English: Children, Dinner and the Future

Today has been an interesting day. I started by working at home, trying to grade all the papers for mid-terms. I only got through one group’s presentation and I am nearly at the end of my rope, or the end of my day rather. Today has been a day of going back and forth between meetings and work. I thought I could get some work done tonight after all the events were over with but I ended up chatting online instead. Finally, I decided to go running after I had another frustrating conversation about the English service.

The first event of my day was meeting the guy for lunch that I met at the PC room last weekend. It turns out that he is a university student at another university in the same city where I work. I asked him why he wants to be friends with a foreigner and he gave the anwer I expected: I want to improve my English. I responded by saying, “So you want to use me for my English”. He didn’t like the way that sounded and I tried to get him to agree to it several times. I would say we had a half-way decent conversation. It was tiring though because of the language barrier. He insisted on walking with me to my home but I said there was no sense in going any further than the university where I work. As it were, he had to backtrack to the hair salon. He wanted to make sure I didn’t think he was trying to use me for my English. I said, “If that’s the case, let’s only speak in Korean from now on.” He agreed.

After that I went home for an hour to grade tests. I finished one group test but that was it. I arrived at the university about the time that my co-teacher suggested we meet. There was a staff person in the office where I met the Korean teachers (aka TAs) who does not speak much English. I had what seemed like a five-minute conversation with her, mostly in Korean, but it was probably only one minute. This made me feel good about my Korean ability which seems to be improving slowly but surely. But then there were other times today when people couldn’t understand my text messages which I typed in Korean.

My task at the university was to work with one of the Korean teachers, a university student, to teach English to a group of children. I can’t quite say that I taught them because the Korean teacher led them through the CCM songs that they will be presenting to their parents in a few weeks. I mostly engaged with the children during this time. A few of them tried to speak to me in Korean and I understood a little bit of what they were saying. Sometimes I was modeling the pronounciation for them and eventually we played the game, “Do you love your neighbor” and we finished with an airplane roleplay.

This was a lot of fun for me. It seemed that the students had a lot of fun and that they were very comfortable in the classroom. The other teacher and I seemed to work well together, too. The adventure continued as I went to dinner with the other Korean teacher (going together with both teachers would have been nice but one of them had to go to church). The meal cost less than 5 USD. We left earlier than we anticipated because it seemed that the people wanted to close the restaurant. I experienced this same phenomenon yesterday with a foreign professor. It was interesting how nobody came up to us to tell us they were closing but they sent us hints in other ways like closing the doors and turning off the air-conditioning (air-con in Konglish).

By the time I got home at 8pm I had a lot of excitement running through me. I thought this called for a celebration with some watermelon. I thought that after eating some watermelon I would have lots of motivation to work but this was not the case at all. I stared at my computer screen for several hours. I was thinking about going running but I didn’t want to leave my apartment so I was thinking of going to sleep. Then when someone called me to talk about the English service I got upset and then I knew I had to go running. So I went running and walking for what seemed to be an hour. Because of being angry, I probably ran harder at times than I have recently. After running I felt less stress, though I am still frustrated about what I should do.