Well, with just a few weeks left, literally, I'm going to to try and revive the whole blog thing. I started that other one but the format and the look of it all just didn't inspire me. Not to say that I haven't been going through a bit of writers block and that in truth I simply haven't felt that much like writing of late, but that is beginning to change. I started to read through the blog of another teacher up in Seoul and it made me realize that I'm wasting this all if I don't get some of it down. Memories can fade, need to get them on paper (so to speak) while I can.
I'll try not to rehash too much what most people already know. My last day of school is February 4th and I leave for Japan on February 7th. I'll be there for about a week and hopefully be spending a lot of time with a Japanese friend I met here who should show me the ropes. I'm hoping to catch at least one good rock show, go to a hot-spring submersed in snow covered mountains and eat a hell of a lot of good food all the while trying to maintain a reasonable budget. We'll see how it goes. By they way, if anyone knows anyone living in Tokyo I would really love a place to crash at so I can save some dough. I'll probably be in Tokyo that Monday, possibly Tuesday and then the following weekend. The Faint played there last night, what I would have done to be able to go...
After Japan I have to have an overnight stay back here in Busan, then I catch a plane to Bangkok. Thailand as of right now is still a little up in the air. My Korean friend Cindy has been working with her sister for the last 4 months in Phuket, but with the recent disasters I'm not sure what to expect. I'm planning on spending a healthy amount of time on the east coast which wasn't affected. I'm not sure if it will drive rates up or what, I'll just have to play things it by ear when I get there. I'm not planning on spending too much time in Bangkok, that's all I know.
Ok, so from Feb 14-25 I'm in Thailand, after that I fly to Athens to spend time with Katarina and see some history. On the 26th I get somehow to Prague to do the TEFL course. That is four weeks and then I make it to Spain, broke to stay with a Frenchie I met back in Spanish class and try to find work. I'll be in Madrid but would really like to try to find a place in Barcelona. Ultimately, by that point I'm just going to broke and tired so I'll probably take any steady work I can find anywhere, as long as I can stay in Spain I'll be happy (relatively at least) cleaning toilets.
So about life here. Things have changed a bit. I'm quite the homebody lately. We're on the winter schedule which means days that begin at 8:30 and end somewhere between 4:30 and 6:30. I'm teaching between 8-10 classes per day leaving me a bit exhausted. The good news is that I like all my classes this semester, even the problem kids from semesters past are being less of a hassle.
Part of the change is that the kids mature and grow so quickly and I'm just getting better at what I'm doing and working with kids. For the first time since I've been here some of the classes that I look forward the most are my younger kids with students ranging from 10-13. The largest reason has to be my confidence level with what I'm doing now. I was reading the other blog and his relating his first experience and they turned out to be exactly like mine. The books that we get are not always perfect and when I first got here I found myself flying through pages really quickly and the kids probably didn't get that much out of it. Now I can stretch one or two pages for an entire class and sometimes longer, reinforcing several skills in ways that don't make them bored. People who know me back home as the serious and sometimes pensive figure would hardly recognize me in my classrooms. I've taken my long suppressed ability to simply goof and turned it into my advantage in the classroom. I've even surprised myself with how much cool I've been able to shed with the children and I actually think that a lot of the time I'm doing a good job.
I'm still doing mostly speaking and listening classes and I've felt I've come a long way on this. In all levels, even up to the upper levels I have focus largely on phonics and pronunciation. It's so essential at all levels for these kids at least with certain sounds that simply don't exist here. Me, the chronic mumbler, I hardly mumble in the class now unless I'm proving a point. I've think I've finally gotten them listening to each other and themselves which is essential. There is constant negative reinforcement on speaking from their classmates and even the Korean teachers who often suffer from the same obstacles to correct pronunciation. An let me just say, there is nothing wrong with accents by all means. Yes, as westerners we find some more desirable, attractive and sexy than others, but ultimately it only matters if the accent is distracting or makes the language difficult to understand. What I try to do is just mellow it so that it can be understood. Luckily Korean is also a phonetic language so outside of a few essential sounds (particularly the f, v, ch, th), they're able to mimic a lot of things. Vowels are sometimes difficult because only about the half have direct correlates in English and the nonsensical nature of English writing makes it difficult sometimes for them to pronounce new words because so much of our language is filled with exceptions to already loose rules.
I think I've talked about it a bit before, but the written system here is extraordinary. It's I think one of the few, if only, written systems that was researched studied and created to be accessible to many people. And it really is, reading it that is. The grammar and sounds are extremely difficult as a westerner as most (I think) non-romance languages can be, but you can learn to read in a few days and it hold relatively few exceptions between reading and speaking. It also could be an easily adaptable language. With a few extra consonants and vowels added in it could easily be used for Japanese and other languages. Yes, the chinese characters, used here for special occasions and ceremoniously, are elegant, but it is based almost entirely on memorization. Furthermore, the meaning of some characters (used here, China for numerous languages and dialects, and for part of the Japanese writing system) change from region to region and language.
I'm going to abruptly cut this off, it's long enough, but more soon I promise.
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