uptown girl (The Host)

So today was a relatively good day. I’ve taken a lot of naps this week. Not sure why—except that I’m usually tired when I get home from school. Go figure. I sleep 6.5-7 hours a night, and I usually take a 1-1.5 hour nap during the day, so I guess it’ll even out. Anyway, it’s now 10:30, and I’m going to try to wrap this entry up by eleven so I can study Korean for an hour and then go to sleep around midnight. I don’t have to teach tomorrow, so theoretically I could sleep in, but I’ll be getting up around 7:30 for breakfast anyway, then I’ll probably go jogging afterwards. I’m worried about sleeping too much with all of these naps, but I guess the cultural adjustment and the adjustment to a new more stressful job are probably contributing factors.

So today I set my alarm for 5:00, because I really wanted to get up early and put the finishing touches on all of my lesson plans. Because I’m usually displeased with what I have to teach, I find it difficult to get really inspired to lesson plan thoroughly until the very last minute. That’s not ideal, but I find I have most of my strokes of genius when the pressure is on. So my alarm clock literally went off every five minutes for a full hour, and then I rolled out of bed around six. Today is Wednesday, my day off from jogging, so I worked a little more on my Powerpoint for class and then took a shower and got half-dressed. I always get half-dressed for breakfast, so I don’t sweat all over whatever nice shirt I’m wearing.

You’ll be pleased to know that I’m slowly but surely getting over my aversion to most fish. Even the ones that are cooked whole and stare at me. They don’t actually taste bad, I’ve determined, but they’re really difficult for me to eat. There’s all of these small bones, and the scales to get through, and with chopsticks…? It’s an accident waiting to happen. So this morning host Dad was at the table with me, which made me more nervous, so I was even more hopeless with the chopsticks than usual. He kept making bemused faces at my efforts, then reached over and effectively divided the fish in half with one fell swoop of his chopsticks. He then proceeded to give me chopsticks lessons, which is difficult to do without verbally communicating, but I had an ‘a-ha’ moment of enlightenment. I’d lost it by lunchtime, but it was there. It was there. Prepping for class is doubly difficult because I don’t have a printer at home, and I certainly don’t have a copier, but because I’m currently being chauffered around, I can’t control when I arrive at school. So it’s usually 20 minutes before my first class, which means a lot of frantic quick cutting and copying, and praying the copier and printer are working. Thankfully, this morning they were.

Anyway, my first two classes this morning were first grade, and we studied prepositions (on, under, in, in front of, behind, next to). First, we just went over the words, which the students seemed to already know, unsurprisingly. Then I wrote the sentence “The book is on the desk” on the board in Korean and English and drew arrows connecting the words with the same meaning. Korean is really difficult for me, and English is really difficult for my students, because the sentence structure is completely different. The Korean version of the sentence literally goes “The book desk on is.” Or, equally correct, “Desk on the book is.” So we practiced creating sentences about where the book is, and then we practiced making sentences about where Miss Camp is. They got a kick out of me standing on the desk. Then I did a game I stole from my Korean language teachers, where I gave each student a piece of paper with directions of where to stand (on the desk, next to the window, on the chair, under the fan, next to the air conditioner, etc…) And then the other students have to describe where they are before they can sit down. The fun part is that one student’s card says ‘in front of Miss Camp’ and another’s says ‘behind Miss Camp, so as I move around they have to move with me. It was, I hope, a little more fun than practicing from the book. The kids didn’t seem to hate it, which is all I can do, really. Oh yeah! I wanted to describe my lesson from yesterday too. On Tuesdays I have to do the CD and the textbook, which is painful, so now I’m just going to try to do it really quickly and then move onto my own activity which practices the same thing. So yesterday’s lesson for first grade was on answering the phone, so I created fake dialogues between celebrities and had the students perform them. I had pictures of the celebrities on Powerpoint slides connected by a picture of a cellphone, and the dialogues were just silly stuff. Joo Jin-Mo (a hot Korean actor) called Britney Spears to complain that Miss Camp broke up with him. [The students didn’t know ‘break up,’ so I called one of the boys up to the front and demonstrated it. It was amusing.] Then Brad Pitt called my new boyfriend, Jeong Jae-Yeong, to tell him that I liked him. The kids got a kick out of it anyway, particularly because I did the female voices in falsetto and the males in my deepest voice. I feel like my real job is to entertain them, because if they’re a little entertained, they’ll pay attention and maybe learn something, whereas if they’re bored, they’ll sleep or tune me out.

