Austin Plus News

The trip to Austin had been Ford's idea. He wanted to visit UT Dallas to see the campus, seeing as he was applying there for graduate school. (He got in.) While he toured that campus with his quiet brother and parents, Joey and I were driving around Austin, sampling different parts of its cuisine.

There were food trucks. In fact, more than half of the food industry was made of food trucks arranged in various lots. We tried out donuts, subs, cupcakes, but occasionally, we did hit an actual restaurant for their delicious steak, some big sandwiches and alcoholic drinks. Everything was plus sized and spiced much more richly than New England could ever bear. Also, MA was still cold at this time, and TX was up in the 70s-80s. Perfect early spring trip.

We also visited some odd museums at my insistence, because I can't just keep eating. There was an arts museum downtown that had two floors but some pretty but simple modern art. There was the Museum of the Weird which was very entertaining, even though I'm pretty sure most of it were hoaxes. Believing in it was more fun, but the skeptic in me grows stronger nowadays.

For the last night of the trip, Ford, Joey, his brother Jack and I went through the Austin strip of clubs and bars. Ford wanted techno and house music, whereas Joey wanted only hard rock. We even tried to dance. We're so terribly inept... But we had so much fun.

Now, the news. I had gotten a new job that will start in twelve days. It's temp to hire, so I don't know how long I'll be there. It's a call center in Quincy servicing Fortune 500 companies' internet and broadband. They do more, but the department that I'll be in will be doing that. After my less than a year stint at Phoenix Charter Academy, this came as a welcome surprise. More to come.

For the Children

Hi! Three months later. While the days have become a little bit of a routine at Phoenix Charter Academy, today was different, because it was the 2013 Benefit Gala. Since PCA is a nonprofit organization, an event like this makes perfect sense. We raised a lot of money - I would guess maybe around $20,000 plus? - though I could never give you an exact amount. Someone else was keeping track; that was not my job.

My job was A/V for the show. Now, I wasn't really in the background so much as tucked into a corner of the stage and running back and forth between there and the projector room, which was past a hallway and tucked into another smaller room. All the materials were prepared for me: Powerpoint slides, music, and even a short film. My main duties were to make sure everyone can see everything in a pretty fashion in the right order, and that the sound was going at the right volume.

That sounds simple, except that the game plan keeps changing because one of the two MCs like to improvise quite a bit. I didn't mind, it kept the show lively. So did the hanging projector which didn't seem to like staying in one set space, so I had to readjust it a few times. So there were about 200 to 300ish people put into this small to moderately sized space with a stage. There were some cocktail tables in front with dainty chairs, but most of the people were standing. Food trays with deliciousness were scattered all around the space, with drinks, tshirts, raffles and other paraphernalia at the edges.

There was dancing, a silent auction and a live auction and some speeches. The speeches were the most moving parts for me. Here we were, in a recovering economy, with so much pessimism going on everywhere, but there are still people out there willing to invest in underprivileged teenagers on the off chance that most of them will turn out okay (despite horror stories like juvey time and drugs). It also reminded us that the day to day work that we do - for me, fixing computers, but for the teachers and tutors, urging young adults to go back to class - has a deep impact, and we are actually making life and circumstances much better for a lot of people.

While the planning was a collaboration between 3 women and took months, the actual implementation only took a few hours, and the modest school building was transformed into a place to entertain and to be entertained. The raffle prizes were impressive, too. Red Sox tickets, Celtics tickets and the signed basketball, cooking classes, trips to different states, and even a band playing live at your house for an hour and a half. The school staff with maybe a handful of students and interns, about less than 150 people, put all of this together - after teaching 5 hrs of classes - within 4 hrs. It amazes me how efficiently people can work and the amount of things they can accomplish when they agree on something.

For me, there was even a short personal span during the day when I accompanied my supervisor and 3 female students to a CVS to shop for pantyhose. The 3 girls were friends, and 2 of them were a lesbian couple, my supervisor did the driving, and then there's me riding shotgun. They were talking about teenaged girl things: gossip, boys, condoms, the tiny variations of colors in different products. This work place is truly like no other, and I can see why the people who can endure the long hours and emotionally demanding workload retrieve so much satisfaction from it. They defy statistics and normal logic in the most steadfast and optimistic ways possible. It's hard not to grow to at least like them a lot.

