inadvertent corporal punishment and bowling

So as of tomorrow, I will have been alive 22 years, so it seems as good a time as any to make a blog entry. It’s been too long since I updated. It’s currently 8:30pm. I went to the gym and half-heartedly lifted weights, but I can’t bring myself to go jogging, because it’s cold, and I know (or am making the excuse) that it will hurt my shins. The two-a-days encouraged the onset of some mild shin split type pain, so I stopped them immediately, but now it’s hard to get back on the weight loss campaign trail.

Yesterday I had my birthday part with the students from DMS. I’d invited everyone from second and third grade, which amounts to about 61 people, but I knew that not all of them would come. We’ve recently had a lot of drama amongst the third grade girls, including bullying and even some half-hearted suicide attempts, and because they’re firmly divided into factions, my co-teacher warned me that probably none of them would be attending. True. Plus, DMS has mid-terms this Thursday, so the girl students, who are more intelligent and harder studiers, would be busy doing that anyway.

So it turned out that 9 people showed up—one boy and two girls from second grade and 6 boys from third grade. We were meeting at the bus station at 2:30, and I ran into a couple boys beforehand. Two or three of them showed up with presents for me, ranging from ornately wrapped desk knickknacks to a pencil case that had obviously been used. (Because my school is in a really really rural farmy area, a lot of my kids are very poor, so I appreciated the used pencil case a lot.) They had to come forty minutes on a bus into the city, so they all won a place in my heart just for making the trip. (I’d have met them out in their rural town, but there’s literally nowhere out there for me to meet them, and certainly nowhere to buy pizza.)

So a couple of the boys were really late, and then they came, but other boys had disappeared. (We literally cannot communicate much at all, so they just left the bus station where we were hanging out and waiting, and I didn’t know why.) I started to get annoyed, but then everyone came back, with more presents. Cute. So we headed to the pizza place. Last time I had pizza with four of my students (at their insistence), it was pretty awkward, because they couldn’t speak English and I can’t speak Korean. This time it was a little better, because there were more of them, and thus, they were all less self-conscious. Plus, the pizza place where I had it is run by a husband and wife, and I go there pretty often, so they were way amused to see me show up with all of these middle schoolers. (It’s tiny, so we basically filled the place.) I ordered three huge pizzas and pitchers of soda, and they devoured it, with only minimal awkwardness. The owner even brought the pizza out with candles in it, and made them sing Happy Birthday in English, which was cute.

And Meghan snuck out to buy ice cream, which proved to be a good finale to the meal. Then I asked them if they wanted to go bowling. Three or four of them immediately said “No… I no bowl” (or some variant of that), and one suggested soccer as an alternative. But two of them were like “Yes!” I suspect that most of the boys had never actually bowled before. It’s not terribly common, and there’s definitely not a bowling alley out in the country. So they were resistant to it, I think, because they didn’t really know much about it. But the two or three kids and I were able to convince them to go, so we set off. We lost the girls somewhere along the way (they went home, I mean), so it was just me and these seven middle school boys. Embarrassing and comical.

There’s only about 15 lanes, about the middle 11 were filled with a league, so the kids walked in, saw that, and immediately were like, “No!” I had to plead and make puppy dog eyes, but then we all got shoes and headed to the lane, and I promised “just one game.” We had two lanes, but the kids didn’t get it at first that each line was meant to be a person, so they just haphazardly bowled whenever they felt like it. Most of them were really bad to start out, but they all got better, emulating me and the two other kids who had bowled before and had the technique down, and they all got a little better. And randomly their male competitive instinct kicked in halfway through and they suddenly divided into teams and started getting serious about it. We were remarkably well-matched, considering the randomness of it, and the other team won the first game by a difference of like, 5 pins. And even the kids who were mortally opposed to bowling at the beginning started saying “재미있다! 재미있다!” (This is fun!) I took a lot of pictures of them and their form, and then when I put my camera down, they promptly picked it up, hence the pictures of me bowling and the awesome one of me doing the strike sign. (X!)

Towards the end of the first game they asked me how much it was, and I told them it was $3 per person (shoes and the game), which is really not bad at all. I could tell they wanted to go again, and they were talking animatedly in Korean, and gathering money, so I was like, “Hey. Stop. We can again.” And they adamantly refused, and kept trying to give me money (especially my favorite boy, CJ—more on him later). So I also adamantly refused, and they accepted it, and then they suddenly really wanted to take a picture together. (These are the boys who would run away whenever I would try to take a picture at school.) But they called over the girl working at the bowling alley (the league had ended by now), and she took it for us. They’re cute pictures, and despite the fact that most of them are not smiling in our group picture, because they’re boys, I assure you they seemed to have a good time.

For the second game we re-divided, again remarkably evenly, and it was just as fun. My team won the second game by a remarkable 8 pins, thanks to a tenth frame (eleventh hour) strike from me, but there weren’t any hard feelings. Bowling was a way better way to spend time together and forge a relationship, because it doesn’t require a lot of talking, but there was plenty of team-building and cheering. I even convinced them halfway through to stop calling me Miss Camp, because it’s embarrassing in public. Brittany is still a really difficult name for Korean people, but they started doing it, and when someone forgot, someone else would correct him. CJ, after I refused to take the money from him, went and bought me a soda from the machine, and presented it to me two-handedly. (I especially wouldn’t take his money, because my co-teacher told me he’s especially not well off, and I noticed on Friday while we were playing soccer that his socks are more holes than socks. His parents are divorced, which is overall really uncommon in Korea, but inordinately common amongst my rural students, and he’s raised by his grandparents.)

I’d gotten a huge discount on the pizza, so it ended up being only $50, and then I confusingly got half off of the bowling, so two games and shoes for 8 people was only $24, when I’d expected it to be $48, which was awesome. We walked halfway back altogether, and then 6 of the boys headed off in one direction, and me and CJ were the only ones going the other way. They said thank you a lot, and were way cute, and then we parted.

CJ is not particularly good at English. My co-teacher commented to me last week how surprised she was to see him participating during class at all, because he’s naturally pretty smart, but he seldom studies and used to sleep in English class. I was surprised, because he was one of the two boys who approached me first and asked me to meet them for pizza, and he’s much more committed to trying to talk to me in English than some of the others. The first time I played soccer with them, when I missed twice, he pulled out his cellphone in the middle of the game and used the dictionary on it to translate the words “miss” and “sorry.” (He’s quite good at soccer, and adorably last Friday he asked which team I was on to decide which he wanted to be on.) But yeah, now he actively tries during most of our in-class games, which is a success. He did, however, when explaining why he was able to come to the party and the girls were not, say “Miss Camp… I never study!” (Fact.)

So we were walking in the same direction, him to the bus station, and me to my house, and I could sense him straining to come up with something to say to me. Eventually he settled on… “Miss Camp… house… what?” Which, with my amazing Konglish deciphering skills, I could understand as “Where do you live?” So I pointed out my house, and gave the brief who lives where explanation as best I could in my broken Korean (2nd floor: farm workers, 3rd floor: me, kids, kitchen, 4th floor: parents). He appeared impressed with my big house (awww…), and then left. First I gave him the socks I’d bought him. And he was confused, and was like… “Why?” (I love Korean people, because they’re always saying “Why?” when we would say “What?” or at least Why…something.) And I didn’t want to make him feel bad, so I was just like, “Your socks… holes.” And he smiled and said thank you and headed off, and I went inside my house, deliriously happy.

