Cogs turning

So it's an eternal oscillation between gratification and the undermining of confidence. On any given day, I can't be certain whether it is I or my students who have changed. My perspective seems to shift a bit and suddenly I've made loads of progress, established repor, and am gaining traction. Then it shifts back and I see what massive quantities of work lie ahead of me. On a good day, the shift happens within a single lesson. During a bad week, the days drag and I'm wading through a swamp with memories of running on dry land.

Yale class seems to be understanding more lately. A lot more. Method helps loads, and so long as I don't occupy myself with the disciplinary issues (I've started to come up with and borrow new tactics for regaining control of a classroom), I can make significant headway within a single period. Today we reviewed an entire month's worth of lessons and made progress into new material.
Cornell class today and everyday is just a little bit wonderful. They react a little better to my intstruction every day, and I'm beginning to understand that the boys are just being boys their age. The quick ones completely zone out, and I can't and probably shouldn't do anything about it. They get most of it. The slow ones, Billy in particular, have a little more trouble, but I'm finally connecting with them, and Billy is really trying as hard as he can to catch up and exceed the work of the other students. Once I get him past James (if it's possible) I might be able to get James' attention agian. The girls, on the other hand, are wonderful, and I'm making great progress with them. Their pronunciation and listening comprehension has gotten much better since I came, and I love teaching them.

My kindergarten classes will require another entry at some point to go through my relationship with each student, but Kiwi class continues to be an interesting little comedy hour. They're my favorites, probably, and I love the days when we get to color and talk a little bit. Because of the number of personalities in the class, they tend to get a little unruly at times, but because of my co-teacher, they're pretty easy to get back under wraps. Laura (one of my coworkers) took an amazing video of Ashley dancing today. The girl could dance for five minutes straight without noticing anything else in the world. She is impossible to discipline because she frankly doesn't care, but only because she's pretty happy wherever. When she's on my side, I have no need to discipline whatsoever because she's constantly telling the other students to sit nicely and be quiet. At some point, I'll try to explain why she's so incredible and what she's teaching me about life. The rest of the class is great as well and I love watching Danny perfectly finish his coloring in half the time it takes everyone else to sloppily do it, because it doesn't end there. He is immediately willing to walk around and help each other student in the class. I would probably be best off describing each student through the way they color. They're such amazing tiny people, and I haven't quite wrapped my mind around that yet.
Banana class continues to be a struggle, and while I at first was ready to blame it on my co-teacher, I'm now wondering if it's me. I know in my head that kids need discipline and consistency, but I'm starting to internalize the fact that I must have discipline and consistency in order to give it to them. They're wonderful kids, but I'm afraid I'm perpetually confusing their universes as I learn to teach them. They're both behind and ahead of Kiwi, but their age makes it much tougher to level with them and explain new concepts. I'm not the greatest at teaching without some thread of logic or mechanical reasoning. It's tough. I need to get more creative.

My more private lessons are all unique and less difficult to track. The one that's frustrating me the most right now is Prodigy G4. They're two fourth grade boys who I have an incredibly tough time getting to speak in real English. They can read and form English sounds very well, but they're too lazy or too poorly taught to comprehend anything they read. They're good, smart kids, but they are my greatest point of oscillation. One day, they're great, and the next they're down below my kindergarteners.

Well, I have to go teach now. I wish I could write more, and might late. For now, all is well and I've really settled in to Korea in so many ways.

I love and miss you all. Hope to talk to you soon.

Joe

Down by the station, early in the morning

So today's been a pretty great day to end a pretty great week. My attitude is, of course, influenced by the fact that I'll be on break for the next five days, which means I'll get to escape my routine and get around a little more.
Today was activity day number two for me. We had a potluck meal to celebrate Thanksgiving, which may seem odd to you since it's September, but the Korean holiday that's giving me this vacation is their closest analogue to it. The food was great, and we made all of the kids little Indian headbands and had them color pilgrims while we talked about the first Thanksgiving. It's so fun and so wonderful [read in the fullest sense of the word] to see education from the other side. It amazes me each day as I go back and imagine my teachers being exactly where I am in so many ways. I thought they had so much figured out, and I never realized that there might've been days when we colored because the teacher was filling in for what was lacking. Teaching is really pretty hard, and it's so full of brick walls and students who you can't get through to one day and who amaze you the next. Today was a welcome reprieve from the anxiety that I've been feeling about whether or not I'm getting through. I got to simply spend time with the kids, speaking conversationally and trying to just relax with them. We sat down to watch Garfield after the meal and there was practically a dogpile of kids on me watching the movie. They're all pretty wonderful, and it's great to know that as frustrated as we get with one another, we can put it all to the side and just enjoy one another's company.

Somewhere in-between

So I've now taken it upon myself the daily task of retaining and expanding my use of the English language. The tendency is, of course, to pare down my use of language to the irreducible chunks that can be easily transcribed into the minds of my students. In many ways, for clarity, I follow this tendency. First though, I intend to confuse them. I am here as a native speaker, and to reduce my use of language to what a native English speaker would only recognize as caveman talk would be a disservice to my students and to myself. They must learn to hear the language as it's spoken.

