Saturday, June 27, 2009

Day with Dad

On the Saturday before Western Father's Day, the kindergarteners brought their dad to our school. The day was hardly a normal learning experience, so I guess the event was only in part to show that their children knew a little English, and was more about having the fathers meet the teachers and having them actually spend some quality time with their children, which is a rarity in a country where it is common practice for the man of a family to live and work apart from the others and only see them on weekends. Anyway, we mostly just had fun. Each of the classes rotated from room to room, and at each station there was an activity, such as twister, snack making, or throwing balls and having the partner catch it in a basket. I was in the face painting room, where the kids drew on their dads' faces, which was generally hilarious and was an obvious time to bring a camera, which I of course neglected to do. Thankfully Will was kind enough to let me use his pictures. It was fun to see the resemblance between the fathers and their offspring, but by far the best part of the day was to watch the dads in the hallway on their cellphones looking very serious and business-like except for the ridiculous things drawn on their faces. Madeline's dad was by far the most amusing looking. I don't know where she got the inspiration, but the results speak for themselves (I'm pretty sure you can figure out which one he is).

Friday, June 19, 2009

Awwwkward...

This last week I have experienced far more sexuality than I ever ever wanted to as a teacher. First and foremost, one of my older (but still pre-middle school and barely pubescent) students drew some rather inappropriate pictures in her homework book. The most striking one was of a girl in her underwear, blindfolded, and tied to a cross. This makes the student's earlier attempts to sit really close to me and to hold my hand as we walk down the hall even more awkward than they already were, especially since the drawings were somewhere I would inevitably see them rather than it just being some accident that I saw her sketches. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised, since I was thoroughly preoccupied by the idea of sex by the time I was in the third grade, which is a fact that I try not to remember now that I teach so many third graders. I feel certain that I hadn't so much as heard of bondage until much later, but I suppose it is natural that they have since this next generation has had access to the internet their whole lives.

Today there were a couple of lesser incidents. Every kindergarten class has a daily English expression that they need to have memorized by the time they leave in the afternoon. These expressions range from the highly useful ("May I go to the bathroom please") to the moderately amusing ("What is that ridiculous thing on your head?") to the uber depressing ("Heneh Teacher is sad and just wants to be left alone") to the utter useless and bizarre ("The giraffe and the monster became friends and never fought again"[ok, I made this one up, but it really is astoundingly close to real ones that I can't recall word for word right now]), the latter of which I think are from the stories they read in other classes. Anyway, today's daily expression in one class was "Take my hand while you get off", which (I found out after talking to the teacher who chose it) is a rule for disembarking from the school bus, and is actually a phrase handed down from our head office. However, when I first entered the classroom and saw it written in the corner of the whiteboard I busted out laughing and had to fight down the laughter for another couple minutes of the class every time I looked at it. The kids thankfully had no idea what was so funny. Also, I'm glad that at least one of my co-workers has a mind as dirty as mine and also laughed right away, since another one only got it when I mentioned that it was inappropriate and another didn't see what was wrong with it at all.

Finally, in one of my afternoon classes with very small children today a child asked to go to the bathroom, and I said no (the school's policy is that they are only allowed to get water or go to the bathroom during the five minute breaks that they get every 40 minutes because otherwise half the class would go every class period). Upon my refusal Dragon (I don't know how he managed to get the teachers to allow him to change his English name from Frank, and while the teacher in me is mildly annoyed the rest of me thinks it's awesome) proceeded to whip it out, presumably to emphasize his need. Ok, really there was nothing sexual about this incident, but I really would rather not see the genitals of any of my students in any context.

As I said, awkward.

Potential

Before I decided to come to Korea, I spent a long time deeply depressed due to my attempts to figure out what I was doing with my life. I was terrified of setting myself on a career path, and wanted to opt out of the whole system, and I think I'm beginning to be able to put into words why.
All the jobs I've ever wanted don't exist. As a child I was sure that starship commander, ambassador to an alien race, or robotics engineer would be available to me as career options. I've always known that I was more intelligent than those around me, and because of this I thought I had world-altering brilliance instead of recognizing the reality that I was very bright in a dull town and school system. My family and teachers always gushed over my potential. They seemed so confident that I would do something important and amazing, and they encouraged me with the oft told lie that I could be anything I wanted when I grew up with the result that I don't want any jobs that actually exist because they all fall lightyears short of my expectations. Now the times I spend sleeping in gutters are the highlights of my life. I have worked about a dozen shitty short term jobs to avoid having to face the fact that I will never explore the far reaches of the galaxy, or even live on the moon.

