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 speaking a foreign language. I gave the background to my statement—US, election, voting—and then posed the question again. Then a student asked me who you could vote for if you didn’t want Bush to win. Once I taught everyone how to pronounce his name properly, Kerry was a shoo-in.

According to the following pole, two of the students would vote for Kerry and the third would vote for Bush. The Republican student soon admitted that he really preferred Kerry.

“I just said Bush because they said Ker… Kerr… the other guy,” he said.

Standard teenage compulsions are stronger than politics.

My conversation class has four fairly advanced students. Class turnout today was three students, which is high.

My other class is at a much lower level. I had to teach the word “election” before we could talk about it. Once they understood, one student said, “I hate Bush-ee.” He’s Korean and English speakers from that country add “ee” to the end of quite a few English words. The other two students in the class didn’t comment. Attendance was 100%.

Yesterday, I walked out of the school, in the centre of Skoczów, at twenty after eight. I ran right into one of my old students. Her group finished their class a month ago so they could all take their matura exam: a big, stressful multi-day exam that all Polish high-school students must pass. I was preparing her group for the English language part of the exam. She did okay. Her brother, who was also in my class, didn’t do very well on the writing part. I can get all teacherly about that and say “That’s what you get when do don’t hand in any of your writing assignments.” Let that be a lesson for all you kids out there. Happily, the brother did do well on his speaking component.

After saying good-bye to my student, I went to check out the town square. This weekend features Skoczów Days, a celebration of the town, whose charter is around six times older than Canada’s constitution. In some ways the fair was a typical a small town do. It had an inflatable play-pen that the little ones could bounce around in. There were small sketchy rides, greasy foods and beer tents. Last night the main stage featured high school singing and dancing acts and a cake eating contest. On Sunday night, it would see a rock group who’s heyday was sometime in the late seventies and early eighties. Kind of like Trooper playing Festival Days in Port Perry.

I ran into one of my adult students, his wife—who is also the secretary at my school—and their five year-old son. They bought me a beer to go with my kiełbasa and fries. That student is getting an ‘A.’ (Let that also be a lesson to you kiddies.) The band played an old Silesian folk classic. Everybody in the audience new the words and the actions. My student translated the chorus, “Where is this street? Where is this house? Where is this girl that I love?” My student is a proud Silesian. Not quite a separatist, but he definitely thinks of himself as Silesian and not Polish.

With my kiełbasa and beer taken care of, I had to run for the bus to Cieszyn. Usually, I flirt with eye-strain on the bus by reading, but last night I ran into a old teacher from my school. She switched to another private school so I haven’t seen her in months. As we were chatting we found out that we both knew this one Brit living in Cieszyn. She said his accent was hard to understand and I simply added that the British do speak funny.

I didn’t run into anyone I knew on the walk home from the bus stop.

You can’t always be the man.

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 ), ‘konsternacja’ and ‘fermentacja.’ The big change is the between the two languages is the “ation” to “acja” (pronounced “ah-tsya”). I tell the following story whenever a student tries to work this connection a little too hard.

A the end of last October, I went to buy my first monthly bus pass. Everyday, I ride the bus from Cieszyn to Skoczów, a small town to the north west. A bus pass not only makes financial sense, but it allows me to avoid interacting with the surly bus drivers who man this route.

I went to the bus station in Skoczów armed with all the phrases I would need.

(When I tell the following part to my students, I usually ham it up a bit, leaning completely to the side as if I’m speaking through that low gap at the teller window, the one that’s for passing cash. I say the lines in Polish, which I’m sure still sounds a bit funny.)

“How much is a monthly ticket?”

“I need one from Cieszyn to Skoczów.”

“I’ll take one.”

“Thank you.”

So I tried the first two lines out on the lady behind the glass. She seemed to be getting it, but then she asked me a question that wasn’t in my notes. Something about “legitymacja” (pronounced with a hard ‘g’). I said I didn’t understand. She tried again, said something about students. I thought, “Ah, my baby-face is causing problems again.” So I explained that I wasn’t a student. I was a teacher. I just wanted a normal monthly ticket. That would be fine. Thanks.