That said, I am attempting to restrict myself to a finite number of phrases rather than the infinity of constructions toward which a native speaker tends. The point of all of this, minus the digression into ESL teaching philosophy, is that I have noticed in the speech of fellow westerners a significant shift toward an almost Korean grammar. Perhaps I notice it more now that I am learning bits and pieces of Korean language, but it is particularly bad among those who have learned more of the language or taught here for longer periods of time. Feeling little slips myself, I've undertaken a reading of Umberto Eco, who, I've been told at various times, is an excellent and challenging read. It's true. I'm a little over 40 dense pages into the novel, and I'm loving it. It's occupied most of my free time today, and I forsee it taking a good deal of what I have remaining until I've finished the novel. I'm reading Foucault's Pendulum, and I can feel lamps burning in my mind that have long been dark. As the flames burn brighter - as they are exposed to more of the oxygen of thought - I can feel more of the lampblack burning away. Or, to to twist the metaphor a differet way, the lampblack is dripping away into the ink upon the page, and thus more is illuminated while the page before me is filled.

Another product of this shift is that I've begun to define more of those shadows that I mentioned recently. Life here gets better and worse with each passing day, but in naming those things which bother me, I am able to quantify them, classify them, and put them in their proper places. My mind reels more as I realize its motion, but each day, without slowing, the reeling becomes more like standing still. I suppose some would say it's all relative. Foucault would likely say that it's all relative to context, tradition, and the all-pervading cultural symbols(if I remember correctly).

All in all, I should say that, while little is new lately, new light is shed each day on those things with which I come in contact. The world continues to spin, and each error is part triumph and each triumph is accidental. Vigilance is good practice, but never an exact science. Teaching has become a sort of metaphor for my quest. Those things I tried so hard to do at first come so easily now in bursts, and those things which seemed so easy then get more difficult by the day. Perhaps it is that I see with new eyes, and perhaps it is that the field is everchanging. Perhaps the two are really part of one larger same.

Anyway. I'm digressing more and more lately, but somehow getting closer to telling you the truth of what I'm feeling here, cryptic as it may be. It has been so good to be in contact with home: to know that life is not standing still for any of you. It gives me great comfort to know that my world there is no more constant than my world here. Perhaps, that is its constancy. For the moment, I am musing on the fact that "perhaps" means something like "chance may be" at its core, and my mind is again in awe at the seeming randomness and simultaneous congruency of life. Creation is so easily difficult and so troublingly easy.

For now, I'm off to teach one of my favorite students. They're all teaching me what a terror I once was, while simultaneously showing me why my teachers held out hope.
Hope to write soon, and sorry if the syntax gets cumbersome - I'm trying to keep my English up to snuff.

I continue to keep all of you in my thoughts and prayers.

Love,
Joe

Engine back in gear

Ok. So I finally went for a run last night, and I'm planning on a follow-up run or a visit to the gym tonight. It made such a huge difference, even though I didn't make it that far. The air here isn't great for a run, but when I compare running in smog to not running at all, the choice becomes obvious. Last night, I didn't idle away a few hours. I didn't follow the pattern that inevitably leads to depression in my case, which is pretty much the one where I sit and stare at the computer all day or watch shows I've downloaded until I get so sick of my own company that I burst forth, only to run around seeking attention and approval.
I apologize, the self-interrogation that preoccupies me of late can't be stripped from my entries that easily. It is what I think about, and try as I might, it continues to bleed through in what I write. Things are sublty shifting, and I'm trying to track the changes without overestimating them. The strangest change I've noticed is that I'm no longer the kind of man who can sleep through the night, unstirring. I dream. and dream. and dream. At first my dreams were about home, and then came the displacement dreams wehre I was constantly placing things from home here or things from here at home. The third type that arose was the utterly displaced type of dream, the surreal sort of revery where I am at once in a Kafka novel and a Dali painting. Those were pretty cool. Recently, and particularly last night, the two chief occupants of the room that is my mind combined to create an interesting scene. It was as though I were on trial before a room of my students. They scrutinized me innocently, in the fashion after which they comment on my armhair or the fact that I blush. They spoke with such a wondered curiosity, matching their daily behavior as I explain new things to them. But things were different in the dream. It wasn't my clothing or my hair that they looked at with rapt curiosity, but instead they looked at my faults, my past, and the very things that have been vexing me lately. I call it a trial, because I had somehow to explain these things to the children without making them alright and without the children shunning me. It was something of a nightmare, and it's haunted me today.
But, as with all other things in life, no one thing can occupy the mind continuously, and in my moments of forgetting, today has been a pretty great day. I'm blaming it on the run last night and the little ways I keep reminding myself that the kids have progressed since I got here. I'm doing my best to see things as they are, stiving toward some sort of objectivity. Camus has taught me that objectivity is pretty impossible if one is to continue to interact with an absurd world, which I find darkly funny at the moment. I'm doing my best to keep rolling the rock up the hill, though, because if I can never achieve my aim, I might as well get better at failing. I hope you can hear the smile in my words, and understand that I'm actually doing quite well. For now, I'm off to class. I hope all is well back home and I look forward to hearing from you, if you have the time.
Love,
Joe