Another part of my dissatisfaction with careers is that I think that the current conception of jobs is growing ever more anachronistic. As far back as I can remember I have worked under the assumption that advances in technology and increases in population would make work unnecessary for most people. I think this is why I am so open to socialism: I think that in the near future there will be far less work that needs to be done than what would be sufficient to occupy people, and I don't like the idea of just inventing useless busywork to fill the ever growing gap. I have recently come to realize how unusual that assumption is, especially when talking to people a generation or two older than me. I have a tutor student who is the parent of one of the children at my school, and she was telling me about what a big problem old age was in Korea. People have been saving on the assumption of a shorter lifespan than the current average, and so they have come to need jobs in their old age, and there are no jobs available. The difference in our world views became clear to me as I was thinking how the problem was that society is stuck on the idea that people need to perform full time jobs in order to have their basic needs met when really we could all work less if we were willing to stop obsessing over careers and stop associating people's worths with their level of employment, whereas she saw the problem as being that people live too long now. With my assumption socialism seems nearly inevitable, with the only alternative being people doing things that were totally useless to themselves and others (and almost certainly devastatingly consumeristic). I'm beginning to see why many people have major issues with socialism since while I take it as a basic assumption to take into account whenever contemplating the future that there will be a massive gap between the work that needs to be performed and the available workers, the idea has clearly never even crossed their minds. It was one of those moments when I recognized a core assumption as what it was—an assumption—which let me recognize that it might not be shared.
In the meanwhile, though, I am performing the busywork of teaching English in a part of the world that will probably overtake the English speaking world in importance and prominence in the near future. However, I don't really think of myself as an English teacher, but as a world traveler, which is a job title that is probably as close as I can possibly come to living up to my childhood imaginings.
Update: I should mention that my musings on potential were influenced by this comic.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

The point at which politics, twitter, and comic books meet

Given recent events, I have reevaluated twitter. I earlier rejected it as annoying, shallow, and stupid. I maintain that this is true in most cases. However, currently in Iran it is the only way to communicate with the outside world. The government has blocked most sites, from email servers to facebook, but the way twitter is routed it is difficult to trace and block without shutting down the whole internet (they have in fact slowed it down considerably to prevent people from uploading videos or pictures). It reminds me of a scene from my favorite graphic novel, Transmetropolitan (actually, maybe it's tied with The Watchmen, but that's beside the point), where the protagonist discusses the fact that creative use of technology is out pacing the attempts to regulate or control it.

Thus, while I still don't see why anyone would want anything to do with twitter in ordinary life, it has become an important part of resistance to oppressive regimes (Obama's state department even requested that twitter not take the site down for maintenance as scheduled so that Iranians could continue to send out information.) As Andrew Sullivan has been saying for the last few days, the revolution will be twittered.

Monday, June 15, 2009

Iran

If you haven't been following the Iranian (quite possibly stolen) election you should (I recommend Andrew Sullivan, Talking Points Memo, and Juan Cole). It's fascinating.

If nothing else, this is one of the most amazing photos I've seen taken in the last few years:(hat tip Sullivan)

Existentialism and parenting, part 3

I had an odd thought today.

One of my kindergarten classes--Pluto--is particularly difficult. There are several hyperactive and attention deficit children, about four troublemakers, two others who cannot handle the troublemakers in a remotely appropriate manner, and a couple hard working smart kids (who make it difficult because without the we could just move at a slower pace). About five minutes into that class today a shy little girl named Tiffany started crying and didn't stop. I did my best to comfort her while corralling the others and trying to get them all to understand and do math problems. After the class I sat in the hall with Tiffany for about fifteen minutes with her sitting in my lap crying into my shoulder while I hugged her (a Korean teacher managed to get her to say what was wrong in Korean, and it turns out one of the boys had done something to her, but by this point--an hour later--she actually didn't remember the particular cause). While her little hand held my finger I realized that she really was comforted by my sitting with her, hugging her, and rubbing her back. I also had the odd thought that I would be a pretty good dad.

