Since my last update I’ve:
*Apricated in Australia
*Lingered lachrymose and a little lonely in
Laos for NYE
*Ritualized
layering up for the chilly Changwon temperatures (Read: Not in California
anymore)
*Become a legal Irish citizen and secured a
stylish claret EU Passport (aspiring Jason Bourne right hurr)
*Parsed through a combined 500+ drafts of
student “speaking test” essays
*Coached and sang with my North Korean Defector
students in front of over 150 guests
*Stepped up my Dad-joke game to include installations
such as “Ah, kids, looks like we gotta amputate my gangrene hand!”
Why the two month update hiatus? What’s with
all the travel? Are you finally cashing in on the last laugh for growing a
warm, Korean faux pas beard as the temperatures continue to drop? (Quickly-yes.
And associating myself with Santa was a hit for the once critical
students.) There are a number of
exciting gaps to fill – I’ll do my best to be speedy and comical.
Let’s start with some of my favorite quips from
what my Fulbright friends will understand was somewhat of a chronic, crippling
excuse of mine – the “speaking tests”
Joe: Eating Chicken in School Must Be Legalized – “While we are in school, we want to eat
something delicious such as chicken. Because chicken is sooooo delicious, when
we eat chicken we feel sooooo happy. Chicken is love. Chicken is the one belief of CSH students. Chicken is
the food which is given by God. So, we like chicken. We want chicken. We love
chicken. We must be allowed to eat chicken. Also, we are hungry while we are in
school. At that when we are most hungry, we want to eat chicken so we can feel
fantastic. We can almost see heaven.”
Minhye: Should Assisted Suicide Be Legalized? - It seems that you are sharing your life with your
surrounding people. That’s why your life is not only yours. Actually, your
birth is given from your father and mother’s hot night, so it could be a part
of your parents’ as well.
Dave: Why
Korea Needs More Strict Law - All people who live in Korea must obey a lot
of written and codified rules. When they break these rules, they should be
punished. But in Korea, there are three magic words that can surprisingly drop
the intensity of the punishment, “I was drunken.” and “I’m a student.” “I was
drunken” means that ‘I don’t remember about the accident clearly, and it wasn’t
my intent”. And “I’m a student.” means that “I’m just a young human and I don’t
know the world certainly, so give me a chance and mercy.”
These laughs represent the rare gems prospected
from the interminable weekend stretches of essays that bled red with tracked
changes. During an odd month where I
made the 4-5 hour bus trek to Seoul every weekend, I was the Korean equivalent
of that one guy who leaves the reading light on in a dark plane cabin –
hammering away on my keyboard illuminating the otherwise dark bus with suggestions
to check subject-verb agreements that would eventually return to uninterested
students. It was a rough stretch, I have
to admit. However, the windfall from the
testing process came from emails like this.
As any teacher would admit, the students’ love, energy, and humor help
pull the finish line tape closer during those long stretches.
By and large, the most
exciting day for students and teachers alike was our “school festival”. For reasons that perplexing from a western
educational perspective, final exams end two-three weeks before the school year
ends. The cons are obvious – students
care less about class, show up late, and are more inclined to test the
teachers’ eyesight as cell phones begin to glide out of puffy jackets during
class time. The pros, however, are fascinating
to juxtapose with what I often conclude about Korea’s harsh educational
structure. Whereas nearly every waking
moment was formerly spent studying or passing out from sheer exhaustion, quiet
hallways began to sport the faint sounds of music. Classrooms floors began to shake with the
synchronized rhythms of dance practice.
The last day of classes passed, and the school erupted with positive
sensory overload – tasty food, mellifluous music and laughter, a symphony of
smells emanating from student-cooked sugar pancakes and savory ramen. And smiles - almost enough smiles to make up
for the deficit that grew during the preceding months. Side note – you MUST
watch the video I shot
of my early graduating students finding out their acceptances. We had about 50 students graduate, 5 of whom are
attending Seoul National University with a mocking 1% acceptance rate and
another 26 who are attending the MIT of Korea – KAIST. Smart cookies here.
