It’s a fine line between bribery and motivation, but if it weren’t for classroom reward stickers, teaching little kids would be a whole lot tougher. More than just a great way to get kids to turn in homework or bring their books, stickers are also great time wasters (I believe actual teachers prefer the term “fillers”). If a lesson comes up a little short, I can easily burn off ten minutes by letting them choose which sticker they get to take home. It’s mystifying as to how consumed students get when it comes time to collect their stickers at the end of class – I’m quite sure I can actually hear their brains humming with excitement. And while I still haven’t figured out the exact criteria they use to make their final selection, I’m pretty sure the inner monologue might sound something like this: “Do I want the red one with the yellow smiley face on it, or the yellow one with the red smiley face on it? Wait, what’s that?! A green one with a white smiley face on it! Oh dear lord, please don’t let me blow this…If I pick the wrong one my life will be ruined. Remember last time when I picked the purple one with blue smiley face on it? Nap time was ruined for like 3 weeks!”
To me it’s really quite amazing how jazzed up kids can get about a circular piece of paper with a light adhesive on the back. Really if you think about it, it must be the shape, because you don’t see people getting that excited over stamps. That’s because they’re square – and only squares buy squares! If the Post Master General would pull his head out of his ass for once in his life and trim off the edges, Americans wouldn’t have to pay God-knows-what to mail a damn letter. As an aside, I’m not quite sure what the Post Master General does exactly, but I feel like more people should be outraged with him.
More than just mild form of bribery, stickers also serve as a reminder – a reminder of what it means to be a kid, to live in the all-consuming present, and to find great pleasure in simple things. There was a time when I too was like that, when a sticker from the doctor could magically make the pain of a booster shot disappear, or a pack of sugarless gum could somehow make the trip to the dentist seem worth it. Of course, that was also probably around the same time when I refused to wear pants to school or believed that an inflatable gorilla on top of the Space Needle would descend down upon my family’s VW Vanagon and eat us alive. I had my reasons, but I digress. The point is, while adults are busy planning for the future, kids are enjoying the moment, and in the end, it’s the moments that matter – it’s the moments that stick with us, kinda like the blue one – the one with the white smiley face on it.
Just when I was ready to let sleeping dogs lie, Kids Times came through in the clutch and left a huge stinker on my desk. A few weeks ago I had pretty much resigned myself to accepting the silliness of the newspaper, but after reading the following article I can now safely say that all bets are off – my hatred is resumed 10-fold. The story, titled “What Is Constipation?” is a baffling choice for a children’s text to begin with, but what makes it even mind-boggling is the fact that is the second article regarding constipation I’ve seen since I’ve been in Korea. That’s two articles in three months. Are you shittin’ me? Seriously, Kids Times, what’s going on over there? My students talk about poop enough as it is, and your only fanning their smelly flames with your constant articles about crap. Anyway, here are some steamin’ selections from the piece (of shit) [Warning: some material may not be suitable for those with sensitive stomachs. If you are eating a sandwich, microwave dinner, 6-piece Chicken McNugget meal, or any other food item for that matter, I strongly suggest you stop now]
Some kids think they are constipated if they don’t poop every day. But everybody’s bathroom habits are different. Some kids might go three times a day, and other kids might go only once every two days.
If you are constipated, you don’t have bowel movements as often as you usually do…Your belly may stick out a little too. And when you go to the bathroom you may feel like the poop is hard and dry.
If your poop is hard and dry, pushing out may hurt a little. You might even see a bit of blood on the toilet paper when you wipe.
Fiber can keep your poop from getting hard and dry.
Being active helps food move through your digestive system. Also, drinking water keeps your poop soft.
Now I’m sure a lot of you are thinking that I made this up – that there’s no way this could possibly pass as educational material – but sadly, the article exists and what has been read cannot be un-read. If you don’t believe me I would be happy to send you a Xerox’d copy. My only choice now is to continue on and somehow look past the utter terribleness that is Kid Times. Hopefully with time the wounds will heal, but only time will tell.
Phew! I feel much better now that that’s out of my system. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have the sudden urge to bathe in Lysol.
Your eyes are not decieving you. That’s a book vending machine that I came across in the Seosan bus terminal. Though most of the books were all Korean, there were a few titles by American authors. Can you guess who they were? If you said BIll Gates, Donald Trump, and Oprah Winfery you’d be correct. But it’s not all bad. Last week I spotted the girl who works at the nearby Family Mart reading one of my all time favorites, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Sure it was the Korean translation, but quite frankly, a novel like would probably sound pretty good in any language.
Recently a friend asked me to help chaperone her daughter’s birthday party in the hopes that I could show her how to have a “real American birthday” – whatever that means. Seeing as I had nothing else to do, I figured “what the hell” and decided to go for it. Well, if the picture above is any indication, if someone asks you to help out with a child’s birthday party, you should probably think it out more thoughouly than I did before making a decision. No amount of pizza and party hats could erase the utter exhaustion of trying to make sure seven six year-olds hopped up on buckets of sugar don’t accidently injure themselves in a tiny apartment. As it turns out, Korean and American birthday’s are pretty similar. Cake, cards, and candles – even the birthday song has the same tune. In fact, the only real difference I saw was the impromptu origami folding session that broke out midway through. It lasted for about 4 minutes, at which point they got distracted, found my guitar and started strumming the guitar strings with crayons. Needless to say, after this experience my heart goes out to rent-a-clowns and balloon puppeteers everywhere.
