Pióro

My ESL students are just average Canadians when it comes to the US election. The students have a knee-jerk support for Kerry even if they have never heard of him.
I started my conversation class with the question, “Who do you think will win the election today?” My students looked at me as if I was [...]

Working in a small town can make you feel like the man. You know, the man who walks down the street and says “Hey what’s happening?” to every second person. Or maybe it’s more like the opening of Disney’s version of Beauty and the Beast, with the main character saying hello to everyone. There’s no [...]

This one gets my more advanced adults howling.
First, I must explain a connection between Polish and English. I promise this linguist eggheadishness is going somewhere: bear with me. This connection revolves around Latinate words like ‘valorisation,’ ‘consternation’ and ‘fermentation.’ Their Polish equivalents look and sound almost the same: ‘waloryzacja’ (remember, ‘w’ is ‘v’ in Polish [...]

Final exams are no different for teachers as they are for students; in an effort to avoid the inevitable, they scurry around getting immersed in every little distraction. Some alphabetise CD collections, while others clean. TV and computer games work too, but they are not as good as, say, organising the spice rack. Anything that [...]

Stereotypes aside, karaoke is big here in Korea. But karaoke is the Japanese name. In this neck of the woods the art form is called norae bang. You can find norae bang in the weirdest places: on big make-shift stages set up in a market to platforms erected within labyrinthine subway stations. We saw one [...]

Arthur is an English teacher from our sister camp, Camp Korea. Our camp was called Pantech and Curitel, named after the huge telecom company that sponsored the camp. Both camps were based at Howan University, just outside of Gunsan. It turns out that Pantech and Curitel don’t know much about kids. They sent some dude [...]

Okay, how’s this for nuts? Me, 12 Korean children (10-13 years old) and raging disco hits. That’s right I’m teaching these kiddies how to git down. I have a class each day that involves something a little “creative,” i.e. not exactly teaching English in the strict sense. So I’m trying to teach these little dudes [...]

First day of class and I’m trying to learn the names of eleven Korean children. All the names are nuts and totally butchered by my heavy Western tongue. (I swear the consonants are lighter in Korean.) My assistant teacher suggested that I give them all English names. Before I could say, “Isn’t naming children a [...]

14 hours on the plane.
3 hours on a bus.
In Gunsan by 7:00 am Korea time, just in time to start our full day of orientation.
Luckily, we got to bed by nine, and had a solid ten hour sleep.
Also lucky we brought boots, cause there’s like two feet of snow on the ground, and it keeps [...]

A few days before Christmas, Matt’s friend and former co-worker Warren hooked us up with a sweet job in Gun-San, Korea.
We leave tonight.
It’s been pretty hectic getting ready on short notice, but the opportunity was too good to miss. For two weeks we’ll be teaching at a winter camp for kids. One of the perks [...]