The
school festival was divided into two halves – the morning sported a series of
collective classroom collaborations, the afternoon dedicated to a gauntlet of
K-pop dances, songs, and awards (even fun has to be competitive here). Each class was tasked with designing a
station to entertain their classmates and teachers. Most stations were dedicated to cooking –
sugary treats, pancakes, rice balls, ramen, French toast, sausage, eggs. Students sold their culinary endeavors and
the money (about $600 in total) was collected and donated to a local orphanage. The boys who goofed off in my second grade
managed to get an OK to bring in laptops and playstations, creating their own
game dungeon. (Highlight of the PC room
– watching teachers take over the video game stations from their students
mid-battle to pull a sweet, reminiscent, “move aside kid, I’ll show you how
it’s really done” antic).
The afternoon sessions took
place in the school auditorium (equipped with extravagant movie theatre seating
– which I needed for an event this long).
Each of the school’s 3 grades performed skits with varying levels of preparation. PSY -
Remember Gangamn Style? – has a new hit out called “DADDY”, and my students rocked that one. Check out the original music video here and the school festival rendition here. There were a few runner ups – 2nd and 3rd place, which you can watch here. TW: these students BUST SERIOUS MOVES.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
That covers most of the “work” my students and
I have been up to. Now for the more
personal stuff. Here are the bullets.
*I’ve been traveling almost every weekend in an
attempt to squeeze as much as possible out of this grant year. This sentiment is seasoned with my current
vacillation that has me leaning towards spending my next year in the
states.
*Surprise, Korean is very difficult to pick up
inductively. Half out of guilt, half as
a social experiment, I’ve joined a weekly Korean class filled with foreigners
from Peru, Switzerland, Ireland, South Africa, and a healthy number of us
Migook-Waegooks (American Foreigners; fun to say out loud, right?)
*I applied for a “Fulbright Korea Alumni Fund
(FKAF) Community Grant” to give the overlooked, under-resourced school garden a
make over. Korea has a historically rooted
(but contemporarily successful) agrarian affinity that I’m hoping to explore with
a interdisciplinary (Bio-English) curriculum centered on reducing the cases of
apian colony collapse disorder (CCD).
Tl;dr – the Pitzer kid got a few bucks to spend some time outside and
plant flowers.
*Working alongside a highly motivated cohort of
Fulbrighters with backgrounds ranging from CS to med school, I’m working on the
Fulbright Alumni Relations Committee to help design a little intra-grantee
facebook-linkedin amalgamation designed to get this year’s cohort an extra
networking avenue & jobs. On a very
related note, hi, I’m on the hunt for my next job in anything from entry level
consulting to (even tangentially related) environmental business. Please DO let me know if you hear any murmurs!
*Because of the chilly temperatures, I've accidentally become that dude from despicable me
I’ve been out of the states
for more than half a year now. I
expected to gather my bearings, but ended up starting nearly from scratch. Diet, daily routine, language, norms – it’s
all so drastically dissimilar to the predictability I cultivated in
college. I spent 6 days visiting my
family and must have started half my stories with “Well in Korea, they…”
Food: From my first update, you might remember the
note about me grinning at my first meal in Korea – well, grinning at my sheer
naivety. Not much has changed in the
following several months; just last week I emailed a former Fulbtighter admission
counselor friend and couldn’t help share photos of the unusual, nameless food
I’d had during the week. The three
constants are always 밥, 김치, 국- rice, kimchi, soup – along with innumerable
side dishes featuring fermented or fresh veggies, meats, and rice products. I’m
often too well fed, finding myself entering in playful kitchen stand offs with
my Korean host grandmother to request smaller portions of rice. “TOO LITTLE!” she’ll say in Korean. I want to say “I AM A LITTLE”, but the joke
doesn't translate.
