So I was talking with my coteacher, Mr. Lee, and he was talking about how a year had already gone by. I explained how I know I’m getting older, but I don’t feel like I’m getting older. It’s like time is passing by but at times I feel like I’m still seventeen. So I can’t process some of the things I’ve done. I sometimes can’t believe high school is already over for me, let alone having my degrees and spending a year of my life overseas. A year ago I was excited about the following three major things...
Pati & Nick’s Wedding in May 2010:
My Master’s Graduation (and the passing of my COMPS) in May 2010: Celebrating that I graduated and agreed to teach for a year in South Korea:
Today, at the end of May 2011, I’m now excited about the three following things:
Going to vacation in Hawaii
Going back to Los Angeles to be amongst my home friends and family
Starting a new job that will challenge me in new ways (I love learning)
Things come full circle I suppose, time for another cycle.
p.s. Seems like yesterday I was keeping me having been offered the job in Korea a secret from my friends because I wanted to wait for the wedding to be over. I’m not a thunder stealer.
Today’s entry was inspired by one Miss Lauren (from: http://laurenseoulsearching.blogspot.com/). During my bon voyage dinner with my friends in South Korea, she told me that my assignment by the end of the night was to give her the top five things I won’t miss from South Korea and the top five things I will miss from South Korea.
So here we go, the top 5 things I won’t miss from South Korea: 1. The way the shower plumbing system is set up in the majority of apartments 2. The way trash on the street in handled 3. The extra syllable added to everything 4. Small tin cups of water (I consume like 80 of those a day) 5. A side of pickles with everything you order (and not the good kind)
However, every cloud has a silver lining, so in keeping a positive perspective on the last year, here are the top 5 things I will miss about South Korea: 1. Being called handsome so many times (throughout the course of a single day) 2. I like learning something new everyday, especially things that Osc from a year ago wouldn't think he could do 3. No need to worry about lunch at work 4. This is my easiest commute ever 5. The friends I've made
There you have it. Great task to complete, kudos Lauren.
As an added bonus, because this was my last dinner with the majority of my SK friends, here's our recreation of the Last Supper (Stephanie is clearly playing the role of Judas).
Well Korea doesn’t really have high school sports teams the way the US does. I was in the tennis team, and of course I had friends that played an array of sports as teens: soccer, basketball, football, etc. However, Korea does have PE classes with PE uniforms not unlike back home. But in order to commemorate students who excel in specialized sports, schools all over Korea have a Sports Day. Sports Day at my school is a two day event that includes a whole wide range of events so that every student can participate in something: soccer, relay races, three-legged races, dodge ball, and basketball. Here go another English teacher at my school, Heidi, and I with some students cheering on the teams:
This was my favorite shot from the whole event, the second grade relay race winner’s photo finish: Can I just say that for a day that promotes physical activity, I’ve never eaten so much in my life? The parents contribute a lot to this event, food and their time. They buy the students A LOT of food: burgers, pizzas, ice cream, sodas, Gatorade, cookies, and any other foods that represent the polar-opposite of a sports day. Luckily, that basketball game I played helped burn off some (but definitely not all) of those delicious calories.
Everland
Something I really wanted to scratch off my Korea “bucket list” was going to an amusement park here. I finally got the chance to go to Everland, about 40 minutes away from the Suwon station. It’s really convenient to get there too because there’s a shuttle that leaves every 30 minutes from the Suwon station (starting at 9am) to take people to Everland. I doubt we have anything like that for Disneyland back home. In typical theme park fashion it had its signature rollercoast, but my favorite was one in the rock and roll park that spun you in ways you wouldn’t expect. Here’s a picture from that ride: All in all it was a lot of fun and Korean theme parks are reasonably priced with reasonably priced concessions (unlike theme parks at movie theaters back home). It was about $30 USD for admission at we had a good restaurant lunch for about $18. Also, Everland has many animal displays so we got to see tiny foxes, monkeys, sheep, tigers, seals, polar bears, skunks, and rabbits.
