Fourth and final Christmas on the DMZ / Final posts ahead

Two posts in one day. The post about McCourt and storytelling had been sitting in the drafts folder and this is another one that should go out along with it. This one's more personal and that one's more professional...
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Let's begin with two quotes. Here's one from John Lennon:

So this is Christmas
And what have you done
Another year over
And a new one just begun

"Happy Christmas (War is Over)"

Fellow Cheorwon Trooper DMZ Jazz recently wrote on his blog:

I guess it's been a minute.  The reason I haven't updated has been a series of immensely stressful, physically and emotionally painful, life-changing, but ultimately- positive changes. 

Same here. A quick look at the sidebar of Dispatches shows that a fraction of posts have gone up this year compared to 2012 and 2013. There are reasons for that.A major relationship has concluded and I've chosen to resign from EPIK at the end of this semester. These two things go together, and yet they don't.

I'm going to be leaving in February of 2015. The easiest explanation would be that I've been feeling homesick and especially out of place in the past month or two. Wait--that's not all of it. I've just been unhappy with being an EPIK teacher for a while. It's hard to figure out when it started, but it's been going for a year. Teaching English as a Foreign Language has been fun and challenging, but it's not where my passion lies. Joining NCTE in November and reading about unit plans for The Great Gatsby reminded me of how much I miss teaching literature and language arts. EFL has plenty of language arts in it, but it's not where EPIK (and my school) seems to care about now. Therefore, moving on would be best for all parties concerned. Making this choice wasn't easy, but I do feel better now.

Making this choice wasn't easy, but it's best thing for me to do. The past year has been fraught with stress at school over the direction of lessons, teaching philosophy, and administrative issues. No single person's to blame. It was my choice to renew for this fourth year and switch schools and it's not working out for anyone. This is not to contradict the Thanksgiving post below, for the coteachers have been helpful and have done things to the best of their abilities. We only played the cards we were dealt. I just don't think I'm the right man for this position anymore.

Why not?  This might further explain why: I finally got around to watching Dead Poets Society this September. The movie focuses on Mr. Keating, the magnetic, maverick English teacher who shakes things up at a prestigious prep school. His youthful and unorthodox style puts him immediately at odds with his colleagues because he teaches differently than the rest of the faculty does. I found the film heartbreaking on one hand and a moving portrait of inspired teaching on the other. It also made me consider my place as a teacher within EPIK. Was I like him? I certainly harbor different views on teaching and, let's face it, I'm a stranger in a strange land. Keating was a former student of the school; I'm an outsider in most every way.

No, I never set out to become a Mr. Keating and change the world. Far from it: I boarded that plane excited to learn about Korea and have a full-time teaching job. And that's what it was for a long time: Learning about Korea and transitioning from an English Language Arts teacher to an English as a Foreign Language teacher. And, let's not forget, working with a plethora of coteachers and all the attendant issues that that entailed.* What a time. Like the ZZ Top lyric, "I've been up/I've been down/Take my word, I've been 'round."

I found I couldn't reconcile who the teacher I'd like to be with the teacher my school wanted me to be. Combine that with a rampant strain of homesickness and equals "it's time to go." Korea's been great. No other word comes to mind. What a thrill, to get to spend some time here and have all of these experiences.

So...happy holidays, everyone. This is the first of the last Dispatches from Gangwon. We're caught in that No Man's Land between Christmas and New Year's Day. I'm still carrying on with a vacation to the States to visit family and friends. For a a while, I'd thought that the trip would provide the refresher necessary to charge through another semester here, but no, it won't. It's best to move on come the end February.

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Enjoy some music:

Ah...J Rabbit. Cool duo. Here they are covering "Winter Wonderland" and having a fun time doing it. I should get some more posts out about Korean music; there are some good groups here.

Here's Chuck Berry doing "Merry Christmas Baby," a song I never knew about until this year.

The Beatles and their Let It Be gem "I've Got A Feeling," which may not be about Christmas, but it's about the peaks and valleys we experience in any given year.

My Morning Jacket - Moving Away. A good slow groover. I cannot thank a certain aunt enough for giving me this album.

