Blue Christmas

Merry Christmas!

Boy was it tough finding a title for this entry; there just aren't enough songs out there which mention the word "Christmas." In the end I decided to go with the one which blends the complicated and mixed range of emotions I find myself feeling today. It's a song that simultaneously makes me want to sink into a deep, dark depression, but also get up and dance around the room. It finds fun in its own sad resignation, which is a pretty great thing, and captures a lot of what today is for me.

I've been thinking about how I would feel waking up on Christmas day, knowing that my family is over 10,000km away from here. I knew before I moved here what my holidays were likely to be like, and I knew I wasn't going to be home, but it's not the sort of thing you really prepare for until the day finally arrives. This is, after all, the first Christmas of my life I've spent away from home.

So how did I feel waking up today? Well, hungover for one. Also a little hungry. And I kinda needed to use the bathroom.

In a lot of ways this is just another day here. I'm still in the middle of my work week and I don't have any holidays coming up. Although we have been playing some games and having parties with our students all week, which has been a lot of fun. Someone decided that one of the games would be arm wrestling, with the students pitted against - you guessed it - me. I mean...I'm definitely stronger than them, but...god damn my arm hurts a lot today. My point here is that this feels a lot like an ordinary week; I'll be off Friday night, returning to work on Monday, same old same old. Right?

My students have really locked on to the whole "I have a really red face" motif.

To be honest I'm trying to underplay the emotions involved. I've been on edge all week and have found myself getting annoyed at things my students have said that otherwise wouldn't phase me. My students complain frequently about having to attend our academy after school, which is normally the sort of comment that just rolls off me. But this week it was a little more grating than it should have been. Comments like, "I hate that we have to come in during the week of Christmas!" usually prompted me to say, "Yeah well I have to come in on Christmas Day, and I have to teach a class on dystopian fiction, so shut up you little shits!"

I of course said none of that, but it's been rough. It certainly didn't help that the section of Pictures of Hollis Woods that I'm teaching this week is prominently about a teacher who is sad she can't be home with her family on Christmas Day. I found out who was responsible for the organization of the winter term and they have since been rolled up in a carpet and thrown off a bridge that Pyeongtaek doesn't even have. This town makes casual murder extremely difficult.

I'm not sad to be here. Melancholy, yes. It's unavoidable. It's the price you pay for living in a foreign country and working somewhere with limited holidays. It's the emotional rent for a year filled with amazing new experiences, new friends, and a life more full of meaning than any job I have ever had. And I'll pay it gladly, because when I go in to work today I'm going to sit in a room with a bunch of incredibly bright, creative and hilarious kids and I'm going to try to make them give a damn about a Ray Bradbury novel that I haven't even read yet. And it's going to be awesome.

If you're lucky enough to be with your family - or just your good friends or people you love - this holiday season, tell them they're awesome and buy them a drink or two. Or three. Or ten. Make it count, because you miss it when it doesn't come around. And if you, like me, find yourself far away from home this holiday season, just reach out a bit: the love is still there, diminished in no way by the distance between you.

Merry Christmas, friends and family! I love you all.


Today's title (come on, you knew this one)

Waltzing matilda

My third week was much less stressful than the first two. The students I was having trouble with originally seem to have settled down a bit, and the ones who didn't have all vanished under mysterious circumstances. I should definitely specify that the previous sentence was a joke. So this is me making that clear. Thanks for reading, NIS!

This will probably be a short update as not a monumental amount has changed since the last post. I was thinking recently about how strange it seems that I'm a teacher now. It feels like such a short time ago that I was sitting behind the same desks as these kids (not literally), and now I'm actually leading classes. I don't think a single day has gone by where I haven't wondered if I'm not massively unqualified to be teaching English. I mean, for example: there are four god damn negatives in the sentence before this one and I didn't even intend to do that.