Yesterday was Father’s Day, but I couldn’t post my intended message because I was in Seoul all weekend visiting my friend Mason from high school. Anyway, I’m back in front of the MacBook and ready to write a little sumthin’ in the hopes that he will overlook the fact that I didn’t send him anything for the occasion. Instead, I’ll keep it short. Here ya go Dad: eminently captivating footage of Woody Allen interviewing Billy Graham – proof that a) they don’t make television like this anymore, and b) pretty much any thing can be found on the internet. It’s pretty fascinating to see just how fast Allen’s brain operates.
Graham: God is perfect.
Allen: That’s funny, because when I look in the mirror in the morning it’s hard for me to believe that.
Watch in enjoy, and as my Dad might say, don’t take any wooden nickels.
Four six-year olds. Singing. Together. In English. It took two days and a fair amount of sticker bribery, but today I reached my teaching high water mark when my kindergarten class sang a rousing rendition of “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” At times it felt like herding cats, but by the end of the class we were even busting out hand motions. Sure the pronunciation wasn’t perfect, but we made it to the end and we had a good time doing it. I accompanied the kids with my guitar, strumming along as they sang. The kids really liked it when I played fast and loud – maybe we’ll take the show on the road performing punk-rock kids songs. Our band could be called Modern English. Already taken? I’ll work on it. Anyway, I’m sure this isn’t a big deal to most experienced teachers, but to a newbie like me it was a great feeling. It’s been one of the unexpected rewards of teaching, but every now and again when a lesson really clicks, when something you say connects with your students, it’s almost as if you can actually see little tiny light bulbs flickering on their heads. It’s satisfying. Now it’s on to the next song. Any requests? We’ll be here all year.
One Nation United Against Belts Beef : Koreans teach the world how to protest.
America, listen up: You may be a global superpower, but when it comes to protesting, you ain’t got nothing on South Korea. Seriously, these people know how to get things done. For the past two months Koreans have taken to the streets in droves to protest their beef with U.S. beef. Candles have been lit, city squares have been filled, and voices have been raised in an effort to stop the Korean government from allowing U.S. beef into the country. Many Koreans fear American beef products could be tainted with Mad Cow disease and believe their elected officials aren’t doing enough to protect their safety. Though only two cases of mad cow were reported in U.S. were reported in the last 5 years, the paranoia has spread throughout Korea like the Avian Flu (wait, that actually happened). Even my first-grade students know about “crazy cows.” So the rallies continue, and they continue to be effective. Yesterday theentire South Korean cabinettendered their resignation in an effort to re-instill the public’s trust in the government. Though a remarkable gesture, the protesters were not satisfied – thousands more gathered outside Seoul’s City Hall to voice their displeasure with the government, and more specifically, South Korea’s “CEO President” Lee Myung Bak. Last night huge shipping containers were filled with sandbags and welded together to create a makeshift wall to keep the crowd of 100,000 from overtaking the Blue House, South Korea’s seat of power. And it appears there is no end in sight – which is good, because I love watching bandanna-sportin’ college kids get sprayed with high powered fire hoses. But more than that, these protests remind us that citizens, when united, have the power to hold the government accountable – a fact that may have been lost on many Americans over – I dunno – the last eight years or so. Think about it. In less than 2 months, South Koreans managed to reshuffle the entire government cabinet – not over war, but over cows. Now that’s saying something.
I recently came across an interesting article from the New York Times regarding “Wild Geese” – a name given to the growing number of South Korean children who leave the country with their mothers to learn English in native-speaking locales. Though highly beneficial to learning the language, the restructuring can create great tension within the family and strain long-held Korean traditions. An excerpt:
Driven by a shared dissatisfaction with South Korea’s rigid educational system, parents in rapidly expanding numbers are seeking to give their children an edge by helping them become fluent in English while sparing them, and themselves, the stress of South Korea’s notorious educational pressure cooker.
More than 40,000 South Korean schoolchildren are believed to be living outside South Korea with their mothers in what experts say is an outgrowth of a new era of globalized education.
The phenomenon is the first time that South Korean parents’ famous focus on education has split wives from husbands and children from fathers. It has also upended traditional migration patterns by which men went overseas temporarily while their wives and children stayed home, straining marriages and the Confucian ideal of the traditional Korean family. The cost of maintaining two households has stretched family budgets since most wives cannot work outside South Korea because of visa restrictions.
This is actually quite a timely article, as I one of my favorite and most talented students recently left the academy with her mother so she could study English in Canada. There are more people already considering making a move. Let’s hope – for the sake of my student loans – that they decide to stay.
Sometimes close isn’t close enough. This terrible knock-off shirt appears to be from Christian Dior’s new “Dyslexic Collection” – either that or it’s the first ever wearable Magic-Eye picture. Whatever it is, looking at it made me incredibly dizzy.
Behold. The Flip Mino. It’s no bigger than an iPod, it barely has a zoom function, and it only has three buttons, but for some reason I desperately want one. The product will be made available starting June 5 and will retail for around $179, which in my humble opinion means it’s worth every penny. Simplicity and brevity are the name of the game for this little guy, and for the YouTube generation that’s pretty much all that matters. Really wanted to capture that crazy hippy dude dancing with scarves to an invisible band in the park but you just didn’t have a camera? What about that time how your friends were playing frisbee and one of them totally got smacked in the face by an errant disc? Well, now you can! There are no memory sticks or USB cables to deal with, and you can be up and shooting within 3 seconds of turning it on. Here’s gadget guru David Pouge of the New York Times with his review of the Flip Mino’s predecessor, the Flip Ultra. The two cameras are basically the same, but the newer model is much smaller and has a built-in rechargeable battery.
p.s. If the good people at Flip need a P.R. guy for their South Korean market, I’m available.