Here's the flip side of the problems existentialist beliefs cause for parenting: my nihilistic world view actually gives me qualities that are good in a parent. I have gained incredible patience; I don't let things frustrate me anymore and I try to enjoy every moment of my life regardless of my circumstances, so instead of getting impatient or bored I was able to calmly just be there for a child when she needed it. When you don't think anything matters it also means you don't get angry about people 'wasting' your 'precious' time that could be used to do 'worthwhile' things. Also, I have become infinitely more understanding of other people in the last few years. Other people still baffle me in many respects, but I have come to accept that and to understand to some degree. When I believed in objectivity I thought that there was a right way and wrong way to act, and even a right way and wrong way to think about things and value things. Now that I have come to view other value systems as legitimate (i.e. not wrong), I am much better at seeing things from other people's perspectives, which both helps me not get frustrated with them for being 'irrational', and to better understand what they really want and why.

I still don't think I'm a very good teacher because I'm not very good at managing the children as a group and balancing their various skill levels and needs, but I'm very good with them one on one. I'm less patient when they are in groups because it bothers me that they are disrupting the studies of others (something I always hated in public school), but I can deal with even the most difficult kids on an individual basis, which again, makes me think I'd be a pretty good father, assuming of course I didn't end up with septuplets or some hideous litter like that. Working with children, my increasing distance from actually being a child, and my nihilism have all made me change my feelings on having children from sheer horror to ambivalence, which is really a huge turn around if you think about it.

On a tangentially related note, I have learned a Korean sentence that I look forward to using with every missionary that knocks on my door or tries to force literature into my hand as I wait for the crosswalk light to change: "Jeonuen mooshinronja-imnida," that is, "I am a nihilist."

Friday, June 12, 2009

Existentialism and parenting, part 2


(once again taken from the glory that is Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Comics)

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Authors that Reedies are pretentious enought to read

A website has documented the uncanny resemblance between Michael Pollen (author of The Omnivore's Dilemma) and Michael Foucault (quasi-philosopher). It is actually really easy to identify which is which from context (backgrounds, clothing, etc), but without such contextual cues it would be nearly impossible since they look more identical than most of the identical twins I have met.

(Hat tip Matthew Yglesias)

Essay

The students that I have who are both older and more advanced English speakers have to write an essay every week (the younger ones just write journals). This month I nominated a girl named April for the journal/essay of the month. (An amusing side note: April chose her English name in the month of April, and the administrators clearly use 'find and replace' each month to make the attendance sheets, because in May her name on the attendance sheet was May, and now it's June. At least those are still girls' names...) Anyway, here is her unedited essay in response to my question "Should only boys play baseball and only girls play softball, or should boys and girls both play the same sports?"


Girls also can do sports. but many people think girls are weak. Ha! fiddlesticks! Many Women success until now.
Girls can do any sports. I'm girl, I can play soccer, table tennis, baseball, softball, tennis, etc. So, people can't say 'girls are weak!' in front of girls.
In the world, there are many strong girls or women. In Korea, like Mi-ran-Jang. She is a famous weight lifter. She picked up the very big dumbbell. (weight 112kg)
We must play sports, with boy. Girls and boys will mix. example, in one team, boys 2, girls 2. as I said, We must both play the same sports.
We will equality.
You have to throw away 'girls are weak' biased.


I have actually nominated the last three months' winners for journals/essays of the month. April's essay isn't nearly as good as the other two in terms of grammar, structure, or the essay's arguments (the other two kids write at about the level of someone six years older, and they're writing in their second language) but I liked the sentiment and the "Ha! Fiddlesticks!" line tickled me.

Daejeon Transportation

It turns out that you can't take bikes on the subway in Daejeon. Or rather, you aren't supposed to. Today is Lindsay's birthday, so we went out to Indy to eat. As we were leaving it started to rain hard, so Will and I decided we'd rather take the subway than soak our dress clothes biking home. We were stopped by someone who works in the subway, who told us that we couldn't bring our bikes on board. However, she saw the rainwater on our shoulders and thighs and took pity on us (plus, being a foreigner lets you get away with a lot in Korea since they want us to leave with a favorable impression of the country). She did tell us not to take our bikes up and down the subway, which we thought was both unspeakably obvious and suddenly very tempting to try. One really could ride down the Daejeon subway since there are no barriers between the cars, and had more people gotten off before our stop I bet we would have given in to our whims, consequences be damned. Oh well.

Monday, June 8, 2009

Adventures in Solitude, take 2

I have Monday off this week, so I decided to go back to Jirisan National Park, now that it is open. This time my travels had a much greater resemblance to the original plan.