It's more than that though. When I was in elementary school, I always tried to picture the life my teachers had outside of the school. I always just pictured them going home, watching TV or reading a book, grading papers and going to sleep. That was about it. And certainly they probably had many days like that but I never imagined any kind of variety. I don't know if I ever wondered about what they did on their weekends, or for fun.

A few weeks ago some other teachers and I had a potluck around American Thanksgiving, and we (read: I) drank a ton. The next day a few of us woke up and went to a hockey game in Chuncheon, and the whole day was a riot. We started drinking again around lunchtime and just generally tore it up all day, went to a few awesome restaurants and chatted about stuff. We told jokes, talked about dating, made inappropriate puns. The whole day was fantastic. And it was at some point on the bus ride home, heading into hour 20 or so of being drunk, that I remember thinking, "Wait a second, don't I educate kids for a living?" 

The whole day felt like the sorts of weekends I had in University, just booze and good times and way too few bathrooms available when you need them. And it makes sense to me; this is the sort of stuff I wanted to do when I came to Korea. But I don't think 12 year old me had any sort of a clue that teachers also have lives that separate from school. So now I find myself retroactively wondering if any of them ever partied their assess off on the weekend the way I have. I remember some of my teachers telling me they had headaches; now I think I understand why.

So if there are any elementary school-aged kids reading this, I have some words of wisdom: You definitely shouldn't be reading this and your parents have dropped the ball.

Today's title:

Start all over again

The third week of my second term begins tomorrow. I was going to post something closer to the start of the term but it's been an insanely busy rollercoaster of non-stop action. Well not really, I've just been out drinking with people a lot and keep forgetting to write something. But we're here now and I'm sober because I have a massive headache for...some reason.

This term has been a little rough so far. Gone are my incredibly well-behaved and respectful students and in their place I've been asked to teach kids who make a college frat party look like church. For the most part they're not that bad, but the strategic placement of two kids who are friends and also don't give a crap can lead to some pretty frustrating results. As a result I've had to crack down pretty hard in order to maintain order, which I really hate doing. Again, they have so much school already and being here is not mandatory for them, so I try to make it as easy as I can. Even as it is my students get way more allowances than necessary, but on the other hand I do have material to cover and I truly hate rudeness.

I also hate yelling, that's something I've learned the last two weeks. I don't like having to shout at anybody, least of all a bunch of kids. The worst part is the ones who are behaving fine have to sit there and listen to it, and the last time I had to raise my voice they just looked so freaked out. By this point last term I was already bonding really well with my students and now there's basically no chance of that happening, and we're gonna be stuck with each other for the next 11 weeks. I'm hoping they get the picture soon so we can move past it but man oh man, it's been a stressful couple weeks.

"BUT JUSTIN IT'S NOT ALL BAD IS IT?" Well fuck you, Incredibly Loud Voice in my Head, but yeah you're actually right. For example, my Tuesday / Thursday evening class is actually made up entirely of some really great kids that I taught last semester. They've always been a delight to teach so I was happy they all moved up to the next level, and our classes go really well. The class I teach Monday nights is also pretty great, and on Friday? Oh man, let me tell you about Friday.

On Friday I teach the Master level, which I believe is the highest level at our Academy. Or one of them. Or something. But basically it's a novel study class, and the book I'm teaching for the first part of the semester: Slaughterhouse Five. One of my favourite novels of all time. I mean it's clear they barely grasp what's happening in the book, even when I strip it down as much as possible (if you're not familiar, Slaughterhouse Five is a book in which the protagonist travels randomly through time, except it's really all in his head, except he insists that it's true, and also he was kidnapped by aliens at one point, except only maybe, and it takes place in World War II, it's fucked). It's kind of surreal to find myself teaching a book I myself studied in school and so far it has been amazingly fun.

So that's about it for now, hopefully I get around to updating this a bit more. I can't believe I only posted one time throughout November. I need to remember to post the story about how we traveled to Chuncheon for a hockey game last weekend as well as a few other things. And of course Christmas is later this month so that's gonna be...well, rough. But we'll get to that eventually.


Today's title: