Settling

I get groceries at a store three minutes from my house. The apples have been on sale. Zucchini is cheap, so are cherry tomatoes. Oranges from Chile. There are misty coolers full of leafy greens, long, slender radishes, things I don't recognize. I have to buy garlic either 20 bulbs at a time in a mesh orange sleeve, or peeled in a small tub of what looks like soy sauce. Tuna comes tinned with vegetables, and sharing the space turns it into a little tasty stew. Cardboard briefcases of Spam line the entry, gifts bosses give employees (hopefully) for Chusok. An employee mills around the store broadcasting the sale items on the P.A. through a Britney Spears headset microphone.

Down the road is a Crown bakery, a chain, I'm sure, where baguettes are cheap and good. Bread is inexpensive, and here is one of the few places where I've seen wheat. Bleached white flour goods abound.

Across from my apartment building is a mini-mart owned by a husband and wife whose English is endearing and guilt-inflicting. She referred me to a tiny bottle of something sugary and menthol flavored when I asked for antacids, which worked well. I buy drinking water in six-liter packs, and it pleases me to have them to patronize.

Gangnam is one of the more affluent commercial neighborhoods in Seoul. Twenty independent and chain convenience stores compete for a quarter of a square mile of business, and all seem to succeed. I can jump from the stoop of one coffee shop to the next and make it for blocks without having to touch sidewalk. Inexpensive sam gyap sal is everywhere, as are seafood restaurants with big, bubbling aquariums of clams and fish. Construction is omnipresent, crews working long into the night setting up new telecom outlets, clothing stores, offices. If anyone knows about the recession, they aren't letting on.

Kyobo tower, at the corner, reaches almost double the height of the surrounding buildings, its red brick facade a warm answer to the grimy white around it. In the lobby, thermal cameras hooked up to LCDs try to weed out the infirm as H1N1 infections climb: above-normal temperatures elicit a long, loud beep. This can be achieved by having a fever, or by vigorously rubbing your shirt cloth together. The displays read from cold to hot backward through the color spectrum (think Roy G. Biv, reversed). My face is a bright yellow-green. In the basement is a large bookstore with a decent English section, and an entire small shelf dedicated to Lonely Planet guides.

Home life is far from luxury but neither is it spartan. The shower is excellent and the mirror next to the head adds ten minutes of shampoo-mohawk modeling time to my washup. I shave and cut my hair in this mirror. The water heater is a tankless with a digital thermostat which I forget to turn off. The toilet seat is a plastic cushion. The washing machine spits suds out onto the tile floor, into the central drain it shares with the shower. To dry, articles are put on hangers on a knotted nylon rope stretched, sloping down across the bedroom.

In the kitchen, a mini fridge holds the last of a pint of cherry tomatoes, a tub of spicy bean paste, soy sauce, six brown eggs, butter, water, and milk. The cupboards hold a supply gradually reaching comprehensiveness: noodles, flour, oil, sugar, salt, baking powder, coffee, a packet of anchovy sauce mix powder and an onion. I have a gas double-burner range with a valve on the wall which I forget to turn off, and there is a VHS cassette-sized baking drawer I haven't tested yet. The last resident left a toaster which smells like melting plastic when turned on. I'm very pleased with my grocery-store knife and cutting board, but I need more prep space. If I had a workshop I'd build a small table to fit the bill, but I don't, so I'll have to improvise something.

The window screens are holy and don't fit right which lets the mosquitoes in which keeps me up at night. Otherwise, I watch TV online, eat breakfast, dinner and snacks, Skype and read sitting up in bed. The breeze flows through and it's usually cool enough. I'm happy here.

Hui-sik

Korean custom dictates that employers take their staff out for food and drink every so often- it's called "hui-sik" (pronounced wheh-shick), and it may make this the best job I've ever had.

After school last Thursday, the teachers and administrators walked down the road to a restaurant for sam-gyap-sal and bulgogi and beer and soju (sweet, sake-like Korean liquor). Principal Susie was there, and everybody got along like kings. We poured drinks for each other, another custom, and cheered, "kon-bae!," sitting on the floor around sizzling platters of beef and pork (and garlic and onions, and rice, and dish after dish of different kimchis). Almost everybody got a little tight. We ended up playing Korean drinking games too nonsensical to elaborate on, but which culminate in two "losers," one of either sex, having to take a "love-shot," a glass of soju drunk with arms hooked alá a newlywed couple's champaign toast.

After an hour or two, when all the food was gone, we filed out and down the road to a norebang, a private karaoke room where everybody, Principal Susie included, did a song or two. The Koreans stuck with the ubiquitos uber-pop songs played repeatedly in every club, restaurant, and store in the country. Kim and Jane belted "Lady Marmalade," Inwoo and Robert gave a powerful rendition of Oasis's "Don't Look Back in Anger," and I took the pleasure of Rickrolling my co-workers (Mackie was not on the menu).

It was a pretty early night, and everyone got home before twelve. A great success in team-building and coworker-bonding, and I won Inwoo's and my gentlemen's bet that I could eat more than him. As usual, I had to carry the group through the home stretch, polishing off two tables' leftover sam-gyap-sal.

I almost feel bad for making them pay me for this.

Teachers' Table

Admins' Table

Pork, Kimchi, Garlic

Grilling

Making Friends

Botched Timer-Shot (not pictured: Becky, to L)

Norebang

Belting

YBM Gaepo IA Hui-sik, September 2009

Learning the Youngsters and Sometimes Yelling

Teaching, I am starting to think, is not easy or difficult; students are.