Hit the Ground Running

Hi, folks. Last we heard from me, I had left South Korea. Even though I'm back home now in Boston, MA, in the U.S. of A, my personal story is far from over - being at the prime of my life and all. ;-) I've been home for 26 days so far. So, reverse culture shock exists.

When I heard about it from other people, it struck me as kind of a myth. How hard can it be to readjust to the life that one has always had? Well, for me ... Not that hard. There are many disorienting mini-events to make me realize I've changed as a person, and my sleeping schedule is still trying to fix itself after about three weeks, but everything else is pretty okay.

During the first week, when two of my friends (who are married to each other) visit, I realize when trying to give them a tour that I had forgotten how to use the MBTA. The prices had increased again. It might just be that I had been in and out of airports for about forty something hours, but my legs felt a bit atrophied and I thought that Cheongju is not nearly as much of a walking city as Boston is.

My skin became very dry again, without the famous South Korean summer humidity. The water here is more metallic. Even though my mother mainly cooks only vegetables, the American diet feels a lot more fatty than Korean food, and a lot less salty as well. Cheongju's air quality is definitely much better than Boston's, despite our proximity to the ocean. My room is so much smaller and more cramped in comparison to my apartment in either Cheongju or on Daebudo. I miss having a lot less stuff. I miss waking up to complete silence, because I lived alone.

I love my sister, though. She thinks my cat and I are both beautiful. She'd say so to the cat when she thinks I'm not around.

My cat pretty much acclimated just fine. Eugene is grateful for my mother and sister's presences when I'm focused on something else and not paying attention to him. There is far more furniture to climb, and more small dark places to hide and sleep in. I groom his fur about every three days, and his appetite is similar - not that I would know the difference between Korean and American cat food.

I did make some changes for my own comfort. I bought a smart phone. I created a wireless network in the apartment, so I can use internet anywhere in the house. I spend a lot of time at the library, because it's much more quiet there since TV's are not allowed. My days are occupied by job searching, hanging out with friends, video games and a rapidly growing list of books on my Kindle Touch. When I play the MMORPG Maplestory, the subtle cultural influences from the game's having been developed by Koreans are far more obvious to me now. I bought classes in Mandarin that will start next month. I bought a YMCA membership so I can indulge in spiking my adrenaline when I get restless.

I get interviews, and I wait for the results. Let nothing curb the ambitions of this young woman.

Korea Somewhat Interrupted

Hi, guys. I am UNBELIEVABLY tired, because it's been a very hectic day despite my no longer having a job. Let's go over what happened, also because I am a bit too rattled to go to sleep at the moment.

This morning, a friend took me to Choongdae, the local university, so that we could book our individual flights. I had a samgeokkimbap for breakfast. I booked my flight to Japan for a very good price of around $350. Then he and I went to get omerice for brunch.

Then, I went back to the animal hospital to get the rabies certification for my cat Eugene. Even though I wanted to take him on the flight with me, there are two layovers for the cheapest flight, so I don't want him to suffer much. I buckled and emailed the Pet Airlines guy to pick him up on the 27th. While I am in Japan, my yoga teacher will be taking care of him for a week.

After that, I decided to ship a suitcase at the post office, but of course, found out once again that they won't ship suitcases (especially not by sea) if it's over 20kg. So I ended up having to take everything out of my suitcase and put it into 2 boxes they supplied, and the sum came to about $73.

Being very pleased with having booked the flight for Japan, I booked the hostel too, all 7 nights, and wrote down the directions from the airport to the hostel. As I was trying to book my flight home to Boston, I got distracted because there's a woman who wants to take some of the furniture off my hands.

So I attempt to go meet her at 5, but then her schedule intervened, and I wandered around Shinae instead, putting together this Greek/classical outfit for no reason other than vanity. It all cost about $130. But first, I had a blueberry cream cheese waffle and Earl Gray tea for lunch. Then I went home for a while and was facebooking. Then I went to go meet the woman who wants furniture. I remember thinking, I spent a lot of time at Choongdae's front gate today, while drinking a small size aloe juice.

