Last weekend, and a discourse on bad students

Aaron says its my turn to blog now, so here I am. I have a lot to write about or else he will be cross with me!

Let's see...last weekend, we did many things. Friday, we went to the Wa Bar downtown. I had heard from other teachers at my school that the Wa Bar is a popular hangout for foreigners (the handful or so that actually live in our town, I guess) so we decided to check it out. Il-kyu went with us. They had a lot of different kinds of foreign beer, so Aaron got the Becks Dark he's been craving, and we had the Korean version of American appetizers, namely, nachos and cheese, potato skins that were 100x less greasy than normal, and cheese sticks. It was pretty expensive; they didn't have any foreign beers under 7000 won (about 5-7 dollars, depending on the exchange rate) but it was nice for Aaron to have those dark beers he wanted. By the way, we only saw one other foreigner there, and we didn't talk to him. But it was a good bar; I think we'll go back about once or twice a month or so for Aaron to get his beer fix.

Saturday, we went to Songtan. It's a small city, 2 train stops away from Osan. The main reason we wanted to go there is that there is a US Air Force base in the town, and we had heard tales of a black market and stores with American stuff all around the outside of the base. We did find a fabulous Mexican restaurant called La Casa; the cooks are all actually from Mexico, and the food was really really good. As were the margharitas! But the rest of the area was kind of a disappointment. There were tons of stores that sold "Coach" purses and similar expensive-looking items, and I thought "hey, I like purses, I could get one of these" until I saw that they were still about 100 dollars (though much cheaper than a real, 800 dollar Coach purse) and way more than I care to spend on things like that. There was not much else there to interest us. We had heard rumors of American food to be found, but we didn't see any. Aaron is dying for some pretzels; they just don't eat them here and we're unable to buy them anywhere. Anyway, Songtan was interesting to see, and we'll probably go back for more Mexican food at some point, but not too often. There wasn't much else, although we did find a Hot Topic store for Kymberly!

No goth clothes here; this is all ghetto. The whole area was like that, actually...

Saturday night/Sunday morning, we had D&D with our group back home. In order to do this, Aaron and I had to stay up all night; they were to start at noon, Michigan time, and we would be broadcasting from Korea at 1am. Needless to say, we did not get started until about 2am, and we were up doing that until about 10:30am. There was a point when we were both so tired, we weren't tired anymore. Just weirdly giddy and probably obnoxious. So Sunday was pretty much shot because we were tired and had been up all night. I took a nap halfway through the day, but Aaron didn't, so he was passed out by 9pm, which was amusing. Oh! We did go to HanaMart, another store near our apartment. I thought it was going to be like LotteMart, a grocery and department store, but it was just grocery. It was really obnoxious though. It was crowded and loud; there was a guy with a microphone shouting at the crowd the entire time we were there. Since we don't speak Korean, I can only speculate that he was announcing the great deals, but I can't be sure. We did see a guy with a little dog in his shopping cart. The dog just sat there and kind of shivered (it was a little cold inside) and he didn't have a collar or anything. I am still convinced that man was buying the dog to eat it. Aaron does not agree. Poor dog. :(

So that started off our 3rd week in Korea. We're both getting into the swing of things at school; I finally have all of my classes showing up and ready to learn (ha!) and Aaron is learning the joys of having to teach by himself, with no help. He actually had a very bad day yesterday (Monday) and my day today (Tuesday) was just as bad. He had a hard time with the 6th graders; apparently they were being very noisy and uncooperative, and he had no help, discipline-wise. He has them again tomorrow so it will be interesting to see what happens. As for me, I had 5 classes today and all but 2 of them went pretty well. The first class to go bad was my only 1st grade class of the day. (1st grade high school = sophomores in the US, roughly) They just would not shut up. I tried yelling, talking over them, and eventually I just gave up. I kept track of how long they wasted my time, and then held them after class for that long. It was really upsetting; usually the co-teacher and I can get noisy classes to knock it off after a time, but today they just didn't care. I am no longer interested in being nice; now I will be the mean teacher and punish them! >:[

My second bad class was the last class of the day, 2nd graders. They were also being noisy, but not as bad. I had a different co-teacher for that class, however, and she does not take disobedience. She called out a few of them and then berated the whole class for almost 15 minutes straight. Needless to say, by the end of it, they were quiet as can be. Apparently I need to learn Korean just so I can yell at them like that! I did feel bad for some of the girls in the class; there are about 10 girls and 30 boys and most of the boys are the "tough" kids. The ones that are disruptive, don't listen, and act rough all the time. The girls are all pretty quiet and shy, and they at least make a show of wanting to learn, even if they are really just bored. Usually I don't even get that.

That is one of the things I am still a little sad about; the lack of motivation in 95% of my students. Granted, it is a technical high school; they are being guided toward career training (I guess they get that their last year of HS?) and few of them will go to college, or ever need to use English. I think that is why most of them don't seem to care. I wouldn't, if I knew I would never have to use something again. (That is how I felt about math!) So it is a little disappointing for me to see that I'm not really making the language stick. Of course, there are a few students who are very motivated; they volunteer answers and can actually speak to me in English and understand some of what I say. So at least I have that.

Aaron doesn't have corporal punishment at his school, but we do at mine. I guess Korean schools are working to get away from it now, but you can still see evidence of it from time to time. For example, the teachers all have some kind of thick wooden stick they use to bang on things to get kids to shut up, or smack other kids with. I've never seen a teacher really hit a student though; it's more of a smack as in "knock it off or you'll get more!". They actually gave me my own stick yesterday, but it's more of a noise-making stick than a beating one. It's designed so that when you smack it on something, it makes a louder noise than you'd expect. But it's slender and light-weight, so I think if I actually hit a student with it, it might snap. I don't know. Sometimes I really want to use it!!

So that's what's going on with us lately. I'm sure Aaron will update later, or more likely tomorrow, to add all the things I forgot to mention. :)

Melissa