Understanding the contrast

Ok, so I'm going to stop writing these entries as though I'm actually going to post more often. I'm certain that there will come a time at which I will need to write on here every day in order to feel close to you all, when the true tide of homesickness washes over me; but, at present, I'm still so busy trying to grasp hold of the world that it's next to impossible to write about it. Anyway, here's my attempt to discern light from shadow, to at least give you the silhouette of what I'm experiencing now. I say this because I've recently realized how much of my life I'm currently living outside of language, in a world of non-linear thought, where things are so indefinite and intractable that I have intense difficulty in truly charting them, even with the infinite scope of the English language.
From a perspective of making sense out of my world, things seem to have been grey for the past month, but only in retrospect. The world has slowly filtered its way into shadows as my new sense of self develops its lens on the world here. It is as though throughout the past month, I've been gazing through vaselined glasses at a world that I could not describe and it's slowly coming into focus. The lines surrounding each islet of existence that shares my world are coming into clearer focus. Honestly, it might be better to say that I've started seeing their shadows. It's all sounding a bit like the beginning of Plato's cave analogy in The Republic, but that's the way it is.
Life is profoundly more existential here. I see so much of my life as completely out of my hands, but my solution thusfar has been to do my absolute best to control those things that are within my grasp and to leave the rest to Korean benevolence and God's grace. I've shed several layers of self already as I've tried on personalities from my past. In many ways, the past month has been a run at several brick walls in the world of self-discovery. Actually, it's been like a walk of several short piers. These are all analogies I'm making largely for myself, and I will probably never go into this with any of you, but you should know that I'm growing, and peeling off unnecessary layers out here.
An example of what I mean is that for many foreigners here, Korea is analogous to that scene in Pinnochio that I always forget about. It's the scene where he goes to that land where all of the boys play and are mean to one another and eventually turn into donkeys. That's what life is like here at times. One skin I've done by best to shed is the one that would lead me to have ears for all of eternity.
One of my biggest issues so far with the journey has been that of wondering where I ought to head. Part of me was putting that on hold, hoping that it would come alongside my calling in life and there would be a moment where I spontaneously understood both what I should do for the rest of my life and who I ought to be while doing it. I have come no nearer to figuring out the former, except to say that I don't know that I want to have to worry about money too much in life. I really don't think that that's going to be escapable though. The latter, however, just like my life here, is starting to appear as a shadow of a thing. I've been reading my C.S. Lewis daily book from Mary and I just finished The Plague by Camus. Both books have been nudging me in a direction that I've been pulling away from in so many ways for so many years. I read them for the habit of it, knowing that if I set out to change my mind by will, I'd fail. In putting the ideas into my head, one drop at a time, I've started to finally feel a subtle shift under the surface. In the past, it seems, all of my best intentions were revelatory and awesome. There is something quietly wonderful about this change in me. I don't want to spook it with words, but it is the shadow of something like who I am to be. It's strange really, because I've been flailing as usual in all of the other directions. The only parallel I can really draw here (and many of you won't get this entirely) is to what Dave did for me when I moved back to Kentucky. He let me flail until I wore myself out, and I finally did and found my quiet joy again.
All of this probably sounds wildly disturbing to some of you, because it's a little more personal than what I've written on here so far. But, the lump sum of it is that I'm going to begin trying to do my best to not give what "plague" I carry to my fellow man. Dr. Kling once called me a "wounded healer" and now that I'm beginning to understand what he meant, I'm humbled by the high praise. At one point, I might have been merely that, but the work begins now to make myself worthy of the appelation of "wounded" healer. Again, rambling nonsense to many of you, but I've got to spill it.
So, anyway, the teaching goes well. Some days are wonderful, and others are frustrating. I feel myself becoming, by practice and subtly, a better teacher. Just like the C.S. Lewis and Camus, I'm adding a drop to the bucket each day, trying to put forth just enough effort to reach through without overreaching myself. I will not be the best teacher in the world overnight, and to think that I would be is ridiculous. I'm just doing my best to be a little better every day.
Otherwise, life goes on. Summer is turning to fall, so the sun has come out here and the humidity has lifted somewhat. Fall is supposed to be the best season here, which is the reason I'm going to be buying a bike as soon as I can. I need a way to explore more, and it'll get me to work faster and to the park to go running (traffic lights are killing my runs here). I'm feeling the need to get out of myself soon, and the bike might be the way to do it. If not, I'm counting on a few good runs to help.
All in all, I'm happy. I'm learning so much about myself, and the Korean, just like everything else, seems to be seeping in without much effort. I just keep constantly focusing, and slowly my vision improves. I guess what's really changed is that the focusing no longer feels like so much work. That's one to write home about.

Love to all of you. I miss you all so terribly it hurts, but only in fleeting moments.

Joe