Just Another Manic Monday

Today was excessively long.

Mondays are always long, due to the obvious premiere of the week after a too-brief weekend, when 4:45 comes earlier than it should, and my weekly duty of Conversation Club.

Each day one of the teachers serves as facilitator for All Day Club, a program aptly named as a club which runs all day, allowing students with extra motivation and free-time to stay at the institute from 9:00 to 3:00 learning English.
The first fifty minutes (9-9:50) are when one of us foreign teachers has duty: it is casual, but requires preparation and of course, presence.

Thus on Mondays my usual two hours of preparation/breakfast time (8-10:00) are cut in half. But this once-a-week occurrence is none so bad, and is then blessedly over-with until the next not-so-anticipated Monday.

Actually, Conversation Club is enjoyable. Last week I challenged the students to tell their favorite color and explain why. Thus followed an interesting discussion of color symbolism and associations. This morning we played a game inspired by Scattergories, in which every space on the board was a different topic and they had to answer a thing beginning with the letter M. Hooray for creativity!

Today, however, my expected 8:00 hour was eliminated as well, when one of our teachers did not show up.

Teacher Bradly, a friendly blue-eyed experienced ESL teacher from Canada with a remarkable penchant for Shania Twain and an actual tendency to say "eh?," married a Korean woman last year and is expecting their baby at any time. The due date is October 21, but only God knows when their little girl will come. So when Bradly did not arrive at 6 AM, and was still absent at 7, my co-teacher Martha and I assumed the time was nigh: Baby was here!

Whether our suspicions were true or not, however, did not matter so much as that Bradly's 7 AM class was awaiting him: someone had to teach. As no one had been notified to come in as substitute, we had to improvise, and awkwardly the three of us (Ron, Martha and myself) sidled into the expectant classroom to announce Bradly's absence, and their own merger into the Level 1 class next door. Martha teaches Level 5 at 7 while I teach Level 4, both highly inappropriate for these Level 2 students. (Our institute's adult program runs from entry Level 1 to graduation Level 6.) So the class, in what seemed reasonable good humor, relocated across the hall to Teacher Ron's room where his few Level 1 students waited.

Fortunately, today was a Review Day (as is every fifth day), when the majority of class is spent on Pronunciation, Dialogue translation, and Conversation; there is no new material to teach. I'm sure the two classes got along fine, despite the abrupt convergence.

As we now knew Bradly to be absent without probability of appearance, we could prepare. For some illogical reason, the institute has decided against hiring a substitute for his five-day paternity leave, and so each of us teachers will be taking over his classes. This is not so difficult for some of us: I am to fill in for his 8 AM Level 1 class, simply adding my workload to 5 adult morning classes rather than 4, inconvenient but certainly doable. However, to cover the 6 and 7:00 classes, one of the teachers who finishes close to 10 PM must come in early, a prospect unpleasant even to consider.
Nevertheless, we know our portending schedule, and so this morning, when Bradly didn't come, we adjusted ourselves.

I scrounged under his desk to find his papers for class, pulled out his Adult binder and headed up to meet his 8:00 Level 1 class. Two students awaited me, I greeted them with words of explanation, and we commenced Review Day with cheerful smiles, the best way to conquer Monday mornings.

The class went well: much of it was spent talking casually and laughing together. The students were interested in me and I in them, as we had not met before, and they were a genial bunch (the four who attended.)

At 8:50, the end of class, I zipped back down the stairs (our staff room is on the third floor, our adult classrooms the fourth) to wolf down a few more spoonfuls of my breakfast and copy a few more game boards for Conversation Club. Amazing what one can accomplish in ten minutes!
One minute before 9:00 I was back in the same classroom to greet the next group of students, the five ladies and two gentlemen who comprise All Day Club. Most of them are Level 1.

After a few minutes of weekend chit-chat, we commenced the Scattergories-esque game and I circulated between the three groups of players to aid and commend accordingly.

When the games had finished we discussed alliteration, ways to rearrange words, add adjectives and verbs to create acceptable answers (ones beginning with M) and acrostics.
Then at 9:50 I bid them adieu, ("Have a Marvelous Monday!") and again tripped down the stairs to finish those last few bites before my 10:00 Level 1 class. Whew.

It was a good morning.

All of the teachers agree that our adult classes are what keep us going, most days. This term I am blessed with highly cooperate junior (children's) classes, all of my students are above the age of 12 and most are quite reasonable. I do have a slew of young teenage boys from whom extracting work is a trial, but overall that second-shift of classes is none so bad. But generally, junior class material is unimpressive, dull, and lessons can range from tedious to scream-worthy.

It was a good morning with students who are faithful, ones who come to class before 6:00 every single morning and persevere through difficult pronunciation and impossible grammar.
It was a good morning with students who are patient, who don't complain when my tongue twists on pronunciation I'm meant to exemplify or completely forget what I'm saying mid-sentence.
It was a good morning with students who cooperate when their teacher is not up to par, or when their classmates' attendance (or lack thereof) has made the classroom echo with absence.
It was a good morning reflecting on how blessed I am: blessed to live only ten-minutes' walk from the school; blessed to have a functioning alarm clock to rouse me from the cozy bed in which I am blessed to sleep; blessed to have coffee in my thermos and clean water in my bottle; blessed to be here among welcoming people who don't resent me for my ignorance of their language and culture.