I think we were all surprised to see so many waygooks (foreigners) working in the theme park’s shows. Here we are with some of the performers after the show: Speech Exam Week So I am currently wrapping up my second to last week in Korea and it is currently speech exam week. This is the week I’ve also decided to let students know of my plans for departure. The big gasps of reactions I get each time make me appreciate my time here even more. The speeches have gone by well, and especially today, they really studied. The theme is what they would do if they only had a month to live. A lot of the responses are universal like spending more time with friends and family, writing thank you letters and donating their organs. Some are original, like one student would try to die a day before his diagnosis in order to prove doctors wrong, another said he would eat a long list of foods so he could die from overeating, while another noted that she would marry her boyfriend and travel the world. I have one student though who is painfully shy. She couldn’t go through with her speech and cried in front of everyone. My co-teacher also told me later on that she also missed school the day following the exam. All I hope is that she’s well and that her classmates’ extrovert personalities rub off on her. Learning experience? Never being shy, and never having to come out of my shell because my shell has always been nonexistent, I can’t completely relate to reaching a level timidity where I would freeze, but I do have sympathy for all my students.
So here I am, another round of speech exams on the way from my second graders, the most seasoned of my students and the most prepared, so I’m looking forward to what they have to say. More blogging to come later...
I’ve heard this theory before and I completely agree, the way you can tell if your child is going to be smart is if they enjoy the company of adults. Allow me to explain. I read a study sometime ago (probably in grad school) and it has come up in conversations that children who get classified as gifted enjoy the company of adults rather than peers their own age.
This stems from something very simple: thinking kids your age are too childish and immature. From my own experience I can say I fully agree. I grew up with a sister five years my elder and we got along great. I really enjoyed her company, and I would hang on to every word teachers would say in hopes that I could be as eloquent as they were one day (most of the time) and I just thought adults were overall better people. I couldn’t wait to grow up, but yet again, who can’t? But it made me want to read more, know more about the world, and explore life outside of school so that I could hold conversations of substance with them in hopes that they would see me as their equal. Let’s fast forward now to high school. I still felt adults were better, and I still couldn’t relate to the average fifteen year old. Granted, I went to a magnet school in which I had the majority of my classes with students who had proven to be smart and all the friends I made were college-bound. I could definitely relate to them, so it’s not like I ever isolated myself from my age group seeing how we were “mini-adults.” In my high school program, our core classes were taken within the magnet school and we had to take electives from the regular high school. So in observing how the other students interacted, my friends and I always had our side commentaries as to how they conducted themselves and how at times there was a level of immaturity we couldn’t relate to. However, that’s not a blanket statement because that can’t be said about everyone; I definitely met a good amount of exceptions. But I digress, I think a big part of why I did pretty well for myself was because I had that mentality even at a young age.
Now there’s my brother. My brother is eight years younger than I am, which means my sister and him have a wide thirteen year gap in between them. My brother, being the youngest amongst my siblings, had no one but older people surrounding him. He had cousins his own age, but he only really interacted with adults on a daily basis. He also could not relate with kids his own age because he would view the world, even as a young age, that he could do better things with his time than play childish games like learn languages, learn about the world, and reach his potential. He did so exceptionally well for himself leaving middle school with a flawless 4.0 GPA and graduating high school with honors. Now as an adult, I think he’s content at a level I was when I reached that facet of my life.
Now we fast forward to my niece. She is a kindergarten student, and you may think it’s too early to tell how she’ll turn out. It’s not. Now being in a mostly “only child” situation, she’s had no choice but to interact with people who are nothing but grown-ups in her eyes. Kids will still be kids and she does enjoy playing with peers, but she also enjoys being challenged. I remember when that little girl was three and could work a DVD player like it was second nature. And then she would get entranced in my brother’s Nintendo DS, which made her require her own at some point. Her curiosity had also led her in learning much about reading before going into school, similar to how I was taught before stepping foot into a kindergarten classroom. Because of this, and because there’s nothing but adults who are looking to her to strive, she became the “student of the month” the first month of her school year. This was based on the fact that she learned all her sight words for the semester in about three weeks. She’ll now be enrolled in a gifted program in her elementary school, so the pattern continues.
The idea to blog about this came about a dinner I was having with fellow teachers here in Korea and thinking, “being an adult and talking about anything and everything rocks!”
So a lot of stuff has been going on since the last blog, so allow me to catch you up on things.