She came by, she's very friendly and talkative. We went back to my apartment, and she wanted all the things she said she would, so I helped her take the bookshelf, bookcase and water kettle to her apartment. We had to dismantle the bookshelf a bit first. I also gave her quick dried food I knew I wasn't going to finish. And a 3-meter ethernet wire. We got to talking, and she's also from Boston. I miss Boston. We got a cab back to her place, which is very far on the other side of town. She gave me $10 for the taxi home, and I was grateful.

Then I went outside and took the bus. But the bus was the last bus and stopped only at the bus rest stop where they all go at the end of the night. I got off, but I had no idea where I was. I remember the lady talking about it, and I am very much at the east end of town. I walked for about 15-20 min. before I could find a taxi. I was so relieved when I did, because I was getting hungry again. Most of the food I had had all day were snacks. I bumped into the head teacher who helped fire me when I got home, and I told him life is awesome without TOPIA.

When I got home, one of my photographers asked me to register with Forever 21 the Korean site, so I did that fumblingly, while trying to finish booking my flight home. In the few hours I was gone, the price had gone up $200! @.@ So then I finished booking my flight home - because it was still cheaper than the other prices, even the price at Choongdae. Then I registered for a familiar clothing store - in a foreign language.

After that, I realized there were huge holes in my plans to paraglide with my friends on the 16th, so I called the company again to fix those holes, and now there is much more information. But I still faltered and kind of freaked out in front of my friends. I emailed my mother and sister about the cat. I plotted out the rest of my schedule with my Australian Korean BFF, and we're going to some herb gardens tomorrow, with something as yet unknown for Wednesday. Because I'm meeting her tomorrow about 9ish around her apartment, I should go to sleep now.

It will be a deep sleep. Zzzzz....

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.

Cycles of the Moon

During quieter moments, I often wonder how life would be different for me if I were Korean and had to go through this school system. They study roughly sixteen to eighteen hours a day. Up until recently, that included Saturdays as well, which means only one resting day. Aside from art class, most of the curriculum is comprised of memorizing ginormous amounts of information. I have no doubt that were I in one of their places, I would be much less likely to be the writer I am today. Their legal system is completely different, so I would imagine the whole process of getting published is also completely different. I love their equivalent of Borders, though.

Nevertheless, they are who they are, and I am myself. Once more a semester has ended, and another new one has begun. Most of it is the same, but I have two new textbooks to teach to fairly low level kids. Aside from the usual grappling against altering my own style to suit these books, there are a few more challenges this semester. One of them is the familiar challenge of kids staring at me because they have no idea what I'm talking about - I'm just the strange foreigner who's telling them what to do and they're trying to figure it out. The other is that since Sean quit, everyone in the office has at least one day per week where we teach five classes in a row. This makes for really long days, and for me, they are Monday and Thursday.

Some students leveled up, and others didn't. Every class is new, because there is at least one kid I don't know. But there is a comfort level with the kids that I do know. The other challenge is that not all the textbooks came at the same time, so there are some classes where we had to basically make up some random thing for them to do. The head teacher decided to make them write a self introduction essay and then present it. I got called in for a talking to because some kids said others were playing with their cell phones, and also some say I was under prepared. It's not just the kids who don't have books sometimes, though - we teachers don't get copies of the books for some classes.

In terms of personal challenges, sometimes I feel that maybe because Koreans grew up in such a competitive society, they get used to acting like they always have something to prove. Literally everything is a competition. Today I was told that it's common for students to put their test scores on their resumes for consideration by colleges, and then later, as graduates for consideration by jobs. Everyone seems to have a do or die attitude.

The academy owner likes to annoy me by keeping close tabs and coming into my classes in attempts to point out things that I've missed. For example, after I got a talking to about some students playing with their phones, he caught someone and took the student's phone in front of me. I'm sure that in his mind, he's trying to help and this is his way of motivating me or something, but I really just feel harassed.

