A Good Day in Hindsight

Today has been a long day. This is typical of most Tuesdays. It started with an early morning “Bible study” at 7am, then a faculty/staff chapel at 8am, followed by a Mid-Term exam in my 9:00 class. The mid-term did not go as well as planned because of the language barrier and some students not doing as well as I had anticipated. I take this to be due to the language barrier and perhaps a lack of studying on their parts. It is the language barrier that makes it difficult to know how to grade the students in a way that is fair to everyone involved.

I had a important lunch meeting with a friend to talk about the way I have been feeling. This was helpful to me just to talk about some of the issues and get some advice on how to work through these issues to attain some degree of sanity though it didn’t deliver me from this present age.

After that I met with a student to proofread something she wrote for me to correct. Unfortunately, I didn’t get all the way through it so I will have to finish it sometime tomorrow or the next day. I won’t be meeting with her until next Thursday so that gives me some time to do some work in this regard. I was not all that alert by this time which probably slowed me down some.

After that I went to a church to teach a free-talking class. On my way there, I had to drop off a trip request form in my department’s office to be approved by the Department Chair. Since nobody in that office can speak in Korean I got to practice some Korean using a sentence I haven’t used before. Then the person I was speaking to asked me another question which I didn’t know the answer to because I didn’t understand her question. Eventually she figured it out or else she just gave up asking. A Korean professor who can speak well was going to call the office to make sure they understood what to do. At the church, we played a version of baseball where I ask a question and they respond. I don’t do it like some people play the game but it served the purpose of getting the students to speak in English and it seemed that everybody was having fun, those who wanted to study and those who wanted to play games.

After that, I went home for a while as I waited for time to pass. I made plans to meet my Korean teacher to study a little bit of Korean. We ended up talking a lot about other things as usual and some of that time was occupied with talking to another student whom she also teaches. This time had some good points and some bad points. The good points were of course the times of relaxing and the difficult points were the points of studying Korean and being reminded how bad I am at speaking Korean.

After the coffee shop closed, we went to the grocery store to get a few items I needed. This was our original plan to go to the store to give me practice speaking to people in Korean. But I didn’t do much more speaking than usual, though it was helpful to learn the different types of tofu and talk more about Korean culture.

I became more depressed as I talked with my Korean teacher about my struggles. If I let myself, I can get really bogged down. But when I think of the people I interacted with, the students, the staff members, my teacher and the people at the grocery store tonight, I think this has been a good day. Now I think I will get some shuteye before my alarms go off at 5:15.