Children’s Day & Buddha’s Birthday in South Korea This is a major holiday, May 5th, in which the schools are closed in order to observe children and their immense contributions to society as well as their extraneous labor. This is actually not sarcasm. Many of my students stay at school on a nearly daily basis until 10 pm at night studying, Korean children deserve a Children’s Day more than any other children. I decided to go to a park here in Songtan that day and just take the nature in. Big ol’ mistake! The place was littered with picnics, and children, and children playing around picnics. I can say the same thing for Buddha’s birthday on May 10th. I understand going to the park on Buddha’s birthday, it’s a national holiday, what else are you supposed to be doing?
Korean Wedding So I went to a Korean wedding, I can now scratch that off my list. The music teacher at my school got married and it was my opportunity to experience a Korean wedding in Korea. I will say that the experience was quite different to a Western-style wedding. There was a huge lunch buffet, I ate extremely well. They had everything: salads, a sushi bar, dessert bar, etc. However, the meal happened before the ceremony. Also, in order to get a ticket for the meal one had to give a gift, and the standard in Korea is to place some money (anywhere between 30-40,000 KRW) in an envelope to the couple. So it’s like they’re getting a return on their investment. The ceremony itself was actually brief. And because the bride is the music teacher, some students attended and sang a song during the ceremony, it was quite nice. The best part was that my school had a shuttle bus that took the staff from the school in Songtan to the wedding hall in the northern part of Seoul. That was very convenient. Speaking of the wedding hall, everything takes place there: reception, ceremony, and photographs. Quite interesting. Just pay the fee and let the hall staff do the work.
Teacher’s Day Korea has a holiday to commemorate teachers, listen up USA, you could learn something. This year teacher’s day was on May 15th, a Sunday, but was observed at my school the Friday before. It was nice, there was an outside ceremony with the entire student body from both the middle in high school (only the second time since I’ve been here have I seen the HS interact with the MS). There were some speeches and some awards to long standing teachers at the school. Then, a student representative from each homeroom went up to the teachers and “pinned” them with a boutonniere of carnations, the flower symbolizing Korea’s Teacher’s Day. I also got a nice card from a student and a dress sock gift package from the PTA. The same day was also followed by another ceremony, the ribbon-cutting of the new school dormitory. I told ya, these kids stay here late, so the school decided to incorporate dorms onto its campus. They’re actually quite nice, and although its yet from being fully furnished, it’ll make student life here more bearable for the kids.
Speech Competition Today was the first annual English speech contest at my school. To be honest, I didn’t think many students would sign up, but it turned out to be quite an event. 23 students signed up, of which three winners are selected. I and four other English teachers were the judges. These kids worked hard all week as they came into my office hours asking for an array of advice. I was happy to oblige. These kids have real courage for being the first ones to participate and doing it in front of a large student body and their teachers can’t be easy, kudos to them. It brought this nice work day to a close.
Things I’m looking forward to: Sports Day (two days in this week), some dinner meetings with friends which I will enjoy to the max, and speech exam week in my class next week. Big happenings during my final moments here.
An excerpt from one of probably four emails that have made me smile and happy dance to the extreme:
“I want to thank you also. We really enjoyed meeting you and after talking about it, we would like to offer you a full time position at our school. We think that you would be a great fit, that the students would love working with you and that you could help us go into the future with all of our goals.”
I was offered a job as a technology teacher for a great Catholic school in LA, how great is that? How perfect is that? EXTREMELY!
I’m so happy to be going home in a month, and even better is that now I can stay. It all pretty much aligned. In the last blog I posted how I had one of the best Skype conversations ever, well this was it. It was referring to the interview I had for this job, one of the best interviews in my life. I Skyped with the principal and vice-principal of the school and it went well and beyond anything I could have expected. I want to thank my family and friends for their support and well wishes on this new venture.
Point of order at the moment: Enjoy Korea.
Now that I know this, and now that it’s all laid out into impossible-to-believe perfection, I have to really make the most of my time here.
p.s. the other three jump for joy emails off the top of my head: Hispanic Scholarship Award recipient email, CSULB College of Education scholarship award email, and the email telling me I passed my comps for my master’s degree.