Every lesson is headed by a "Word of Life": a verse from the Bible. Although I disagree with some Seventh Day Adventist beliefs, I am glad to teach for one of their institutes (SDA Daejeon Dunsan) because of blessings such as these, those reminders of God's ceaseless mercy.

And those words helped carry me through the rest of this Manic Monday, as I finished up a morning of five formal classes and one club, going from 6 until noon, edited Term Project presentations for some of those students, then headed upstairs at 12:35 to meet my dear friend for our bi-weekly Korean/English lesson exchange.
Learning Korean is difficult, especially after working all morning, but what a blessing to learn and be taught by such a patient friend, a woman who graces me with her trust, intimacy, coffee, and lunches, who accompanies me to the phone shop and to the doctor, who prays with me.

It was a good two hours studying Korean and aiding Young with English.
It was a wonderful twenty minutes spent sitting with my dear Korean co-teachers in the quiet in-between, before the other foreign teachers returned for the afternoon junior classes.
What a blessing to feel such warmth! The literal warmth from Hyuna, who hugged me on her lap and rubbed my chilled hands (it was a cold good morning!), and the smiling warmth of laughter and conversation and welcome from Jason, Ace, and Karl, as I disrupted their work with my chatter.

It was a good half hour scribbling down test questions for junior classes, reviewing those term project edits and going over lessons while bantering with co-teachers.
It was a good ten minutes walking home through the pristine September sunshine.
It was a good forty minutes of rest lounging on my bed, snacking and sipping coffee with my feet under the blanket.
It was a good twenty minutes of final preparation, making word searches and printing copies before class.
It was a good two hours of teaching four junior classes.

It was a good ten minutes of cuddling again with Hyuna.
It was a good twenty minutes of preparation for the dark and early of tomorrow's 6:00 class.
It was a good ten minutes homeward listening to my co-teacher's much-needed vent.
It was good to take off my shoes and put on my flannel pajama pants.
It was good to pop bread up from the toaster and make an always-pleasing PB&J.
It was good to sip tea and check my email.
It was good to turn on Netflix--and even better to close it out for the need to write.

It is good now to turn towards sleep.
It's been another Manic Monday. Made extra manic by the mishap of Bradly's phone: it died in the middle of the night and failed to awake him this morning with the usual alarm. (No baby yet!)
But no matter how manic, no matter how exhausting or even atrocious the days may be, they are gone in a blink.
This term is nearing its end, and where has it gone?

It's been a series of Manic Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and blessed Sundays.

Here's to tomorrow and its mania--a too-early alarm and the start of a new unit, and two extra, blessed morning hours in which to breakfast and prepare.
Here's to Tuesday.

Monday, it's been fun.

Le Premier

Introductions: I have finally started a blog.

안냥하세요!

This is the standard Korean greeting, used for "Hello", "Goodbye", and the rhetorical "How are you?"
Literally it means "Are you at peace?", and so should technically be followed by a question mark.
However, I am an English teacher and so allow myself grammatical incorrectness; I am also a writer and so allow myself poetic license.

The more one studies English, the more one recognizes the absurd number of inconsistencies and situational discrepancies which make learning a language so challenging. English is ranked among one of the most difficult languages to learn because of its bastard background. I mean this literally, in that English is the illegitimate offspring of Latin, French, and German, reared in a country fought over by several different people groups and slowly unified by creation of a common language and king. It has continued to develop, filled with unfathomable extraneous letters and syllables, awkward homonyms, synonyms, and idioms, and a vast array of irregular verbs.

Short story: English is tough.
"Difficult, Teacher!" is a phrase I hear often from my English as a Second Language (ESL) students.

In return to this truth I reply, "But it's not impossible!"

This exchange is also a good summary of my life: Difficult, but not impossible. The reason for the possibility is God's grace.

Teaching English in a foreign country where one cannot speak or yet understand the language is awkward. Living in a place where one's looks deviate from the norm and attract constant stares is also awkward. Miscommunication and this status as "exotic other" can be tiresome, frustrating, and wearing on one's nerves.
Lately every time I catch eyes following me in the blatant "Look at that strange creature!" fashion, I mentally retort, "Keep watching: I might do magic!"
I have yet to say these words aloud, thankfully. Although their exact meaning might be lost, the tone of utterance would be clear. And I would only confirm the suspicions of many that foreigners are rude barbarians who redden too quickly, sweat excessively, and disregard civility.

Praise the Lord, God's grace includes many wonders, including patience and ever increasing empathy and compassion. Those qualities are what dam the flow of impatience and intolerance, granting instead gratitude and humor.

I am starting this blog as a regular greeting to those who are far away and so graciously think of me, pray for me, and send letters and cards. It is a genial letter of response in which I will share of my experiences, from mundane to thrilling (mostly in-between.)

This week will mark my fourth month in Korea, and the close of October my fourth month of teaching English for SDA Language Institute in Daejeon. I teach juniors (children) and adults, from 6:00 AM until 7:15 PM (yes, I have time off in the afternoon). The schedule is grueling and the teaching can be exhausting, if only in effort to keep smiling and encouraging the students and co-teachers. But, God is good all the time, and for every challenge He pours out blessings, if only in the satisfaction of that title: "Teacher!"

I never wanted to come to Korea; I never wanted to teach in a boxed-in room; I never considered life in a tiny studio apartment in the midst of a city in a country of an unknown language--but here I am.
This is my life now.
And although it is awkward and exhausting and fraught with frustration, I am glad to be here.