I opened the rest of my presents inside, and it all amounted to: two pencil cases, a notebook, a few pens and pencils, a coffee cup with kittens on it, a random desk knickknack, a stuffed teddy bear, and my personal favorite, a snow globe (yes!) So yeah, I basically wanted to cry. I mean, I have a similar problem here, I think, to my problem in Ireland. I really love my students. Like, so much. The one time I’m always really happy is when I’m at school, specifically when I’m at DMS. And that works out, because I spend 40 hours a week at school, through sadly only about 18 at DMS. And I like living in Naju a lot… it has everything I need: a gym, DVD bang, a good pizza place. But I read about all the traveling the other ETAs are doing, or planning to do, and I question myself. Like, Korea is turning out really well for me, but I guess my experience is just going to be different than most other people’s. I don’t have any interest in going to China or Japan or Shanghai or Taiwan. Does that make me weird? Like, just the idea of going to one of those crazy places on vacation, and not knowing any of the language, makes me cringe. I guess I still like my vacations to be a little relaxing, and that just sounds terrifically stressful. And I’m just not interested in Chinese stuff. I would, theoretically, like to travel in Korea a little, but the same language barrier thing mostly still exists there. I guess I really am just weird. Like, I get sad when I have days off of teaching, especially when it means I don’t get to see my third graders, because they go to high school at the end of this semester. I don’t know... it’s the Korean system that makes the kids so wonderful and adorable, so I’m glad I came to Korea. And I guess the language barrier would exist anywhere. I guess I just always end up doubting myself whenever someone starts babbling about how much they’re going to travel and what a WASTE it would be not to visit all of these other places.

Anyway, today I taught at NMS, and it was awesome because it was my third graders, who are always way cute. Interestingly, I bonded with the 3rd grade girls much more quickly at NMS, whereas I bonded with the boys faster at DMS. Three of the NMS girls especially are in my special twice-a-week after-school class, and they’re awesome! I ran into them in town last Tuesday, when I was feeling really down because of 2nd grade, and I ate dinner with them and had a good time. But luckily the boys are also starting to warm up to me as well, which makes 3rd grade classes an overall good time. The boys at NMS are just as adorable. One of them, TH, always spouts the most random things in English, and I die laughing on a regular basis. (Let’s Saturday swimming together.) Another, JS, is actually pretty good at English, and he’s a sweet kid, who I almost killed today.

It wasn’t on purpose. He strolled in a minute late to class, which usually only earns a dirty look from me, but gave me a sassy look, so I did what I always do: picked up one of the little pencil erasers that’s always sitting on the teacher desk and threw it at him when he wasn’t paying attention. (This is, after all, Korea, where they still hit the kids with sticks.) I throw stuff a lot in class, including candy, and sometimes the blackboard eraser, though I always intentionally miss. And I knew I was a crack shot, so I expected to hit JS in the head, but unexpectedly I managed to peg him directly in the eye. He was, needless to say, surprised, and I laughed and apologized at the same time. He’s one I count on to always participate, so I was relieved that the pelting didn’t dampen his enthusiasm for answering my questions, even when I looked at him a minute later and saw his eye was a little swollen, and started dying laughing again. He was like “WHAT?” and then said in Korean what was obviously, “Is it swollen?” to which his classmates responded, “A little,” which led to a dirty look for me, but I apologized very sincerely. I doted on him further throughout class with extra candy, and he led the boys to a one-point victory over the girls in Comparison Trivia Pub Quiz, an awesome game I stole from Meghan. He was also the only one to fully appreciate my last trick question, in which they found out that famous soccer players David Beckham and Ronaldo are, in fact, the exact same height (to the centimeter).

I was worried he would harbor a grudge, but today he got his tenth ticket, which meant a prize—chocolate bar. And when I saw him later, his eye was fine, and when I asked if he was angry, he laughed and said no, so I was relieved. He’s adorable, like all of them. My mom proposed today on Skype, interestingly, that she thinks I’d fall in love with American students just the same. Possible—I’m sure I would fall in love with SOME of my American students, but it wouldn’t be the same. I literally love EVERY SINGLE ONE of my third graders. I still remember middle school pretty well, and how most of my fellow students treated the teachers. Plus, I have no problem admitting that it’s in large part my novelty as a foreigner that makes me popular, and the fact that I work outside of the system and can thus dispense candy like crazy and not have to worry about giving grades. It is, in many ways, an ideal situation. Plus, they’re just kinder, more naïve, and cuter. I know my Mom just really wants me to come home after a year. :) I’m definitely coming home, really.