The students love that last bit because any interactions with people behind glass are anything but straight-forward around here.

In my frustration, I turned to see who was in line behind me. Youngish people. Perfect. Someone will know English.

“Look, can you help me? I want to buy a monthly bus ticket. But there seems to be a problem.”

“Sure. Okay.”

So the English speaker yammered with the behind-glass lady. At the end, bilingual girl turned to me and said, “Ah, you need your legitimation.”

To which I replied, “Oh. Right. Great. Yeah, I’ll just go home and get it. Thanks. Really. Thanks for your help.”

I got out of there as fast as I could.

My students are killing themselves at this point because there is, of course, no “legitimation,” at least not like my helpful friend at the bus station thought. She just took the Polish word and turned it into an English one, with a hard ‘g’ pronunciation and everything. In Polish, “legitymacja” is official student or senior ID. In English… well, if you can read this, you don’t need to be told.

I did get a bus pass the next day, but it was at the Cieszyn bus station. I did have to explain once again that I had no legitymacja but I had my passport and residency papers. That took care of everything.

The happy new addition to the site is comments. The hard-working folks at Blogger have made comments a regular feature of their blogs. After a few blissful hours of code hashing, this site now has the capability to get feedback from all five of its loyal readers. Sarcasm aside, I’m really stoked about this feature because it gets to the essence of what separates print from the Web: dialogue. So let’s hear what you gotta say.

For people who don’t have an account with Blogger, you can only post anonymous comments. But, I encourage you to sign your anonymous comments nonetheless (e.g. start a new line at the end of your comment and write “–Name”). So far, only the posts on the main page can take comments and any new ones will have this feature. It would be incredibly time consuming to go back through one hundred plus entries and turn on the comments feature. I do have exams to create and then mark. On second thought…

A bunch of us Canuck English teachers and some of our Korean teacher counterparts went out the other night. After a big bowl of noodles, we found the nearest norae bang establishment with a price in our range. Now, if you are imagining that we went to some big smokey bar and had to perform Captain & Tennille’s Love Will Keep Us Together in front of a bunch of strangers, you’d be mistaken. We got our own private room for the nine of us, complete with TV monitors, mics, light-show, tons of tunes to choose from and all the soju (Korean rice wine) we could sneak in. I found out that, in spite of all the norae bang infrastructure, I am still a very bad singer. Oddly enough my best performance was not to the Stone’s Start Me Up or Earth Wind and Fire’s September. I brought the house down with that Celine Dion’s song from the Titanic movie (My Heart will Go On). Okay, okay, before all the indie kids throw up their arms in dismay, let me explain…

At the end of camp, each class has to do a performance for the rest of the camp and all the parents. Think grade school recital. I tried to get my kids into Jungle Boogie by Kool and the Gang, Sedated by The Ramones and even Take Me On by A-ha. But they wouldn’t have any of it. They hated it all. But not Titanic (see aforementioned Korean proclivity). So, fine. I gave in. In the final performance, my eleven kids sang like little cherubim, each one holding a piece of their own art-work that, when lined up side-by-side, formed an long paper Titanic with the ship’s name running down the side. (In the dress-rehearsal only the kids carrying the two T’s and the first I were held up, so the audience was treated to TIT. Magic.) At the end of the song, I came out in my paper iceberg costume and smashed through my singing angels. It was great. So, needless to say, I had some familiarity with the song by the time I got to norae bang.

Martha, however, rocked the norae bang. Even with a gravely throat brought on by a cold, she wailed. Such a trooper.

Anyway, there’s Arthur. Unlike most teachers, he seemed to have a lot of free-time on his hands. I think he found this time by not planning for his classes, ever. Still, he managed to pull things off. Just before our camp finished, the teachers at Camp-Korea had to e-mail some student evaluations off. These get posted on the Camp Korea web site so the parents (and relatives and rest of the planet) can see how the little ones are progressing. What follows are Arthur’s first drafts of some student evaluations. They are hilarious. The students names are their English ones.

