I hate to sound boring and repetitive, but today was yet another good day. There was no boring assembly this morning, so I got a lot of work done, and my kindergarten and fifth grade lessons went well. It’s nice that my Mondays are so easy, relatively speaking…I only have three classes and two lessons to prepare! I definitely need to plan ahead in my lessons for third through sixth grade more, to make sure we’re covering everything this silly book wants, but I guess I’m doing a good enough job because they asked me to teach a special English class in two weeks to fifth graders from the area. Or they are just so happy to be relieved from English duties, they don’t care what I do. I prefer to think it’s the former. At any rate, at least the children appear happy with me. I’m still a very popular figure around here. I even got my first phone call from a student tonight—a third grader named Eebin. She’s really cute. She gave me a card with her name and number and some other stuff I couldn’t read in the middle of our lesson last week and made me fill out one, too. It was a really funny conversation because I could only understand a little bit of what she was saying, and I mostly responded in English, which threw her off. Guess I’ll just have to teach her more English so we can hold a conversation!
This afternoon, I did some lesson planning for tomorrow and actually got it all done, for the first time ever! It was sooo nice to come home and not worry about it, though I still have to figure out what I will do tomorrow night with that class I agreed to take on. I am really not happy I am doing it, but I definitely can’t back out now and I would feel really horrible if I said no. Maybe it’ll turn out to be more fun than I think, but I doubt it. Adults aren’t as much fun to teach, in my opinion, though hopefully they’ll be more obedient.
I was talking today to my co-teacher about how people are always trying to strike up a conversation with me when I go out on my walks. He suggested that if I wish to avoid this, I need to wear a huge hat, glasses, long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, makeup, and a mask. I think he was joking. Seriously, though, I run into some interesting people out there in the countryside. Yesterday, for example. I was just walking along when these guys in a truck just stopped and offered me a ride (I think…). I tried to say no, but there was some miscommunication and anyway, we had a little convo. I fell back on my few known words (sentences have completely left me now!) and managed to tell them that I was an American teacher living in Hongsan. They were really excited to meet me and one guy insisted on getting my phone number. I can’t imagine what we could possibly talk about, since I already exhausted all my Korean, but whatev. I’m sure I’ll just be the American in his phone book.
For some reason, we have literally hundreds of pairs of brand-new slip-on sandals at school. There have been a number of boxes in the teachers’ room for a few days, but I had no idea what they held until this afternoon. We spent a good hour or two this afternoon labeling and stacking the darn things. All I could understand was that it was for “a graduates’ association.” We’re always doing things for graduated students. It seems RIDICULOUS to me…wouldn’t time be better spent serving current students? The answer, it appears, is no, and no doubt reflects some Confucian ideal of respecting your elders. I’m not here to question, so I’ve just been trying to help out where I can, though there are of course many things I cannot do (read and write, for example). I think the third grade teacher was working on a presentation for the graduated students yesterday, and that was why he had to come to Hongsan and was ordered to escort me. Today I was helping them write Hongsan on all the sandals and they all were so surprised and pleased when a) I could actually read what they were writing and b) could write it all by myself. My sandals were the subject of much awe and talk among the other teachers. I guess maybe it’s surprising to them that I can do this, considering my poor grasp of the Korean language, but for goodness sake, I did learn something in a month of Korean! I can write pretty letters, if nothing else!
Tonight after dinner, I looked at some old pictures of my host family with my host mom, Eun-ho, and Ye-eun. I saw a ton of wedding photos, a few baby pictures, and a lot of pictures of my host father in middle and high school. The wedding pictures were nice. I didn’t even recognize my host mom! She was in a really fancy dress that had the biggest skirt I’ve ever seen. My host dad looks exactly the same, though. The grandmother was in a few and I finally found out that she is indeed my father’s mother. She was definitely upright in the photos, so she must have become hunched sometime in the last fifteen years or so. That’s gotta be tough. Oh, and I also found out my host mother has two sisters. I met one of them my first week here, but I am not sure where the other one is. The pictures of my host father were quite comical. He’s wearing some sort of military-esque uniform in a bunch of them, which I guess was his middle school uniform. He has hardcore ‘70s hair in many of them, and it was all I could do to keep from laughing. There are a few where he is in some kind of flex pose. My host mother pointed to one and said, “Body builder.” I don’t know if that means he actually was one, or just pretending to be macho. I hope he wasn’t one—I’ve seen the Korean version many a time on TV, and it’s sick.