On Friday night after work Will, John, and I went out to a restaurant a couple blocks from our apartment building. For about $20 we were served seven courses of barbecue, including roasted beef, chicken, lamb, pineapple, and pork, as well as an all you can eat buffet of everything from sushi to roast beef to smoked salmon to kiwi. During dinner the power inexplicably went out three different times, though it remained on on the outside of the building, which it covered with neon. The outages seemed very out of place at the upscale restaurant that had a waterfall outside and Plexiglas under our feet with a garden beneath.

After dinner I rushed to get ready to leave, then took the subway to the East Daejeon train station. On the subway I unexpectedly (it was 11pm) ran in to one of my Korean coworkers. She, like most people, thought that it was odd that I was traveling alone, and she also said that I was better about getting out to see Korea than she was. I was on the train from 11:45 pm to 2:30 am. The seats were sold out, so I had to sit on the floor in the dining car, which thankfully wasn't nearly as crowded as when I went to Suwon. I met a Korean man named Kae, who teaches people to be English teachers. We discussed the Korean education system, traveling, freedom, and women. While discussing hobbies he said that he liked martial arts and that even though he is 37 (we would say 35 or 36), he can still jump up in the air and kick three times before landing, and that he can still punch through cement but won't try to punch through harder bricks anymore because he broke his hand doing so. The most astounding part of the conversation concerned his relationship with his wife: he lives in Daejeon during the week and visits his wife and daughter a few towns away on the weekend, and he said his wife has never said "I love you" to him, though other women have said it to him.

Kae's stop was about halfway through my trip, and I read some War and Peace for the rest of the way (which was a rather hefty tome to bring on a backpacking trip, but oh well). In Suncheon I sat outside and read some more then spent about an hour drifting in and out of sleep before getting on the 5:30 am train to Hadong. I tried to nap for the hour long train ride, but ended up spending more time looking at the rice paddies out the window than sleeping. In Hadong I had about an hour and a half to kill before my bus left, so I wandered the streets of the village. Among the more interesting things I saw were laundry hanging from either a gravestone or some other kind of marker: ...rice patty fields forever:
...narrow squalid alleys:
...a shop literally filled with clothes:
...fish hanging up to dry on clotheslines...and a gazebo on a high hill that offered good views of the village:While I was up at the gazebo loud speakers in town made announcements of some sort that were so loud they reverberated throughout the valley. I'm glad that there aren't similar blarings in my neighborhood at 7:30am on a Saturday.