I mean, let’s be serious. These are middle schoolers. The only reason they want to learn to speak in English is to talk to me. So if I’m not fun and cool, they have zero incentive to get good at talking. Sure, they study vocabulary and grammar a little to pass their tests, but speaking is another story. So yeah. That’s why they call me entertaining teacher from America. Well, maybe they do. Mrs. O told me yesterday that she was worried the students wouldn’t like me. (What?) But, apparently, they do. (Whew.) Today’s second grade lesson was about adverbs of frequency (always, never, often, sometimes, seldom, usually), which are actually pretty difficult to explain. They don’t have exact Korean equivalents, because Koreans are usually a little more ambiguous. So I did my best to explain them, and then they filled in worksheets. (Dana is twelve. She never smokes cigarettes.) Then I had them play a game (boys vs. girls, my favorite). There were two piles, one with adverbs and the other with verb+object. One person from each time ran up and took one card from each pile, wrote the sentence on the board, and had their team read it. Whoever created the most sentences won. It was a draw, luckily, so everyone got candy. I think I’m going to spend a lot of money this year on prizes. But hey, that’s okay. Fulbright’s paying my rent, and my only expense is DVD bang.

Speaking of which, Tim came from Gwangju to meet Meghan and I for DVD bang. We ended up watching the movie The Host, which is really really famous. And bad. Well, it’s not too bad. I give it 3 out of 5 Bs, but it’s not worth writing too much about. A stereotypically evil American military scientist pours a lot of formaldehyde down the drain of his lab into the Han River, and it creates a big scary monster, which kills people, and everyone thinks has a virus. The main characters are a family who are trying to rescue their daughter who is taken by the creature. It eats some people, and stores others in the sewer for later consumption. The movie is pretty ludicrous overall, and not in a terribly satisfying way—plus, the end kinda sucks. I like horror movies, but I like ghosty supernatural or psycho killer movies—not weird mutated monster movies. Meh.

We also ate pizza. I’m trying to be mad at myself for it, but I need a lifestyle where I can eat pizza at least once a week, so if that will stop me from ever being super-skinny, so be it. I should, however, have skipped the ice cream. Oh well, jogging tomorrow morning.

When I got home, I needed some information from my host mom, which is always a fun game. I have to go to school tomorrow so that I can accompany the rest of the teachers to a welcome dinner for the new principal. It’s roughly the last thing I want to do, but alas. So I need to take the bus to school. I said “At the terminal, what should I say?” She thought for a minute and said “At 4:00, I come home, together drive you.” I appreciate that she’s so nice and always willing to come help me, but I feel bad. Plus, I eventually need to figure out the bus, since starting October I’ll be taking it to school everyday Mon.-Wed., so after contemplating in my room for a few minutes, I came up with a new strategy. So I brought my notebook into the living room and said “시간 있어요?” Which means, do you have a minute? And she said, of course.

So I drew a picture of me and the Bus Terminal, at the window, with a conversation bubble (cartoon-style), and she was like, “Oh!” and promptly wrote in the necessary phrase. Encouraged, I drew a picture of me on the bus speaking to the driver, with similar success. So I assured her that I would go 흔자 (alone). She said “if you lost, me call.” And later “you my third children.” Aww. She’s a really nice person. I’ve vowed to do the dishes and vacuum my room tomorrow with some of my free time. I hate doing dishes, particularly when I didn’t eat the food, but it’s the least I can do.

One last thing—I’m planning on going away overnight on Friday to visit a friend in Nonsan (two hours away), which means another scary/exciting bus trip. We’ll see how that goes.

Take care!
<3