Oh Oh She Is Tall. . .

Have you ever heard the song Love Potion No. 9? Well, the tune of that has been matched to a song to teach children English, and none of our lives will ever be the same. We watched a claymation video that was supposed to teach children about the concept of being tall, and it was one of the funniest things I have ever seen! Mostly because it was extremely awkward and had no point. It started out with a boy and a man doing pull-ups in a park. Then they start a dialogue about a blonde woman they see stretching nearby. "Who is that woman?" "That is my teacher!" "Oh, she is tall" "Yes, she is tall. . . and beautiful!" The two then walk over and have an awkward conversation with the tall blonde teacher, and then the song breaks out. We heard this song on Saturday I think, but ever since then you will hear people constantly hear people singing snipits of this song - most notably "Oh Oh she is tall" to the tune of Love Potion No. 9. After writing this entire paragraph I am having a feeling this will forever only be funny to EPIK teachers, but I wanted to share it anyway! It also goes to show that the materials we are given are going to be mediocre sometimes, and we will need to take the concept and try to modify the lesson to suit our student's needs. 

I need to work on my chopstick skills. It's just downright embarrassing at this point. The only thing I have mastered picking up is rice, since I eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We have the option at all meals to use chopsticks. I really need to put down the fork and pick up the chopsticks from now on. One Korean food I just can't get into is kimchi. Kimchi is the most well/eaten known side dish in Korea. Read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimchi They even say "kimchi" instead of "cheese" for pictures! Speaking of cheese, it is no where to be found. I hear it is hard to come by here, but I am hoping I will find some when I get to Busan. I can't live without it! :)

A cultural note. When you hand something to someone or are receiving something, you always use two hands. I keep forgetting this and always feel bad when I forget, which is pretty often. I want to do my best to immerse myself in this culture and not just be tourist who doesn't know any better. 

Today's classes were pretty monotonous, until the 3rd one rolled around. I was gone at the start of class because I had to go to the nurse to get cough medicine. When I came back, the class had divided up into 5 groups of about 15. I quickly joined a group and found out that we supposed to make up a skit on anything we wanted. We did a grocery store scene, another group did a scene at the airport, and so on. When it was all over, the guest lecturer said we were short on time and rushed through the rest of his slides. He then asked us to divide into our groups and do another skit. I looked at the clock and realized we only had 20 minutes left, and he hadn't given us any feedback about our last skits. I raised me hand and said, "Maybe only a couple of groups could do the skit and then you could give us some constructive criticism about how to improve our skits." He looked at me long and hard and said, "It's not my job to give feedback, it's your students. It doesn't matter if you did a good job or not, you just want English coming out of your student's mouths." I was unsure how to respond because I thought I might have missed something at the beginning of class and my comments were unfounded. I looked around the room for reassurance and found that others agreed with me, but unfortunately my comment turned into a launching pad for outright verbal attacks. One girl said, "So you obviously aren't an expert in this area, so what are you good at?" Now, I am sure many people were thinking this, but it was just rude and inappropriate to call this guy out like that. Like I mentioned before, most people here have not taught before, so I thought it would have been useful to get feedback. I also found it ridiculous that we were doing a skit with 15 other teachers. It is just going to be us and our co-teacher! When there was a lull in the attacks and awkward conversation, I  asked if anyone had ever seen or done a core dialogue. Since the resounding answer was no, I jumped up and made up an impromptu dialogue to show how to teach it when it is only you. Lana and Sarah (my TEFL trainers) would have been so proud! The lecturer's face was priceless when I was finished. He looked at me like I was the dumbest person he had ever seen, and all he said was, "Uhhh Okay". I unfortunately disliked him even more when he said told us the best way to quiet a class down was to get in their faces and yell "SHUT UP!" He also showed us how he liked to just get in their face and just stare. While intimidation might work for him, it will never be incorporated into my classroom. 

Tomorrow we have four more lectures and then finally on to lessons and lesson planning on Wednesday. Photos to come in next post!