Teaching, Learning and Other Adventures Around the World: Memoirs of a Kindergarten Teacher, pt. 3

For my third installment of my Memoirs of a Kindergarten Teacher series, I have a new kindergarten job to report on. Instead of teaching my own class of students, a class of structure and high academic standards, I am now a traveling kindergarten teacher, visiting approximately twenty-eight kindergarten classes a week, providing twenty-minute English lessons to students who understand practically no English.

Every twenty-minute lesson is structured the same way: I ask the students, "How are you today? Are you angry? (and I make an angry face with devil horns on my head) Are you sad? (I make a sad face and pretend to cry) Are you hungry? (rub my belly) Are you tired? (pretend to sleep) Or are you HAPPY?? (I put a huge smile on my face)" Then the kids are supposed to yell, "YES! HAPPY!" Then I ask, "How's the weather today? Raining? (NO!) Cold? (NO!) Cloudy? (NO!) Sunny? (YESSS!)" Often when I ask the kids how they are doing, the most common response is, "SUNNY!" Clearly some of these students are not understanding my question. But they are so gosh darn cute, so whatever.

Then I read them a book, having them repeat each word I read. Afterwards, we do a matching game based on the main vocabulary words we learn from the book. In an ideal class, the class's teacher will be sitting with the kids, helping them stay engaged in the lesson, and all of the kids will be participating happily. And sometimes I will get to teach this ideal class. However, more often than not, the teacher will be absent from the class, either literally or figuratively (by figuratively, I mean the teacher is physically present, but mentally she is focused on the screen of her smart phone and oblivious to the chaos being ensued by her students). When this happens, the students, who seem to think of me as more of a clown than an educator, run wild. And I mean wild. You think I'm exaggerating? After only a few weeks in this job, here are some of the things I have witnessed in this kindergarten jungle:

One boy pulled one of his slipper's off his foot and slapped his neighbor across the face. One girl pulled down her pants and shoved her bare bottom in the face of a classmate. Many students have run up to me and poked me in my private parts. One time all the students started chanting one word at me. I am not sure what this word was, but when I sternly said "Stop!" they proceeded to chant, "Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!" Several students have broken into an ear-piercing scream for no apparent reason. One boy decided to just drop his pants to his ankles and grin at me. Kids wrestle. Kids do somersaults. Kids pull out the classroom toys and play. And all the while I am sitting on a tiny chair, saying "Shh! Quiet! Stop! HEEEEYYYY!"and finally resort to watching the clock until my 20 minutes are up. And literally, sometimes this will happen with their teacher present! I don't know if she thinks she is off the clock for twenty minutes and is purposely leaving all of the classroom management responsibilities to a man who speaks very little Korean, but if the class were to catch on fire, she might still be consumed by her smart phone (and eventually the flames!).

And this chaos leaves me with a dilemma: part of me wants to say, Whatever, I am still getting paid, whether or not these kids are actually learning. But as a professional educator who cares about teaching, I have a hard time not fulfilling the lesson, and I have a hard time letting these kids get away with such obscene behavior. But what am I to do? Well, I now know there are certain Korean phrases I need to learn, such as, "Be quiet! Sit down! Put your pants back on!" But if saying those phrases doesn't work, then what? Maybe I will resort to turning on a fan and closing all of the windows/doors in the classroom and see how they react. (for those of you confused by this statement, look up "fan death")

I don't mean to imply that this is how most of my classes are. The average class is somewhere in between the utter chaos and the class of angels. However, I do experience the chaos more than the serenity, and it makes me wonder what is expected of these English lessons.

Luckily I get to spend my evenings teaching well-educated scientists and businessmen who I can have intelligent conversations with. It provides much-needed balance to my life, the yin to my yang.

On a different note, in my last entry I pledged to find more to love about Korea. Yesterday, during a rock climbing excursion in the countryside outside of Pohang, an elderly couple slowly drove past us down the rode in a long tractor. The husband was driving while his wife was sitting on a stacked bundle of recently harvested rice grass. They were dressed modestly and had very weathered skin. They were born in a Korea entirely contrasting to what we live in today, an agrarian society where rice literally was the life source. A generation that lived through a Japanese occupation, a bloody civil war, a devastated country, famine, military dictatorship, and then modernization/westernization as fast as a blink of an eye. Despite the mad dash for the posh urban lifestyle of lattes and smart phones, this couple is continuing the lifestyle familiar to them. We waved to each other, and I found myself saying aloud, "I love that!" So there you have it, one more thing to love about Korea, the remnants of the old world, slowly driving by and waving from a tractor. It will be sad to see Korea twenty years from now when the old world is strictly just a memory or an exhibit in museums.

Fall has also been exceptionally beautiful, both with the autumn colors in the trees, as well as the soon-to-be harvest rice fields of gold and green grass painting the landscape everywhere outside of the city. Here are some photos I took recently: