rituals and balloon animals

It’s currently 9:08 on Tuesday morning. I’m breaking my ritual of blogging at night for this entry, because I didn’t last night, and I’ve got a lot of free time in the gyomushil this morning. I’m really glad that I finally sucked it up and rode the bus yesterday, because now that I’ve figured it out, I really like it. I figured out the push-button-stop system, so I don’t even have to try to speak Korean to the driver. It’s awesome. The weather’s really nice, too, so it would have been a really nice walk if one of my students and her parents hadn’t stopped to pick me up yesterday and today. It was really cute.

Yesterday was a really interesting today. Because I only see the third graders at NMS once a week, I haven’t formed the relationship with them that I have with the other grades yet, but yesterday I had a really good lesson with one of the two classes. They seemed to have fun, and they were nice to me. The other class went disastrously, and just left me demoralized for the rest of the day. The problem is that I was teaching simple present tense versus present continuous. You may think you don’t know what that is, but you do.

Simple present is just what it says: He eats rice. She likes eggs. Simple continuous indicates what you’re doing right now. “He is eating rice.” Anyway, it’s just unnecessarily confusing, and having me explain it is stupid. But it’s what’s in my book, so it’s what I did. The first class got it fine, but the second class was totally confused after my explanation, which led Mrs. O to just explain it again in Korean. Which was fucking demoralizing. Why did I waste twenty minutes of our time explaining it in English then? Why don’t you just teach it yourself? That’s my problem. It’s just too difficult to learn in a foreign language. The second half of the lesson was on practicing dates, which was fun and good practice. But I feel like she thinks I’m a bad teacher, which just isn’t fair! I’m not supposed to be teaching grammar! I’m supposed to be teaching conversation. Why won’t you just leave me alone and let me teach by myself?

So yeah. I was irritated. And I’ve decided that I’m just not going to teach anything that’s too difficult from now on. I will pick and choose from the book what I think will be conducive to my teaching, and if they don’t like it, I don’t care. Me teaching from the CD half the time is ridiculous anyway. I’m not really as negative about teaching at the moment as this entry makes it sound. I was just really frustrated after yesterday’s terrible lesson, and I’m venting here, since I didn’t get a chance to vent then.

One thing I am negative about is that I’m really itchy all the time here. Particularly my arms and my back, which is super-annoying. I’m blotchy too, which is new for me. Maybe I just need to moisturize more. I hope it’s not some creepy skin disease. ahahaha.

I taught one first grade lesson yesterday, which went okay, although it bored me to tears because I was just repeating things on the screen. I have three lessons from the CD to look forward to today. Awesome. But at least I have my club class, in which we’ll be singing “If I Were a Rich Man,” and doing the lesson I described before. But because it’s supposed to be fun, we’re probably just going to sing most of the time. Because it’s all girls, so I’m hopeful they’ll like it, and I like to sing! That’s why!

I was exhausted when I went home yesterday, around 3pm, so I laid down with the intention of taking an hour nap. Instead, I woke up at 6, and even then just barely. I’d only gotten about a little less than 7 hours of sleep the night before, but a three hour nap is a little ridiculous, I know. After that, I’m pleased to say that I was productive. I studied Korean for an hour and a half and went jogging, and it was a really nice run. After that, I showered and hung out in my room for a bit. My host sister burst in at one point to tell me that “today ancestor worship”, but I assumed she meant that they had already done it. But when we started setting up big tables of food and burning incense around 10:30, I figured out that we were going to do it later. I hid in my room mostly, because I didn’t want to inadvertently interrupt anything. Around 11:30, I went out to say goodnight, and went to bed, but then a few seconds later my host mom knocked on the door and asked if I wanted to see their tradition. So I sat on the couch and watched as Dad bowed in front of the food, and they poured a lot of alcohol into a bowl.

Because of the language barrier, they weren’t able to completely explain it to me, but I gleaned some. My host sister had said: “My grandfather. Dead. So today, many food, give.” (Then she did an impression of a crotchety old ghost and said: “Thank you.”) “Then… eat… good luck.” Which is as cogent an explanation as I got. So yeah, they set out a lot of food, burn incense, stand a spoon up in bowls of rice, pray, bow, and offer the food to their ancestors. Then, they eat the food, and it’s good luck. It was really curious and interesting, and it made me think about our inferior Western traditions.

Dad asked me if I wanted to try bowing, so I agreed, because really, why not? I had to do it four times, because I’m a woman, whereas men do it twice. It basically just involved putting my forehead on the ground. Apparently I did okay, because then they invited me to sit and drink soju with them, the first time I’ve really sat down with both parents. We communicated a little, and ate, and then I went to bed. It’s an interesting way to commemorate dead relatives. I mean, sure we remember our relatives, and think about them on particular days, but maybe it’s good to have something concrete like that, a ritual, which makes you feel like you’re really communicating with them. Which lets you feel like you’ve done your duty as a son/daughter/brother/etc. I don’t know, I’ll have to do more research about it. It was neat, anyway, and worth staying up for.

And this morning the woman at the ticket window in the bus station gave me a balloon animal with my ticket, for no reason I could discern. Oh, Korea.