Birthdays, Children's Day, Parents' Day, and Teacher's Day
May is pretty packed with holidays in Korea. I've already mentioned Buddha's Birthday on May 2nd, but here are some others.
Korea not only splits Valentine's Day into three separate holidays, but it also combines Mother's Day and Father's Day into Parent's Day, which shows how different cultures can carve up the world in different ways with no one way being objectively 'better' or 'worse'... ackkk... thesis flashback...
Anyway, Tuesday May 5th was Children's Day. I distinctly remember asking when Children's Day was when I was in elementary school, and being told that every day was Children's Day. Apparently the proper question was not so much 'when' but 'where', and the answer is 'in Korea'. Kids all got the day off of school, but we celebrated the day before with games in kindergarten. I have no idea what happened on actual Children's Day because I celebrated by sleeping off my adventures in Seoul.
Friday of the same week (May 8th) was Parents' day, where children traditionally give their parents carnations along with usual Mother's/Father's day stuff. In my kindergarten classes we made cards with paper carnations together. On the cards the children wrote messages. Some of the kids were old enough to write their own messages in English, but others needed help, so we brainstormed some ideas about why they should thank their parents. Lindsay and I wrote up their responses on the board for them to copy, which read roughly as: "I love you Mom and Dad! You are such great cooks. Thanks for all the delicious food. Also thank you for all of your hard work. Love, [name]." This worked fine, except that the next period the Korean teacher's aid (whose English is rather poor and who constantly reinforced the kindergarteners' bad grammar... must not rant...) had other classes copy the message from one of the students in our classes, but the card she picked at random was of one of the students who wrote her own message. Thus about twenty students copied down: "I love you Mom and Dad. Mom, you make delicious food. Dad, you gets the money. I love you, Dora". Our academic supervisor has a son in the latter class, and saw the card and was thoroughly confused as to why Lindsay and I wrote such a convoluted sentence (she had no problem with the sexism). We eventually straightened the matter out after some language barrier caused confusion.
Added to these holidays was our school's celebration of the April and May birthdays for the kindergarteners. This time I remembered to bring my camera.
Luis, Colin, and Neil are from Jupiter, the baby class (they are roughly three years old, or 'five')
Neil was one of my first students, and he is much more fun to teach now that he is with students his own age instead of a year and a half older than him.
The birthday children wear dresses or suits. Some of the dresses are disturbingly like wedding dresses, though at least none of them were wearing veils this time. Dora is in Neptune class ('7' year olds), and Madeline is in Uranus class ('6')
Danny is in Pluto ('7', but they started learning English this year) and Taylor is in Saturn, the one class I don't teach. Taylor's teeth are totally rotten to the point where they are half gone.
This is Kevin's default expression. The suit suits him. He's in Mars, the oldest and most advanced kindergarten class. 
...And this is Olivia's default expression:
No matter how badly my day is going, if I see Olivia's face light up as she sees me I instantly feel better. Luke also rarely fails to amuse:
Raymon here is clearly having an off day, but he is usually pretty fun. He is half Korean and half Nepalese, so he is working on his third language and is a year ahead of most of his classmates. I'm hoping his super nice dad will offer me a place to crash in Nepal, since he still lives there and comes to Korea on business and to visit his family. 
Part of the mandatory fun of birthday parties at ECC is taking class pictures. You can tell that they love it (you can tell by the expressions that range from forced smiles to distant stares to outright hostility):
We teachers are all amused that James didn't notice the girly headgear being held behind him. The baby class also was pretty bored once we wrangled them all in there.
Jupiter actually seems to be having fun. The boy at the bottom left is Scott, the son of my academic supervisor.
Beckham and Carrie are the children of the school's manager. Yeah, it's not awkward at all teaching those three students...
Beckham's classmate Ellen is playing with dolls not much larger than Kevin, the school's youngest and smallest student.
Keeping Kevin in the room is a full time job, much less keeping him in his seat and working.
During most of the birthday parties I indulge the kids on their favorite activity: having me hoist them up in the air and generally letting them climb all over me. This time I stopped for a cup of tea with Henah, the kindergarten teacher who also teaches me Korean:
As long as I had my camera, I decided to document my school. This is the Noeun Best One Building, with YBM ECC (my company) on the fifth and sixth floors. 
The second floor houses The West Wing ('sence 2005' [sic]), whose logo is a variation on the US's except that instead of arrows and an olive branch the eagle is holding forks and hops.
You may have noticed that Koreans have no problem slapping signs all up and down a building, and ours is hardly an exception.
Now, back to the holidays. Teacher's day (May 15th) wasn't all that interesting, except that I got a few odd gifts and some cute cards. The gifts included cologne (which I've never even considered wearing before), Mary Kay moisturizer/sunscreen (which hopefully won't have bleach in it the way most Korean sunscreens do; they like fair skin here to an unhealthy degree), and soap. I also got a few flowers, including one addressed to 'Rahden', which I eventually figured out was meant to be me (I think the h/n mix up was just sloppiness of handwriting, whereas the R/L confusion is a matter of the Korean language not making that distinction, and the e/o mistake would be excusable for anyone because my name isn't spelled the way it sounds). The four girls of Neptune class got together to make cards for me, which were very cute, and their parents got me a 50,000 won gift certificate good for a wide variety of stores. I'm not sure yet if I'll get two weeks' worth of groceries or blow it on a huge steak dinner. Of the cards, one read "Landon teacher very very very very very very I love you". Another has printed on it by the card makers an amazing assortment of English phrases on the front that were obviously pulled off a random website so that there would be English on it:
Happy DayThis part makes sense, but then things get interesting:
Wishing you
happiness today,
tomorrow
and always
Sign up for the M update to receive monthly e-mail updates, including news about the poets, poems, and features most recently added... Find a poet by searching names and titles in or database of more than 500 poet biographies.[Elipses in the original.] This part was obviously pulled off a random website so that there would be English on it (or perhaps it was mistaken for a poem on a poetry website). But the card only gets more fun:
Everybody needs![all punctuation and capitalization as in the original]. Oh, Konglish.
She's a electric. I need a time. Little by little
Stand by me. All of the world. Wonderwall
Love Love Love. What are you doing now?
May I help you? think you
2 comments:
I'm surprised by how small your classes are. Are all classes that size in Korea, or just the ones in the private, extra-school school?
Its good to see that you enjoy working with small children. Did you know that would be the case? I keep going back and forth as to whether I would want to try to be a teacher, and though it isn't exactly the same, I'd like to hear what you think of teaching when you finish up there. Do you think its something you'd want to do more of?
All of my classes have a cap of 12 students (theoretically; I briefly had one class of 13). Public schools have classes of 30 to forty, though, just like in the US.
I absolutely want to teach more, but more in order to see the world than anything else. I'm thinking about spending a year in Taiwon, then a year in Japan, a year in Thailand, etc. The actual teaching is sometimes rewarding, often incredibly frustrating, but usually just like a normal job.
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