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*If memory serves, I've worked with around 25 coteachers in the past 3.5 years.

Frank McCourt's "Teacher Man" / Reflections on storytelling in class

A persistent question in ELT is teacher talk time. Many teachers worry about talking too much for fear of not giving their students enough time to talk. Some, myself included, fear becoming the archetypal “sage on the stage” who monologues his way through the class. All of that teacher talk precludes any time for letting the students talk. And if they aren't talking, then their speaking skills won't be getting any better. I’ve written about the “sage on the stage” stuff before, but it’s time to approach it from another angle.

The quote below shows a case in point. It comes from Frank McCourt’s excellent memoir Teacher Man, where he writes of his early days as a teacher in New York City and how he often told stories in his classes because they held the students’ attention better than the day’s lesson.

I argue with myself, You’re telling stories and you’re supposed to be teaching.  

I am teaching. Storytelling is teaching.  

Storytelling is a waste of time.  

I can’t help it. I’m not good at lecturing. 

You’re a fraud. You’re cheating our children. 

They don’t seem to think so. 

(P.26. Link to e-text at Google Books here)

Though I’ve never kept track of how often it happened, most every class over here has included at least one story or anecdote. Many of them got told on Mondays or Fridays because those days lent themselves to that time honored topic of weekends and what people do on them. Sometimes the stories would relate to the lesson and sometimes it wouldn't. They were fun to tell and the students enjoyed them. At least, it seemed like they did. Unlike McCourt, I had some basis for telling stories because of how EPIK teachers' classes are set up. Many EPIK teachers are encouraged to tell stories from or about our home countries because it lets the students hear real live English from a real live English speaker. The students still don't have much exposure to English speakers and hearing stories and anecdotes allowed them to hone their listening skills. Indeed, sometimes I or a coteacher would stop and quiz the students while I talked, Like the aforementioned quote goes, "storytelling is teaching."

Yet as fun as it was to tell stories, I started wondering about whether it was good to do so when my EFL studies turned to TTT, or teacher talk time. Suddenly I'd think, "Hey! Let them talk!" A lingering memory of a speaker at my EPIK Orientation would come to mind. He'd said, “Your job is not to speak English to the students. Your job is to have the students speak English to each other.” Questions mounted in my mind and I'd end up arguing with myself like McCourt:

• How will the students know what to do if they don’t have any examples?
• What if they know what to say, but they lack the vocabulary for it?
• What about speaking itself? Korean and English have different rhythms and timbres. Shouldn’t I be doing some modeling After all, they would need to hear examples of correct pronunciation.
• What does all this matter if the students are enjoying the story? They're getting vocabulary and syntax, right?

These questions would go on and on until I'd think, Fine, but it was one story that lasted for 5 minutes in a 45 minute class. The kids were engaged. Let it go. And I would. I should remember that stories and anecdotes have their place in the classroom. Storytelling constitutes a form of teaching. One form, anyway. It may be teacher talk, but as long as it doesn't dominate the class, it should be fine.

*ELT = English Language Teaching. It's quite similar to EFL, or English as a Foreign Language and ESL, or English as a Second Language. Or, if you want to go longer and more detailed, TESOL, which is Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.

Related: ELT Rants, Reviews, Reflections: Reducing Teacher Talking Time

Belated Thanksgiving 2014 / Sunday morning reflections

This week's been up and down. Most of it comes from feeling homesick because it's Thanksgiving today. As I explained to the students this week, Thanksgiving is quite like the Korean Chuseok holiday: It's a time for families to gather and enjoy spending time together. It also focuses on being thankful for what you have. And what you have isn't so much what you possess as it is about intangible things like family, love, and friendship.

I got to see Dave Sperling of Dave's ESL Cafe speak in Daejeon yesterday. He said, "You're living the lives you want.  You're in Korea, after all." A wave of happiness went through me when he said that, for it's something that, obvious though it is, I sometimes forget that coming to Korea was about more than taking a job. Coming here meant learning a new culture and leaving home. It meant getting--and using--a passport for the first time. And it meant having to keep an open mind about things.