Then I feel like this is the way this society works. If someone higher than you in status feels like you're not doing something that you ought to, they'll just harass and alternatively make your life miserable until you hide all your feelings of scorn and contempt for them, even if you take only the most minimalist steps in doing what they want.

From what I gather, the whole atmosphere when it comes to foreigners has become somewhat more hostile. Because another coworker is quitting soon, the academy owner is urging us to turn our documents in to him again, to make sure that the organization has hold of our visas, with the excuse that it's an order from the government. The government itself is making the contracts of even the public school teachers much more dependent on their staying for the entire duration of the contract. In somewhat related news, I just got my national criminal background check, but I wonder if it's worth the effort to find another job in this country if it means staying here for a longer period of time.

Chain of Command

With the half-lull between the semester over for the middle school students and the new semester earnestly under way, events have settled into something of a routine. I was glad for it, since the middle schoolers coming to TOPIA mainly because their parents don't want them going anywhere else meant that I had to be wedded to the copy machine. I had to photocopy answer keys and then white out the answers to pretend that these were workbooks, since the real workbooks weren't available.

A new start comes with new joys and a new set of problems. While I really enjoy the pretty set of reading books in the Spotlight series, the writing books tend to have too many activities for the time allotted. This is especially true since the daily vocabulary tests started up again and moved the whole schedule forward by twenty minutes. The activities in the debate books are more than repetitive, encouraging the kids to brainstorm the same topic over and over. For middle school debate, the books show both sides of an issue, but the research team chose issues that I don't think the kids care about. For example, very few Koreans are animal rights activists - this is a meat eating country, after all.

There's also a new class named Library. While the elementary school students are adjusting pretty well, the middle school students and we teachers are not. The textbook for the middle school Library classes has many grammar oriented activities, while most of the teachers want to teach it like a literature or book club type class. I was teaching it as a grammar class because I was going by the activities in the textbook, but since teachers disagree and the students have been complaining, there have been a handful or so of meetings to improve this class. Some meetings were right after work, so all of us had to stay a couple of hours after without overtime pay. I've been told that this is business-as-usual in Korea, whereas I know Americans would probably raise a riot.

The grading system is also kind of on the fritz. While we can input the homework grades for debate classes, we can't for the rest of the classes so everyone has been kind of ignoring the fact. We can upload the homework assignments for all the kids, thankfully, but it's inconsistent. Just two days ago, some classes didn't show up in the database. The next day, some kids showed up with no homework and blamed the database even though all teachers assign homework in class, on the board.

While all of this is a tad frustrating, I wasn't affected much until today. Today I got hit directly by the chain of command. What happened was that the private academy owner's son is in one of my writing classes, and he's cocky enough to laugh at the rest of the class out loud. One of the female students felt offended, but instead of speaking up about this, she goes home and tells her mother. Her mother calls TOPIA in a rage, so the head teacher of the foreigner teachers gets to deal with her since he's the homeroom teacher of that class. He goes searching for any "incidents," and when it was my turn I didn't think what happened was anything so I just said the boy was cocky and didn't mention it.

Today, apparently what happened was that head teacher tells the girl's mother that nothing was amiss, so she gets even more angry. Then he hears what I said to two other teachers regarding what the student said in the "incident" and comes back to lecture me about not giving him all the information he needs.

All this is the simple result of one kid being a jackass, while the female student overreacts and then her mother does too, so the head teacher comes to say something to me about it. I'm going to talk to the academy owner's son alone the next time this happens, but I can't tell the girl to ignore the opinions of others since head teacher wouldn't tell me who she is. I'll report anything out of the ordinary about this class specially to the head teacher, but I won't do this for everything the kids say to each other, because they're cruel on a daily basis consistently.

This kind of politics happens all over the Earth, so this has nothing to do with whether I am in South Korea. In fact, it feels to me like an episode out of "Boston High School" or "The Wire" - and unfortunately, today I was the one being kicked. I won't let it happen again tomorrow.

Mother Earth, Love Me Weary

Two bigger events happened. One, it's been two weeks since the schedules for the new semesters at work came in. Two, I helped clean up a beach in 30 degree Fahrenheit weather on the same island that I taught on last year.

