail. I would not get paid,
Dave threatened, if I did not go into the Sauna. I thought about it, but money talks and I so
desperately wanted to save every possible penny for a trip when my contract
expired. So I hung my head and very
begrudgingly followed Lauren and Lindsey into the women’s side of the sauna. I wanted to cry. I was probably the most modest person I know
– hey, I went to Catholic school for thirteen years what can you expect? Even though I played sports all through
college, I always hated the locker room. My locker room anxiety was so terrible
that when I ran track in college, one of my teammates and I would literally stand
outside the locker room and wait until it was completely empty. Only then would we go in and shower as far
from each other as possible. Every time
we annoyed our coach who could not comprehend our stubbornness. We held up the team but the only alternative
was sitting on a bus with two stinky sweaty people so he kept his grumbling
down to a minimum. In the sauna, as we moved en mass – Lauren, Lindsey and I –
I kept my eyes closed and prayed that the time would swiftly pass. It didn’t. We
went from a freezing cold tub where I thought my limbs might fall off the water
was so cold to a steaming hot one where my skin turned bright red. It was too hot to even be comfortable. When enough time had finally elapsed and I
could get dressed, I promised myself I’d never do that again. Next time if Dave wanted to dock my pay so be
it. I would much have preferred to have spent my time sitting under a tree and
reading a book.
Day three was another field trip,
only this one was a perfectly legitimate and necessary one. We had to journey to some government building
in order to obtain our residency cards.
Without them, we would not be able to teach legally, which I would later
learn happened all over Korea.
Foreigners would go to teach English without acquiring the proper work
visa. As a result, they would have to
make a tourist visa run every three months.
It was easy enough. All you had
to do was leave the country – most people went to Japan because it was the
closest and cheapest – and when you reentered your passport was stamped and you
were permitted another three month stay as a tourist. Of course if you were working illegally at a
hogwan (academy) and you got caught there were penalties and fees, but even
those were easily swept away if the owner of the hogwan passed out enough money
to the right people. Anyway, it was on
that trip that I met Jake. Jake had
already started teaching at Olympic Wonderland a week earlier and would soon be
working with Lauren. And of all the
people I met while living in Korea, Jake is the only one I still see
periodically.
To get to the government building
we had to take the subway. Growing up in
New York City, I was no stranger to subways, but the ones in Seoul are much
more user friendly than the ones in New York.
Seriously, I sometimes wonder how foreigners find their way through New
York on the subway. In New York
different lines are different colors but you can’t rely on the different colors
because there are several numbers or letters designated for each color. For example, the A, C and E trains are all
blue, but don’t let the color fool you.
Two of those trains go into Harlem and one will carry you into
Queens. Being a foreigner in Seoul is so
much easier. There everything is color
coded and it if you read the easy to follow maps it is impossible to get
lost. Even the stops are written both in
Hangul and in Roman letters so that foreigners don’t have to trip over the
different alphabet.
Anyway, while we were riding on
the crowded subway, Jake asked me if I could do a pull up. It was a random question but I answered by
putting both hands firmly on the overhead bar and pulling myself up. Once again, all eyes in the vicinity were
turned towards me. “I bet you can’t do
half the amount I can do,” Jake threw down the challenge, and not being one to
ever walk away from a challenge, I quickly picked it up. Though I am extremely competitive, I couldn’t
tell you who won. The fact that I don’t
remember, might very well indicate that I lost.
After all, what competitive person doesn’t remember winning? The winner of that particular contest,
however, was not important. The
important thing was that the foundation of a new friendship had been laid. Most people, dressed nicely for work,
wouldn’t even consider doing something as foolish as pull-ups in a subway, but
Jake seemed to be like me. He just
didn’t care what other people thought.
And over the next twelve months, because of our over abundance of
restless energy and our carefree spirits, we had our fair share of foolish, fun
and memorable adventures.
Olympic Park
Train Running Through Seoul
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