I met a family via mutual friends here in Korea, whom I later found out (after they had suspected it) that their son has autism (very recent diagnosis). Having had much experience in the field of autism and its partners and because they had heard of my professional background, they were really interested in meeting with me. I met with them over dinner at their house, but before I could, some prep work had to be done. I could definitely speak as a relative (twice over) of someone who has autism and as an educator. But something is missing. I can't speak as a parent. So quite some time ago I decided to contact the moms in my life who have background knowledge (I wrote about this in a previous blog posts http://theoscblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/going-to-holland.html) because they can offer that parental advice, experience, and piece of mind. I went to this dinner with my handy-dandy notes and I'm glad it went better than I had expected. I was able to put their minds at ease, which I must say was a great feeling. The biggest piece of mind I think I could offer them just came from my own observation, "Remember, some of the things he's doing aren't because he's autistic, they're because he's three years old. That's the stuff three year olds do." I think I was able to get them to differentiate that not everything is autism, it's the genuine common thread in the human experience.
Last Friday was a lot of fun. After a half day of work (out of a series of 4 consecutive half work days, thank you midterms), the English department headed out for dinner in Cheonan. Cheonan is a city within Gyeonggi provice (where I live), but I'd never gone. It was strange because my friend Mel (from http://melinsouthkorea.blogspot.com/) had just told me about how she abruptly ended up in this city a couple days earlier. We went to this great restaurant inside a mountain by a couple of universities in Cheonan. The restaurant was great and the food (along with the makoli) was a plenty. After this, the "young teachers" went on a hike. That was tiring. Having eaten so much before was not such a good idea, but after it was done, I can now say I've hiked in South Korea. Afterwards there was a gathering at Mel's where she made an awesome vegetarian meal followed by rounds of Catchphrase (a game I MUST own when I get back to the US) and You Don't Know Jack (remember that one?).
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Saturday- Up & DoWn
This day started out fine. A great dinner for the "mayor of Korea", our friend Mr. Bruce Lee who celebrated the 10th anniversary of his 25th birthday. Moti Mahal Indian food, you can never go wrong with the restaurant. Another event followed after. Some stuff happened there which left some damages, but time heals all. I just hope things get better in that respect.
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Sunday - Blossoms
Sunday was new day. I had made plans to go to the Pyeongtaek Flower Festival in Anjung and it was a lot more than I had expected. It was fields and fields and more fields of wonderful plants from all over. There were exhibitions set-up, even animals too. I was thrilled when I saw the albino boa, I always wanted a snake as a kid but my mom had a phobia, so instead we compromised and I got smaller snakes with legs, or as the rest of you call them: lizards. I had a lot of fun there and a great meal soon followed.
Side note: this was my first experience taking a city bus in Korea, almost made it the whole year without it happening, but I will say that after being on it, it would have been fine if I had never rode it
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Monday- Damages
I had found out earlier that day that one of the foreign exchange students at our school (or as I lovingly call them, FESeseses), fell off a horse while going on a horse-back riding trip. Luckily it was nothing major and he only had some pain, nothing broken. Time to dust off and ride again.
Later in the afternoon I got some messages. I got an email from my brother, a Facebook message from my sister, and a status update from my cousin notifying me that my great-aunt Carmen has passed away. Of course I felt it, but I asked to leave school early because I needed to get home to use Skype and call my mom and she if she was okay, after all she was her niece. My mom was okay, as okay as you can be I suppose, but she was worried about what my grandmother's (my great-aunt's sister) reaction would be about the news. So I guess I was worried about my mom being worried about my grandmother. Everything is being arranged right now so that she is buried in her hometown of Mazatenango. You were a great woman aunt Carmen, loving, happy, fun, and hospitable, you will be missed and I feel fortunate and blessed to have been able to meet you. That three hour drive we took the last time I was in Guatemala keeps replaying in my head.
Rest in Peace to my great-aunt Carmen.
Later in the same day a few of us teacher friends in the area had some Mexican food together, it was good for us, we needed to get our minds off of some things if even for a brief moment.
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Tuesday- Three
Bad things happen in threes right? I hope they don't happen in eights, nines and tens. Well a problem arose with one of the FESeseses and another student at my school. Because the FES student came to me when the problem happened (drama between the two girls), solving this problem consumed most of my work day. I'm used to the FESs coming to me because as foreigners in South Korea, we tend to understand each other and I'm able to offer advice. Luckily, I only taught half of my classes this day, so I was able to be there for the FES and see that a solution be executed.
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Wednesday (today) - Skype Savior
Thank God Skype is around! That's all I have to say. This is helping this funk big time. I just had a great time in one of the best Skype conversations ever.