While my teaching hours start earlier now - 3:10 or 2:30 as opposed to 4:00 like before - they are fairly stable. I have five classes a day, and the new system of all kids in the same level using the same book means that there are less books to plan around, but we might have to teach the same lesson twice in one day or one week. The debate books are more detailed, like the training had promised, and having a library class means I get to teach stories sometimes.

There was a week and a half of no middle schoolers, because they have to study for big exams at their school. The younger ones just got into middle school, the regular middle schoolers showed up at TOPIA, and the older ones studied for and took an exam that determines which high school they go to. Management had us choose a random textbook to teach the middle schoolers who showed up, so we've been making photocopies of those pages and occupying them in a more casual manner than usual. However, testing period was officially over today, so I assume the regular curriculum with their new textbooks will begin tomorrow.

Saturday morning, I woke up at 5:30am to quickly pack, then caught a taxi to the express bus station. The bus there took me to Seoul, where I transferred from line 9 to line 4 and reached Seoul Station minutes before the Daebudo Ecotour group was going to depart. The commute took me three hours. We reached Daebudo in an hour. After eating, we went around to places on the island where birds gathered and heard lectures about the different kinds of birds that live there.

Then we went to a museum, where I learned about the different kinds of mud flats and the four different kinds of salt in existence. It was connected to an underground aquarium too, so we saw some live fish that were not models. After dinner, there was a workshop where they had us brainstorm and give a presentation on how to satisfy all the stakeholders in a piece of land, while trying to improve the environment there at the same time. I took the initiative to lead and got two tickets to an exhibit about Tutankhaman at the Gwacheon National Science Museum. =)

The next day was the actual beach clean up, and the amount of trash made me irritated at people's careless practices. Most of the junk was from people who had barbecued on the beach and fishermen. It was mostly plastic wrappers from snacks, and Styrofoam bits from floating objects attached to nets that the fishermen use. There were also a good two or three intact fishermen's body suits. There was much more, and the whole pile could be five or six feet high and five square feet wide. South Korea's beaches are no more polluted than any beaches in an industrialized country in the world, though.

Afterwards, we ate lunch, and all of us headed home. I got home by 7:30-ish pm, and was happy to settle down and just play video games for a while.

End and Begin a Semester

The debate competition ended with a sigh of relief from everyone, except for the higher level kids who enjoyed etching out the ideas and details of one topic, because it involves a lot more speaking than writing and less homework.

It occurred in a gumdo training room beneath TOPIA. (Gumdo is a martial art style that's like kendo, but geared toward big groups of enemies instead of just individual combat. Kendo is a Japanese one-on-one sword fighting style complete with structure and armor. ) While more than just this private academy uses this building, I think the academy's owner has the rights to it, which is why we have to clean the classrooms after all the kids leave at 10pm and the Korean teachers clean much more during unofficial office hours.

 We moved some unused bookcases and shelves into the giant store room next to it, cleaned it up, and then moved all the chairs (except for two classrooms) and a handful of tables down into the training room in the basement. That only took one sentence to explain, but the actual process is always a lot slower. For example, I had to hold open the elevator consistently for people to move chairs and tables into it. Before that, it took a while to move all the chairs and tables from their classrooms to the space in front of the elevator. Once we moved all the chairs and tables to outside of the elevator in the basement, we still had to place them in the training room. It also took three or four trips because the elevator is roughly only four feet by four feet.

The preparation was a lot more work than the actual competition. While I did judge one elementary competition in a panel with two other teachers, one part of the competition itself only took maybe forty minutes. There were roughly five rounds. In between, the vice academy owner treated the kids and teachers with hamburgers and cola. The kids who were too young to participate watched a movie until their time was up on that day, and I babysat them with one other teacher to make sure they don't get too out of control or make a mess of the classroom since they got hamburgers and cola as well. The first four rounds took place in classrooms on the fourth floor.