Sometimes one needs to hear the obvious. Living and teaching here is what I want to do. What other explanation exists for having signed a fourth contract? At another point, Dave said, "If I'd known [doing Dave's ESL Cafe] would be so hard, I wouldn't have done it." Not me. If I had known in August 2011 that the next three years would mean traveling all around this peninsula and Asia, meeting countless wonderful people, feeling better and worse than ever, and becoming a better teacher, then yes, I would've done it. Korea continues to be a wonderful time. Some days go better than others. Living as an expatriate is a full time job. But even so, it's the best I've ever had.

I'd like to give thanks to

• Family. Words fail to express the importance of family. I miss all of you very much.
• Friends. I've met friends from around the world here and that probably wouldn't have happened--not to this extent, anyway--if I hadn't gotten on that plane. You know who you are. Thanks for being here and for all the things you've mentioned about your home countries. 
• The students. The Korean school system pushes them to the limit, but they keep coming back for more. The longer I stay here, the more I feel for them. I often wonder how I feel in their shoes.
• Coteachers. Thanks for all of your help with understanding the school system and teaching our classes.
• Planes, planes, and automobiles. Korea has an excellent transportation system. One can go anywhere at nearly any time.
• Anyone who comes here and reads this blog.

This will be my final Thanksgiving in Korea. It's getting to be time for me to move on, for some educational and work opportunities have come up in the USA. The final Dispatches from Gangwon will come in August of 2015.

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Though I'm not Southern, this song's a favorite for what it says about the USA and how we should try to preserve nature.

Lynyrd Skynyrd - All I Can Do Is Write About It

Actually, though it's about the USA, those lines about "the concrete slowly creeping" apply to Korea as well? Other than Shin Joong-hyun's legendary "Beautiful Mountains and Rivers"? 

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Previous posts about Thanksgiving

#3: Thanksgiving 2013

#2: Thanksgiving 2012

#1: Happy Thanksgiving! 2011.

* Ironically, Thanksgiving signals the start of the crazed Christmas shopping season. And Black Friday and its sales are on the next day. Strange.

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Last, but not least, thanks to Cal and J for being here in 2013-2014. Rock on!

Reflections on the 2013 School Year 1

Exams have concluded today and we’re entering the last days of the school year. The year concludes on 27 December, so we’ve about two weeks left before the winter classes begin. The regular year is, for all intents and purposes, over. We still have more classes to do, but they’ve already been planned out, so I’ve more some time to relax and stretch out. Hence, this post and a future series of posts reflecting on how the 2013 school year went down. Here’s the beginning:

Favorite lessons/activities:

l       The Price is Right--the students had great fun guessing prices of various items we learned about. It also provided an excellent review of money and numbers. The teams liked competing with each other for the closest price as well.

l       The hotel and airplane tickets roleplays--The students enjoyed walking around making their various plans with people. They got to do some real life English as well as practice activities they'll likely do as adults. As reading's been called an "imaginative rehearsal" for real life, so to are the role plays.

l       Battleship--The activity does take some time to explain, but the students understood it after a couple of tries. The game's format lends itself to repetition, so students get plenty of practice with variations on a speaking point without wearing the point out. The students also had fun guessing where the ships were.

l       Board games--UpWords and Scrabble. The games allowed the students to use their repertoire of English words in a fun context. To keep track of the words, they wrote words that they played on a handout and turned them in for my review.

• The summer camp

What else went well? Why?

l       Anything I mentioned about America. The students are hungry for knowledge about my home country as well as the chance to compare Korea to other countries. The students delighted in hearing about how it’s possible to vote, buy rifles, and smoke cigarettes at age 18.*

l       The notebooks and the bringing of materials.I've written about this before—at the beginning, it felt like moving mountains get the students to remember that yes,this is class, and yes, you will bring your materials with you, but theydid get the message. Soon over 80% were bringing books, notebooks, and pencils to class and we began taking notes in earnest. Some grumbled at this, but it was the next step after brining the stuff to class. (Many did see the value, though) The note-taking part’s still being worked on, but the students are starting to see that yes, they need to write stuff down from time to time. Writing helps, interestingly enough, with the hallowed study method of memorization. It’s funny how students will copy words and sentences for pages, but writing stuff that appears on the board is forgotten much of the time here. Oh well…one more thing to work on next semester.