Jeremy

Jeremy writes like a psycho killer. Most children, even the dumb ones, learn at least a few English phrases that they can repeat day after day in their diaries—“I like camp. It was fun. Dinner was yummy.” Yet, every night Jeremy writes the same thing: ‘Pantech and Curitel’ over and over in a script that could only be accomplished if the writer held his pencil between his teeth. And the company’s name is never spelt right to boot. I recommend therapy. The other day, the kids in the class were given treats to share: bags of crisps, candies and such. One box contained lady fingers, or as they are called in Korean, pepero. Jeremy was damned if he was going to share these with anybody so he grabbed a handful, opened his mouth as wide as it could go and jammed his fist full of pepero in. He then used his other hand to ram the chocolate sticks farther down his throat, the whole time managing to laugh maniacally like an evil kung fu master who sees that the hero has fallen into an obvious trap. It was fucking hilarious. This is why Jeremy is my favourite. I also saw him eating paste.

Edward

Edward is the kind of student I dread writing about. There is nothing especially good or bad about him. He is a poster child for mediocrity and will grow up to live an unfulfilling life that even he will fail to take any interest in. Unless he does anything spectacular, he’ll get a B-. Usually, I give his type a B without a second thought, but your son is kind of whiny. He bugs me.

Lucinda

Your daughter is dumb and ugly. Usually I take no notice of these students, but it has come to my attention that your daughter has a crush on me. Most of the time, students with teacher-crushes are fun. I lead them on with little smiles and winks, while avoiding anything that could get changed into a rumour and prison-leading allegations. It’s good for little girls. Sure they’ll cry themselves to sleep for the two weeks following camp for love-sickness, but when they’re older they’ll trade teacher-crush stories with their new university friends. It’ll be fun and they’ll remember me and that time with fondness. But like I said, your daughter is dumb and ugly. This depresses me. They can be one or the other, but not both. I’m doing my best to ignore her.

Repeat after me, “Outta sight!”

“Um, do you like the name Mark?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, good. You’re Mark.”

“How about you. Um. Do you want to be called Sam?”

The friend of the would-be Sam started laughing and saying some jazz in Korean. I only understood, “Frodo.” So ‘Sam’ is out ‘cause all the other kids will think their classmate should be wandering around Mordor with his buddy. Sam became Jon. It’s weird that no one said anything to the girl who came with the English name ‘Cherry.’ There must be cultural thing I’m missing.

So, it seems christenings have been added to my resume. But not to worry. I don’t think these kids take naming things as seriously as I do. Most of them were instantly happy with their new names, as if I gave each one a shiny sticker. I’m sure their English names are equally disposable.

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 coming. Very pretty.

As Warren says, who would have thought a place whose name starts with the word ‘South’ would be so damn cold! (Other than the South Pole of course.)

We get three hot meals a day, and they’re all rice. And kimchi too.

Actually, the food is yummy.

We’re still getting oriented, and tomorrow the kids arrive.

Apparently we have to teach them English or something… I knew there was a catch.

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 is that the flight’s paid for, and the return can be used any time in 2003. Needless to say, we’ll be traveling in Asia this winter.

We took a drastic step, and finally sewed some Canada flags to our backpacks… I know, we swore we would never be one of those travellers, but we decided it was more important not to be mistaken for Americans in Korea, as they’ve been causing some shit over there.

Our itinerary is loose, very loose. We figure we should hit Japan, if we can afford it, and say hi to my friend Matt Snell who’s been living there for a few years now. Taiwan, and maybe China? Then perhaps Ho Chi Minh City, and Bangkok? Our pal Paul is in Bangkok teaching English, we think.

We should still be in Asia for Chinese New Year, which could be a little bit of all right.

We’ll be updating as much as we can, so stay tuned.