Only the final round took place in the big training room, where several banners about TOPIA have been put up, and a new banner for the debate competition itself hung behind the two competing teams. Aside from all the teachers, the academy owner and vice owner, all the students and a tiny number of parents made up the audience. The students get restless, and we had to shush them many times. The judges sat in front of the audience, the podium is in the middle, and the two teams sat on either side of the podium. The elementary teams had five members each, while the middle school teams had three students each. The final round took around an hour and a half to two hours.

The winners received cash prizes; the runner ups received participation certificates and dark chocolates that we teachers had to pass out next week in class. We also had to skip some chapters in the book so that we can say we finished the textbooks, since the semester ends this week. I went in this past Saturday to proctor an interview and grade some placement tests, and I'm not sure how much I would receive for compensation. I also have to wait one more month for health insurance.

Two weekends ago, all the teachers plus our supervisors went to Daejeon for training. The new program is called Debate and Library. There will be next textbooks, and the teaching will be much more reading and debate based. This is good for teachers who like using story formats, but bad for everyone else. There will be new schedules, which will include the one or two new teachers who have arrived since the last entry. I was just getting used to these textbooks and this routine, but situations change quickly - such is life.

Debate Competition

A month into my new job, working at TOPIA, there is a randomly announced debate competition. While there were three debate competitions before, they were only for the higher levels on a voluntary basis, for students who have taken the debate class. Now, the entire schedule has been paused, all syllabi notwithstanding, for a new version of the debate competition that's for all levels, whether they signed up for the debate classes or not, on a semi-voluntary basis. It's just that those kids not participating in the contest will still have to partake in the group oriented debate classes for everyone.

Teachers are suddenly grouped together, whether they've previously taught debate or not. Information meetings are held at the last minute, people are lost, but everyone's winging their way through. At the risk of sounding like I'm stereotyping, I wager to say that snap decisions from higher up that overhaul everything at a moment's notice is a Korean practice. This is encouraged by the way employees don't complain even when very discontent, because it is viewed as a sign of weakness, not that something might be wrong with the system. The way people compare each other is used to persuade people to work harder towards the ideal.

Sometimes I feel like this 'the group is always right' mentality might be more consistent than the American ideals of individuality, given that democracy is basically that group opinions overrule any one voice, and the majority wins. However, that is not to say I believe it's right to see dissension as a sign of weakness, because most of the time that is probably not true. I'm never sure whether or how much bias there is in my thinking, though, because I was raised in an American system where the loudest opinions are the most easily heard (and more so assumed to be correct). The underdog is the hero in American culture; that is, the dissenter is usually seen as right.

In this situation though, I have no real choice but to go with the flow. The elementary school children are using semi-parliamentary style debate, where there are five members per team, and one team is for the motion, whereas the other team is against the motion. The pro team always goes first, then the con team goes, with the introduction. The same is true for arguments one, two and three, where a person always replies in a rebuttal to the points that the previous person makes, and then speaks more in detail about her own argument. She should end with giving evidence. In the conclusion, the con side goes first, so that the pro team can have the final rebuttal, and then everyone in the house votes on the motion after listening to this debate in real life, but in the competition, the judges will vote.

Meanwhile, the middle schoolers will use parliamentary style debate. Instead of pro and con, the sides are named government and opposition. Each side will have three speakers, and every speaker has a name. On the government side, we have the prime minister, the deputy prime minister, and the government whip. On the opposition side, we have the leader of the opposition, the deputy leader of the opposition, and the opposition whip. Government goes first, as with the elementary schoolers, then the opposition. As before, the present speaker will contradict the prior speaker's points. This time, however, everyone has to give evidence, not just the people giving the arguments. The first two speakers on each side has to talk about the topic, give three points with evidence, and the whips give more supporting evidence. Then the opposition gives a reply speech before the government does, and the debate is at an end.

The first round will be on November 9th, with the final round on November 11th. I'm not sure who will be the judges of the competition, but I know that some parents will be there, so our academy owner wants us to prepare the children very well. After this, the schedule will return to being guided by the syllabi and then everything will be as usual. I've been having a bit of a hard time both adapting to all of this and having time at the end of the work day to create as I usually do. I miss my drawings, poetry, fiction, photography, video games and books. Of course, there's also social networking and blogging.