*They couldn’t believe it was possible to own a gun while still in high school. And as someone who turned 18 just before senior year began, it is a strange thing to think about. The Korean students can’t drive, smoke, or vote until age 19, which means after they’ve finished high school. What a contrast to America—driving is high school for a good chunk of the population, for better or worse.

It's Daejeon! Reflections

Greetings, dear readers. I rode the Mugunghwa train out of Daejeon yesterday afternoon and arrived back in Seoul. It's now Friday. R and I will fly to Jeju this afternoon. This post marks the transition between one adventure and another. 

Reflections on the Daejeon jaunt:

Be a man with a plan

The best way to keep from worrying or fiddling about is to stay busy. Keeping on the move meant no time to think of anything else except how to get from A to B and to enjoy everything along the way. Before I went out, I'd written down where to go and how to get there. The plan was by no means bulletproof, but it was something to work from. It centered on staying out from morning to evening and seeing as much as possible. 

Having a plan applies to daily life as well as traveling. I'm one of those people who writes an agenda for every day, including so-called off days. I do so because having a plan means having a purpose for the day. Doing things deliberately means less time for idling and more time to accomplish things. Taking the time to write an agenda also means that the day's events receive more attention than simply blundering along from one thing to the next.*

As a corollary, being alone is fine as long as thoughts about being alone don't come to mind. I've always been fine by myself.

Knowing more Korean helps

Not to be Captain Obvious, but yes, it's true. My Korean skills aren't anything special, but I've gotten quicker at recognizing words and phrases. Speaking the language comes more naturally, too.

Make it a good time, rain or shine

I strode out of the hotel yesterday to find dark skies bringing intermittent rain showers. When it wasn't raining, it was misting and drizzling. It was not looking like a good day for journeying around the city, but I knew I had to go out anyway. Here was a city that had plenty to see and I only had a short time there. Another opportunity to tour Daejeon may present itself for a long while, so I had to seize the day. I had my umbrella and the raincoat, so the pavement got pounded, and it got pounded hard. The rain humidity only became a problem if I concentrated on it, so didn't. What good would it have done, anyway? The weather is what it is: Korea gets rain, rain, and more rain in the summer time. It's not worth fighting the inevitable.

The rains did preclude visiting some of Daejeon's beautiful parks, but like the song goes, "You can't always get what you want." Actually, that's not entirely true: I could have gone to a park or two because the sun did eventually come out, but I was too fried from all the walking to want to do anything else after dinner. What transpired yesterday was more than enough, anyway. If things had gone differently, then that ride with the mom and her kids might not have happened, among other things. The days are what we make of them.

I love traveling by train

The Mugunghwa's not a bullet train, but it does have large windows and a cafe car. I enjoyed sipping a beer and watching the countryside roll by. The large windows on either side provided one lovely picture show. Additionally, train travel's predictable: A stop here, a stop there, and smooth riding in between. Bus travel means stops and starts that go with the rhythm of the traffic. It also means a smaller cabin. Both forms of transport have their share of bumps and jostles, though. 

Korea has many cheap or free attractions

Everywhere I went yesterday had free admission. Repeat: The EXPO Park, the National Science Museum, the Currency Museum, and the Museum of Education charge no admittance fees. The EXPO and the Science Museum do charge for some attractions inside, but they cost no more than 3,000won. The most money I spent at any time in Daejeon was the 10,300won train fare to get back to Seoul. Otherwise, everything else came cheaply. I'm no fan of nightclubs and I rarely stay out late anymore, so anyone who prefers to travel on a budget had best do stuff during the daylight. A few friends have mentioned that Daejeon's a fun place to live, but isn't as good of a place to visit. I disagree, for the city, wide as it is, offers wider and flatter roads to travel on and a good transportation system.

Yet after the short but thrilling time there, I'm not finished with the city. I'll return to it to visit its parks and mountains eventually. Biking along the Gabcheon (Gab Stream) also looks appealing. Until then...

*Dale Carnegie wrote extensively about planning in his book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. I recommend it for its clear prose and excellent, practical advice.