a horrible day, amazing race part 2 (Soo)

So the last few days have been more than a little crazy. Tuesday turned out to be a really terrible day. The students were extra-talkative and bored from the CD, my co-teachers were extra annoying, and then my club class, the one bright spot I was looking forward to in my day, was cancelled. I nearly burst into tears roughly three times in the middle of the lesson, and it was generally bad. Not because I’m homesick, just because I was so frustrated to be teaching from the CD. Here’s a copy of the message I sent to the former Orientation Coordinator:

My dilemma is that I see each class twice a week. They took us shopping the first weekend to buy textbooks, so I'm expected to teach from that textbook for one of my class meetings each week. And with third grade, it's ridiculous stuff like countable vs. uncountable (How many/how much) and simple vs. continuous present ("He goes to the movies" versus "He is going to the movies"). And I'm doing my best, but those things are impossible to teach in a foreign language. So the kids don't understand, and then my co-teacher just takes five minutes to explain the whole thing in Korean, making my explanation pointless and a waste of time. And then I feel like they think I'm a bad teacher. When we, for the last five minutes of every class, get to do the games and activities I plan, things go great. But me teaching grammar is a joke. I tried to explain that I think it would be better if I did activities that reinforced grammar they had already learned, but they have a tendency to just pretend they don't hear me when they don't understand or agree with what I'm saying.

And surprisingly worse, for the other meeting I'm supposed to teach from their regular textbook. They have me play the CD and have students repeat. p.s. The commands for the program are in Korean, so I never really know to use it, and then the co-teacher interrupts me to tell me how to do it. The other co-teacher just gives me a lesson plan of how she wants me to do the activities from the CD. Be serious! Why am I even there? I suspect that my "conversation classes" are taking away their regular English time, and they don't want to get off track, so they just have me teach their curriculum. But that's insurmountably boring for me and the kids, and I can't even explain to them what the dialogues we're repeating from the CD mean.

I LOVE the kids. They're wonderful. But they're bored to tears and then they just chat non-stop, and my man co-teacher then proceeds to yell at them in Korean and hit them with a stick and give them penalty points the whole time I'm trying to teach his stupid textbook dialogues, which equals no one paying attention to me at all. Dilemma.

Maybe I should just not complain, and suck it up and accept that I'm going to spend a majority of my time for the next year repeating after a CD. I'm just depressed, because I know this way won't work. They don't get anything out of repeating me repeating the CD, so it'll be the end of the year and they still won't know any more English than they did before, and I'll really feel like a failure.

I didn't email Susie or anyone at Fulbright because I feel like in the end I'm there to do what the school wants me to do, even if I hate it. I'm sorry to complain! I really am trying to make the best of the situation, but today was just really frustrating. The students always make me smile, but it kills me to bore them to tears for no reason.

That basically sums things up. And it was even more annoying because all the teachers and my co-teachers kept being like, ‘you look depressed,’ ‘you need to take a rest,’ ‘the students were very bad today, no?’ And I was like, NO! It’s not the students! It’s the way you’re making me teach and our interactions. Bah!

But anyway… I tried to remedy my crap day by going for pizza and a movie with Meghan, and the pizza did wonders for improving my mood. It was tres delicious. The movie we watched was… not. So here’s my review for Soo:

Soo is yet another gangster movie, but this one didn’t even have JJY in it, which was bad. It had another fairly attractive Korean actor, whose name I’ve forgotten. Anyway, the plot, so far as I could understand was… there were twin brothers, Soo-jin and Tae-jin who had a somewhat tumultuous childhood, and then at some point were separated. One became a police officer, and one became an infamous assassin named Soo. They’ve both, apparently, been looking for each other for a long time, and at the start of the movie they’ve finally found each other and are reunited. But just as they are walking towards each other, Tae is shot in the head. It’s pretty dramatic. I never figured out why he’d been shot, although it was some group of gangsters from a secret company. Anyway, Soo takes his body and prepares it for burial himself, in a weird sequence. And then, he decides to impersonate his brother as a cop to get revenge. Conveniently, apparently, Tae-jin had just been transferred to homicide THAT DAY, so Soo was able to just show up and pretend to be his brother. Hmm. Anyway, the charade doesn’t last too long, and during it he is constantly fighting with his brother’s fiancée, who figures out quickly that he’s not his brother. Anyway, there’s a lot of killing, and eventually revenge, and he dies in the end. It was so confusing. I didn’t know who the gangsters were, or why they killed the brother in the first place. Generally disappointing.

But it was better than my day beforehand. Then yesterday improved drastically. My co-teachers were really nice to me, and my classes were great (I was teaching my own lesson, which helped). It made me think that maybe all of my misery the previous day was self-created, but I don’t think so. My woman co-teacher even took me out for lunch to have some delicious meat item. Finally, we went out for a teacher dinner, and ate eel. Gross. I only tasted it, and it wasn’t so bad, but the texture was pretty gross, and the taste was just weird. But I had an okay time, and when I got home, I studied Korean and went jogging, which made me feel accomplished. Then, I realized that I had left my USB key at Noan, and I was screwed. It was 10pm when I realized, too late to call anyone, so I had to get up super early this morning, take a taxi to Noan and wait for it to open, get my USB key, and take a taxi back to town before my ride picked me up at 8:10. Exciting. Yet another amazing race.