I managed to catch a little rest on the bus up to Ssanggeysa, the beautiful temple complex which I have already thoroughly documented. Past the temple I saw the same stone paths, hills, and waterfall as before, but there was now considerably more water and the land was lusher:
Just past the waterfall I finally reached new territory. I had a pleasant but long hike across a minor ridge:Though I didn't see any of the bears, otters, or wildcats that live in the park, I did see many birds, chipmunks, dragonflies and other insects, and a small white snake. About halfway through the day I summited a small mountain (Samshinbok, 1288m). All mountaintops are fairly crowded in Korea, and Koreans like to have full picnics on top of mountains, complete with a sixpack of cheap beer. I was given some fruit that I couldn't identify and was offered a can of beer. I am always treated well at mountain tops here, perhaps because people want me to talk about Korean generosity when I leave (or perhaps I'm too cynical and it really just is generosity, but Westerners receive a lot more special treatment than their fellow Koreans for some reason).
By the end of eight hours of hiking I was rather exhausted. I hiked at least 15km, and I went at a brisk pace: during the whole weekend I passed all but one person I saw on the trail, and I was never passed myself except when I stopped to de-layer or eat. I stopped for the day at a shelter, which was really a large three story lodge. It was incredibly crowded there (this picture shows fewer than half the hikers present):
Koreans always cook primarily on gas grills, so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that their dinner while backpacking were essentially identical to the dinners they would make at home, with the only difference being that the campstoves are slightly smaller than the stoves at home. I considered pressing on to the next shelter before it got dark, but the weather looked ominous. I was incredibly fortunate to meet a man named Jae Hak (pronounced Jayhawk) who was kind enough to tell me about the strange policy of the shelters in Korean National Parks. Apparently, their priority in terms of who gets to sleep indoors was (in descending order) 1. people with reservations 2. foreigners 3. children 4. women 5. the elderly, and then young men. If you have been following the Sonia Sotomayer Supreme Court nomination, you may have heard some conservative lunatics talking about her 'reverse racism,' a term that they mean in a very racist sense to mean that she is discriminatory against whites (a baseless claim), which they see as the reverse of how racism should be, or how racism naturally occurs. What I experienced was real reverse racism: I was treated differently on the basis of my race (well, technically my nationality, but in Korea the distinction is not given much notice, and skin color is treated as sufficient proof of foreigner status), but instead of being discriminated against I was given preferential treatment. Actually, I get this a lot in Korea: I am treated well because I am white, and there is even a bookstore that gives a discount to teachers, a discount that is automatically given to anyone who is white. I was mildly uncomfortable accepting this race based preference, but sleeping out in the rain would have been more uncomfortable, so I bought myself a spot on the floor. I spent some time talking to Jae Hak, who insisted on giving me dinner, so I ate tofu and kimchi instead of the bread and nutella that I packed (my parents were kind enough to send the nutella with the box of books they sent). Dinner would have been more extensive, but before it was done cooking the drizzle became a downpour. I still can't believe I forgot to bring a pack cover (i.e. a trash bag), especially since I knew rain was probable. My things didn't get too wet, and I was wearing waterproof gear head to foot, so the rain was fine, but I was glad that I wouldn't be sleeping outside. The rangers running the lodge were kind enough to ignore regulations and let in many more people than there were spaces. I had an actual designated spot on the floor to lay on my blanket, and was asleep before the lights turned off at 8pm. I awoke in need of the restroom in the middle of the night and had a difficult time traversing the floor because it was so crowded with people that at some points there were ten foot squares of space where there was not even an inch between people. I eventually followed in the wake of someone who didn't care who he woke up or stepped on. Outside and in the outhouse I became all the more thankful for my spot inside as I saw people huddled under plastic tarps and a man sleeping in the outhouse, his head inches from a urinal and his feet about two feet from one of the ceramic holes in the ground that passes for toilets outside the West (I'm glad Western style toilets are available in most parts of Korea. Much as I don't want to be a cultural imperialist, I think that we can all agree that in this particular instance one option is clearly superior).

Just before five am I got up along with a majority of the sleepers, bid farewell to Jae Hak, and started hiking. It took very little time to get to a second shelter, and then there was a steep hike up to a viewpoint where I ate breakfast: (The mountain above is Cheonwangbong, my destination.) After a quick hike (under three hours) I reached the top of Cheonwangbong, aka Jirisan, the namesake of the park. It definitely qualifies as a real mountain, since at 1915 meters it is at a higher elevation than my parents' house in Colorado Springs (1832 m). It is the tallest mountain in the mainland of South Korea (South Korea owns an island volcano whose peak is slightly higher, and the highest mountain on the peninsula is on the border between North Korea and China). The top was (unsurprisingly) crowded, which explains why someone had stacked stones into a large flat square for people to eat and wait a little bit lower than the summit:The top had a nice view of the ridgeline, though it was still too foggy to see all that far.
At the top I ate my traditional summit snack of gummy bears and decided that I would take the quicker route down to the East rather than along the huge ridge across the park to the West because 1) I hate backtracking for any distance, much less to where I had started the day, which would take two and half or three hours, 2) it would be anticlimactic to hike all those shorter mountains, and 3) I wanted to sleep in my bed that night and to be lazy on Monday instead of rushing back and going straight back into classes without any time to rest. I enjoyed my hike down, which included a couple more peaks, patches of flowers, and another waterfall.
I really enjoyed this tree, whose roots made a perfect spiral staircase. Korean mountains have very well maintained, if steep, trails, and it is not unusual to see huge staircases:It stayed misty throughout the day. It drizzled or rained lightly for a big portion of my hike down, which was actually rather pleasant and kept me from getting overheated as I had the day before.
Eventually I reached a road and walked down it along a nice stream. I was too tired to be in the mood for swimming, but I almost went in on principle because there were such beautiful deep pools:
A little ways down the road was a small temple, Daeweonsa:
If you look closely you will see a satellite tv receptor. Apparently quiet contemplation is not enough to occupy the nuns who live here:
I couldn't find the bus stop at the temple, so I walked along the road for about an hour and eventually flagged down a bus, which I took to Jinju, and then took a train back to Suncheon, where I got another seatless ride to Daejeon, and then took the subway home. It was a lot of sitting around on moving vehicles with layovers, which is always tiring, but it gave me lots of time to read and so I'm now halfway through War and Peace.

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