my first month in Korea

Wow, I knew it was coming up but I find myself completely surprised as I look at my taskbar calendar to see that the date is the 10th of November. The significance of this is that I have been in Korea for a month.

As I tend to think of these things in chunks of time, that’s 8% of my commitment at the hagwon, that is sizeable. Looking back on it, I’m trying to work some sort of memory narrative into this post, something to sum up this first month without going back over ground already covered in previous posts.

I suppose that really it feels a lot like I’m back at Uni, I’ve got a similar feeling of freedom coupled with obligation, not to mention that I am again living with my Uni house-mate of two years, Jon. The environment I have found myself in is also one which encourages personal learning, but like Uni I find myself less than enthusiastic to engage it. I have not taken every opportunity to learn the local language but I feel that I should do. I have taken in some by a sort of osmosis I think, I can think of literally several Korean words right off the top of my head.

When I arrived the words in a conversation that I might over-hear flowed together like a sort of… fast soup. Now I can hear individual words, some of which I recognise, sometimes I may even get the general gist of the conversation without knowing many words at all. This never fails to please me. Reading hangul, a must for any foreign teacher worth their salt, is becoming less effort and I am beginning to read some syllables rather than say out the smaller components first.

The largest part of my learning though, is the teaching. Having come to Korea with retrospectively no teaching experience, thoroughly bricking it for my first week, I now feel not entirely uneasy about each day as it comes. A fair chunk of the lessons are sort of formulaic; read a book, hand out worksheets, try to extract English from unwilling kids, quieten noise – that sort of thing. Some portions are a bit unnerving still, for example I still have to absolutely plan for my story time tomorrow. These lessons are my own making so after choosing a book to read, I’ve got to form some sort of learning related activity. For my first book, Dinosaur Train, I was given a series of interlinked cushion rings (as seen in a previous post) and was told to get the kids to make themselves into a train. I also thought of getting the kids of pretend to be dinosaurs, which hilariously scared one of the youngest (like, 3 years old, or 4 or something) kids to tears. I’m serious about it being funny, that kid is a jerk.

Talking about crying children, actually talking about children at all, I might have mentioned before that I felt uneasy around them. They are unpredictable. While that’s true for children that you don’t know, it’s not like that at all with kids you see every weekday. You get to know their personalities and when they are likely to be pestering shits or amusingly daft. Sometimes, they can even be surprisingly clever – even at the age that I am teaching. Couple this with my theory that most of the time children want: 1. Attention and 2. Approval, and you should be set to deal with most of what they can throw at you. Except sick, I will not deal with sick.

Looking forward to the coming months and rest of the year (assuming no-one cottons on to how I am constantly blagging being a teacher) I hope to get a little more active both physically – I don’t walk far to work… or to anything thinking of it, and mentally – I want to quit faffing and take a course in Korean, perhaps even something else while I’m at it. MOTIVATION!

Wish me luck!

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Other stuff I have done in my first month:

• Bought a pet beetle larvae

named Andrew Lloyd Webber, with a playstation controller as size comparison

 

• got drunk in Hongdae several times
• retained an impressive cough
• missed good beer, good bread and good friends