Promise to Give 'Em Ecstatic Hell

Substituting for the coworker who had to go to the dentist from last time went very smoothly, because my one year of experience teaching ESL on Daebudo really did make me comfortable with South Korean children and having authority over them. Naively, I thought that first mild test was the only one, and that I'd have started to officially teach by now.

Nope. TOPIA had me back at observation of coworkers' classes, which relaxed me a bit because it was easy and I didn't know for how long I was going to be doing that. I told them I was ready to teach, but then they had me Microteach, which means I pretended that a panel of coworkers are students, have half the duration of actual class time, with material from their highest English middle school class. It was a reading comprehension class, so I had my coworkers read passages and discuss the main points of the story. When evaluation time came, they really kicked me down a notch - as was their job to do so.

It felt like a Maoist style criticism, and I was so tense that I started hyperventilating. I only got better when half of them left and I sat down, only to know that my skin had gone chalk white and there was a half subconscious part of me willing myself to breathe. The administrator Yvonne seemed really disappointed and hadn't spoken to me, but the academy owner patted my shoulder in sympathy and almost all my coworkers gave me pep talks because they all had to go through this trial by fire. In hindsight, it was true that I was under prepared, but to be fair, it wasn't that I didn't teach - it was simply not anything similar to what they were looking for. That was Wednesday.

Because this is a private academy, what they are looking for is what matters the most. It's similar to the way that one has to fit in with the corporate culture of whatever big company a person is working at in America - like EMC, the data storage company, practices Lean Six Sigma which emphasizes customer service and "project focus on the key business gaps and strategies critical to the business success". TOPIA's principles are Credibility, Competence and Compassion. The Microteaching aspect probably focuses on credibility and competence - in the way that they want me to teach.

They wanted me to go by the syllabus, which means that I will not have any students read anything in class - they will only go over the workbook exercises with my half guidance with the assumption that they all did the homework. So then my real role - as was true for my time at the public school in Daebudo as well - was to discipline them, sporadically add in new ideas and personality to the textbooks (read: be a particularly authoritative performance artist), and engage them in conversation while adding in new ideas

And I did do that, partially, but I hadn't used the workbook and wasn't informed of how to read the syllabus, or the very structured and ordered way they had wanted me to use class time. I only had maybe twenty minutes because I spent ten photocopying reading pages from the student book last minute - while they did tell me that I was going to Microteach, they didn't tell me the specific chapter or structure they wanted - and so I thought teaching the way I taught before was going to be fine.

So now that I've been fully woken up to what they actually want from me, I've spent the last two days preparing. The next Microteaching is tomorrow, Friday. To make up for my lack of satisfactory performance in their eyes, they're actually having me demonstrate two times back-to-back, so I have to go in half an hour early. I'm well prepared now, having planned everything that I think they want down to the half minute. This also means I should go to bed almost right after I log off here. Wish me luck, and goodnight.

Curriculum

So my schedule goes something like this.

I teach "morning English" every day of the week, twenty minutes before actual classes when I think of a simple game for kids of all ages involving English. So far, I've only come up with a song to sing, Hangman, Simon Says, and because Friday I was feeling lazy, I just let them watch Looney Tunes instead.

Then on Mondays and Wednesdays, I teach gym classes. So far, I've had them play tag and soccer, and haven't thought of anything much else yet. Mr. Jeong says that I should go by the textbooks and use English to teach them stretches and strengthen them through obstacle courses, except that I'm not sure how to go about that, so I will need to think of something soon. Monday's three periods are for grades one through three, whereas Wednesdays are for grades four through six.

There's also the afterschool activities, but these are kind of casual, no one really cares what I do with them, so sometimes they convince me to let them go outside, or just hang out, or something or other. But I also try to have them review the things they learned throughout the day through word games and such.

The goal is to have conversational English, so there are a lot of skits and role playing. The more talented ones can memorize the lines and act them out immediately, whereas most of them read them out loud from the "script". To make things fun, multimedia is almost always used - from sing alongs to memory games with prizes to whatever else we can think of. The main classes are through Mr. Jeong, so I don't actually assign homework - and this is perfectly fine with me.