Friends: I’ve made a few. The majority of my daily interactions with
non-Koreans are with friends from the nearby town Masan or on Jeju Island,
although I’d say a big group of us get together every month or so in a cramped
BnB for a little reunion (no matter where we’re placed!) I’m branching out with the new crew in
downtown Changwon through my Korean class – right before I left, I giggled at
two classmates who starred in a community theater rom com play. My Co-Teacher and I have finally broken the
workplace-only friendship barrier, which I’m pleased to admit has afforded me
time to play with his two dogs and indulge in the aspiring sommelier’s wine
cellars (yes, the dude has two).
We call ourselves the "Changwinners" Allana (r) and Anne Marie (l)
Future: A whirlwind two months ahead. My last day of school was Christmas eve – I
brought my steel-framed backpack still tarnished with rich red Ghanaian dust to
school before hopping on a plane for a quick sojourn in Australia (knocked out
6/7 continents, on the hunt for an affordable way to get myself to
Antarctica). From there I popped over to
Thailand then Laos where I’ve been since NYE, and tomorrow I head on a 9 day
jaunt through Vietnam. I’ll be traveling
with a partner – a High School ETA from Masan who’s booked us on a Ha Long bay
cruise, a motorcycle tour from Hue to Da Nang, and a spelunking spectacle
through the tunnels of Ho Chi Minh (supposedly with a stop to fire an AK-47 as
we found out this morning). Exhale,
inhale. Jumping over to Thailand for 3
days, I’ll meet my sommelier co-teacher to explore his favorite areas followed
by a too-quick 30 some hour reunion with the partner I spend almost every
weekend exploring Korea with.
This brings me to January 14th,
where I’ll make the most exotic and exciting leap of my break to Kazakhstan to
visit my thesis advisor, professor, and friend Azamat. Originally from the former Soviet state, he’s
back home teaching at the country’s most impressive international school,
Nazarbayev University. The second
semester elective sociology class “Contemporary Central Asia” course
description caught my eye, and the class itself was far greater than the
promised “Fermented mare’s milk, the oil curse, bride kidnapping, dictators,
atheists, Islamic radicalism, pipeline routes, U.S. strategic interests and
democracy promotion.” Time will tell, I’m excited.
There’s a lull of a full 12
days to fully shake off the inevitable hypnagogia back in Korea before I make
another big move (literally) to Seoul for the month of February. I’m
exceptionally lucky to have been offered a clerkship at Korea’s largest
international lawfirm, Kim & Chang, where hopefully I’ll be more useful
than I was at my first clerkship (read: coffee-boy-apprenticeship) Then, I
guess I go back and teach another semester?
To me, that sounds outrageous! I
spent the first semester teaching a spinoff social science curriculum, and I’ll
spend this second semester designing and teaching a unit curriculum centered on
one of Changwon’s supposed core values of “environmental sustainability”. Considering how well the light sociological
research I conducted last semester went, I’ve been slowly digesting a number of
published metrics for assessing environmental literacy and behavior and hope to
juxtapose my students and the Fulbright cohort.
We’ll see how far any of these pipe dreams go.
Fun: Texting
is a thing of distant memory here, and we all use a smartphone app called
“Kakao Talk” to keep in the loop.
Another speaking test essay that caught my eye, Yuyeon took my “How to
write a hook” up to the plate and smacked a homer – “Brown speech bubble with a
yellow background. With a cute sound, “Katalk! Katalk!” The top bar of the
smart phone is twinkling. This is the alarm of message. Everyone will know what
I’m talking about. Yes, this is Kakao Talk, which is loved by 95% of
Koreans.” I’d like to attribute the
ubiquity and popularity of the app to the trademarked emoticon characters who
do a damn good job at conveying the most emotions felt when living in Korea. My
spirit animal has to be the dog, Frodo.
That about does it for now – I’ll be off the
grid for a few weeks but will try to throw together a brief photo tour of my
travels once I land back in Korea. As
always, if you’d like to have one fewer email to read now and again, let me
know if you’d like to be removed from this list!
Much love, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year,
