Krista is alive and well in Gumi!

Hello all!
Well, as many of you know through my mass emails, I have made it to Gumi, South Korea alive and well. Once I flew into Seoul I was supposed to take another plane into Daegu which is a city 45 minutes away from my town of Gumi. Well, it apparently snowed enough in Daegu for the airport to be closed (I guess Korea doesn't get that much snow since 2 inches can close an airport!!!). My flight for the final leg of my trip was cancelled! So, not knowing anyone in Seoul I was stranded at the airport at 5pm Korean time (1am my time). I had been up almost 24 hours, I was tired, hungry and now stranded! I didn't have any contact numbers for the director of my school who was supposed to pick me up at the airport and I definetly didn't know how to get from Seoul to Gumi which was 5 hours away. Luckily I met 2 really nice Americans who were in the exact same boat as me. They travel to Gumi all the time for business and knew how to get there by train and bus. I was just about to hop on a bus with them when I heard my name over the P.A. system "Krista Inrig Vancouver!!! messsage at info desk!!" It was my director Mr. Oh informing me that yes, I should get on a bus and that he would be there to pick me up. That was terrific since my first plan was just to get on a bus, find a hotel room in Gumi and track my school down in the morning (I had a number for the school, but no afterhours numbers). So, 5 hours later I was finally in Gumi, it was 2am Korean time which was 10am my time.....I had been travelling since 6:15am my time the previous day. I met my roommate briefly and finally fell asleep around 3:30am, I had been awake for 30.5 hours. I slept for....oh, maybe 6 hours then I was awakened by way too much light in my room and the street outside. I live on the second floor of an apartment on a busy street corner, not a quiet place. So, up I got and chatted with my roommate Marnie. She's been an ESL teacher for 2.5 years, she's Canadian too, from Lethbridge. I think we're going to get along just fine.

I work at Prime Language School. In Gumi there are four different Prime Schools all over the city. I like the school I’m observing at. It won’t be the school I teach at though, but I’m assuming it will be pretty much the same. I will be teaching 5 50 minute classes starting at 3:40 PM Monday to Friday. I don’t think the actual teaching will be all that hard, usually we go through two pages out of the books they are working on a day. The language barrier will be my biggest problem. They have tests once they finish a section on pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary and memory. We usually talk for the first 10-15 minutes of class, just getting them to tell us quick stories about how their day’s gone so far, what they did last night etc. Right now the talking generally centers around me, how I like Korea, how much Korean can I speak and other random questions. They know how tall I am, how old I am, what food I like to eat, what my favourite colours are, if I have a boyfriend (giggles), his name (more giggles), how old Marc is, where Marc is….you can imagine. I’ll probably be teaching children around 11-12 years old. Well, they say their 11-12 but they’re actually more like 9-10 years old. In Korean culture the day you are born you are considered to be 1 year old. From there on, every Jan 1 the child gets a year older, not on the day they were born. So, a child born Jan 2 would be one year old until Jan 1 of the next year when they turned 2 (in Canada the child would only be 1 year old). On the same token, a child born December 29 would be one when he was born, but would turn 2 two days later on Jan 1!!! In Canada the child would be considered only a few days old, but in Korea it would already be 2 years old……weird, I know.

The teaching style is almost completely different from Canada (not that I know all that much about teaching styles in Canada, I’m just going on my vague recollection of elementary school). Everything is memory. It’s kind of sad I think. The kids can be pros on what is in their book, but that‘s it. Right now one of the classes is working on their M sounds. Generally half of the section contains about 16 vocab words for that letter, so the children will learn 16 words beginning with the letter M. So you’d think that they’d get that M sounds like mmmm. They do on some level, but they are more so memorizing the whole word Monkey rather than mmmmonkey. We did a test and put the word money on the board. They know all of their sounds, but for the life of them they couldn’t figure out how to say money until we broke it up for them and said each sound first. They hadn’t memorized how to say money yet. They can’t sound words out. They know what M sounds like only because they’ve memorized it. They can’t put the sounds of M O N E Y together to make the word money. To me it’s sad because they’re not really learning the language; they’re just memorizing part of it. In the real world they’ll do just fine in certain situations when dealing with the English language, but in others they’ll be totally lost.
We’re also allowed to discipline the students differently. In Korea status is everything. We are allowed to hit the kids!! We can’t slap or punch them, but we do bang them on top of the heads with their books or smack their foreheads with a pen we carry around. One teacher suggested that I use his method. He makes children who are being bad sit with their legs at 90degrees and back against the wall for 3 minutes with their arms straight out. The Korean teachers carry sticks that they hit them with. Now, yes we hit them, but there is definitely no bruising left and it doesn’t even hurt…it’s more of a method of embarrassment to the child. I was watching my roommate’s class and one of the boys started acting up, she went to his desk, pulled his hood over his head so he couldn’t see and started giving him light body shots!! He was laughing, the whole class was laughing, but he did settle down after that. It’s just a way of saying I’m in charge, so listen to me….I guess. Another oddity is that we tell the whole class everyone’s marks. Again, status is everything. If a child doesn’t get first, second or third on a big test, they will often cry. We write who is first, second or third on the board and those kids get stickers and coupons. The children will also know who got last and laugh at them. It’s completely normal, I feel bad doing it, but it’s expected. I’m sure I’ll get over it….but I don’t think I will completely. I think its mean. The kids tend not to have any internal motivation. If they know that they won’t get in the top three then they often won’t try at all. To them they don’t see any point unless they beat everyone else in the class. On the other hand, the majority of the kids tend to try really hard in order to be the top. There are pros and cons in everything.