Well, my science class that I've been doing suffered a setback, today. We've been requested to adopt a simpler curriculum… some of the students were feeling left behind. Danny, my boss, had explicitly said to me, when I started this biology unit, a little over a month ago, that he wanted me to "teach to the top students." And that's what I've been doing. But, because this is an after-school academy, the curriculum tends to be pretty flexible, and will respond to parental requests fairly rapidly. This makes for a shifting platform for the teachers. I'm not really upset. It's just interesting.
Some of the students – the "top" mentioned above, of course – were disappointed in the change, however. And we had a long in-class conversation on Monday about all kinds of things, including some "meta" talk about the nature of Korean private English language academies and how they seem to work.
In this same class, today, some students came in eating some chicken "skewer bombs" (폭탄꼬치). These are barbecued fillets of chicken-on-a-stick sold by street vendors, the "bomb" part of the name indicating that they are very highly spiced. The Koreans justifiably pride themselves on their very spicy food, and they seem to be singularly fascinated by the prospect of freaking out foreigners by feeding them the most dangerous parts of their diet. So it was no surprise that one of my students offered me a taste of his "skewer bomb," and then they all waited with fascination and eager silence to see my reaction. They wanted to see steam come out of my ears, or something.
But they hadn't reckoned with the fact that I happen to be not just a gringo, but a gringo achilangado. Which is to say, I have deep familiarity with (and love for) a cuisine even spicier than theirs: ie. Mexican. I said, "oh, that's very good." Meanwhile two of the others who'd had some ran from the room to get a drink of water.
End result was, we decided to celebrate the "end of science" (ie. the end of the advanced biology I was teaching) by having "skewer bombs" – I gave Jason and Danny 11,000 won to run down to the corner and get some for everyone. We had a little feast and discussed the vocabulary for the much simpler unit we'd be tackling next. And I ate a whole one, and it was very spicy, but not as spicy as my famous mole poblano, nor even as spicy as my mother's famous chile verde.