M/W/F

1

Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I start my seven-period day with a class of about ten second-graders. We just finished "The Day Jimmy's Boa Ate the Wash" and are elbows-deep in "How I Spent my Summer Vacation." We discuss vocabulary and making complete sentences. Ricky's bottom shares a similar magnetic charge with his chair and as a result spends most of the 40 minute class running around the room. He tripped and banged his knee the other day, and the five minutes he spent crying quietly at his desk were the most productive the class has ever had.

2

Second period is a class of seven third-graders. Jack and Ben can work well if supervised closely. Hannah knows all the answers. One student refuses to work, disrupts class with fart noises, and cries when reprimanded. This is the slowest period of the day. We work on sentences and narrative style.

3

Third period is another ten-large group of second-graders. I discovered yesterday that they can be bribed with stickers to follow four rules: 1) Stay seated, 2) Don't interrupt, 3) Wait to be called on before speaking, and 4) Don't yell. An entire period of peace cost me only 400 stickers.

4-5

At this point, the first- and second-graders go home and the third-, fourth- and fifth-graders arrive. Fourth and fifth period I have three fourth-grade girls who move swiftly through the reading and writing lesson plans for the back-to-back classes. We often have about 30 minutes to play Scrabble.

6-7

Sixth and seventh period I have about seven third-graders. One of them is bright enough to complete all of the class work in his head as he reads the questions. On a good day, he buries himself in a Lemony Snicket book. Otherwise, he will write his answers backward on the board when called on, and generally be as disruptive as he can. He may need to be placed up. We work on grammar.

T/TH

1

Tuesdays and Thursdays I start with a four-student class of excelled second-graders. They barely speak even if you do call on them, and there are time and resources enough for them all to have as much attention as they could possibly need. We work on sentences and vocab.

2-3

Then, two periods with a class of nine first graders, most of whom are productive if chatty. One is disruptive and will only work when constantly and repetitively prompted, and even then only reluctantly. This is the slowest part of the day. More sentences, vocab.

4-5

Fourth and fifth period I have seven fifth-graders who are extremely bright and eager. The text is generally insightful and pragmatic, but still too remedial for them, and we frequently go off-book. I offer them extra credit for tasks I think will build useful skills. Today, Jinny got 15 "stamps" for finding a reference book and using it to explain how to write "1978" in roman numerals. Between periods, Alex inspects the wiring in the fire alarm and Anders asks geography questions. The other day, Sally played Vivaldi on a portable Mp3 player.

6

Sixth period I have five remedial fourth-graders. They work, albeit reluctantly, and we generally have a good time crawling through the syllabus. Tuesdays are writing, but Thursdays are debate & discussion, which we all respond to more enthusiastically.

7

Final period I have excelled third-graders. Tuesdays we work on writing, but Thursdays are discussion. Last time, we tallied what kinds of school supplies we had in pairs, groups of three, and as a class in order to understand the benefits of different sizes of teams. We then did the same activity using countries we'd visited instead of school supplies, and between the class had over 20.

Pre-established semester-long lesson plans take most of the work out of the job. The only preparations I make before class begins at 2:15 p.m. are to run off copies of any worksheets or tests for the day and grade everything I collect. I might spend the remainder of my 2-hour prep time eating delivery with other teachers, drinking instant coffee or reading Huck Finn from the YBM library.

The troublesome students stick with me. I'm not sure yet how to address the administration on moving students to higher placement levels, or to what degree I should rely on them for discipline. By the next month, I hope to understand the system well enough to take appropriate steps. I worry that there won't be any.

For now, I'm happy that I have at least one double-period of great students each day of the week, and excited that I'm slowly honing my less-focused classes.

Timeline

Five years ago today I was in a dorm room in Montana, pining for a long-distance girlfriend and clueless about the direction of my life. I'd put very close to absolutely no effort into school and had a poor relationship with my family. After four months, I packed my belongings and a Dutch rabbit named Oscar and fled back to Illinois in my cousin's Chevy Lumina.

Four years ago today I was living with my parents and attending community college, arguing with a long-distance girlfriend and no wiser as to my future. I worked at a hotel and played a lot of video games. On a whim after the new year, I'd move to Florida to work and live on a state park.

Three years ago today I was back with my parents, moping over a drawn-out break up, back at community college, wondering about another try at a university. The Florida job had deteriorated from web-surfing and infrequent menial tasks to mindless data entry sandwiched between ruthless redneck office gossip. I would quit in August, too demoralized to fight for my final paycheck.

Two years ago today I was living in a cookie-cutter townhouse on an Illinois university campus with Mike and Steve, bowlers with mild attitudes. I was in my second semester of an English degree, working at Subway and the school paper. Beyond graduating, I had no goals.

One year ago today I was living in Santiago with a sweet Chilean family, learning Spanish and eating too much. I was within sight of my bachelor's, making friends with people from around the country and the world and drinking lots of cheap beer. In a month I'd have seen Argentina and Machu Picchu in Peru. By the end of the year I'd see the Straits of Magellan in Patagonia.

Tonight, I'm sitting up in bed listening to Korean motorists putter down the street. There's 11,000 won in my wallet ($8.87) and I'm still uncertain if my ATM card works here. In twelve hours I'll go to a school to teach children how to read, write, speak and understand English with no more than a few classes on 17th century lit and a ramshackle lesson plan. When it's bad it's tiresome, and when it's good it's indescribable.

A year from today I'll be gone. I've got a good mind to ride the trans-Siberian railway and hitchhike West through Europe. After that, if the money isn't gone, maybe a motorcycle tour of the continental 48. Nothing's set in stone.

In 2006, I was riding in a golf cart with a silicon-valley ground-floor millionaire. We were cleaning up after a garden party at his Key Largo home.

"If you could do anything, what would you do? What do you want to be?" he asked.

"Indiana Jones," I said. I wonder what he would have said if I'd thought to ask him the same question.