Enjoy the Respite

I can't speak Korean. My students really need to stop getting their hopes up. This time, it wasn't because I felt compelled to throw around a few words of Korean in class to control the students, but because we teachers were commanded to administer speaking tests through the phone (so the parents can see our dedication). In order to actually get whoever answers the phone to give it to the student, however, requires a few phrases of Korean. However, there are still two students who are very resistant - one who never picks up the phone, and the other whose mother prattled at me in Korean for a while curiously (and I, of course, could answer none of her questions, and when I said I'd call back tomorrow, she was all too eager to hang up. Was she just giving me a hard time?)

The other instance I had to speak bits of Korean was about two weeks ago, when my vice academy owner came to observe my youngest class three days in a row. I didn't mind letting her see that I used little bits of their language to control the classroom. The students also expect me to speak Korean more than the other foreigner teacher - he's married to a Korean woman so he actually Can speak Korean - because I look Asian. I run into this on taxis a lot, when they ask where I'm from, and I reply "American" and then they gesture to my face or say, "Oh, but you're Asian..."

This week is madly easy, though. If this job were this way all the time, I'd stay here forever and ever. There are no middle school classes, because they are taking some time off to study for their midterms. While administration gave us those phone calls to make so that we'd have something to do, plus all those meetings about how to teach TOEFL and NEAT (the standardized tests to get into middle school and college, much like the U.S. MCAS and SATs). Today I even had to quickly design a test for the youngest classes, because the academy owner felt that they should be inundated into the standardized testing system early.

Before we all left work today, the academy owner came around to pass out little plants to everyone. I stared and was like "What is it?" The head teacher says "You Eat it" so I immediately bit into it and chewed. Perhaps it was good for you, but one of the other teachers says it is bad for pregnant women. It tasted really bitter, and I forgot to say Thank You, but I appreciated being given the spice and having had the chance to taste it nevertheless.