I have these little prizes I give to my students for good performance. Little trinkets I buy at Insadong, for example – never more than a dollar or two each. One thing I'd acquired were some cute little hand-crafted stuffed giraffes – I'd been inspired by that Korean language giraffe tongue-twister (naega geurin girin geurimeun etc.) I've managed to memorize.
Today I had a student select one of these as a prize. She seemed pleased with it. But as it stood in its red-spotted glory on her desk and she studied it carefully, she uttered the following deeply-thought question: "How do I use this?"
Indeed.
How does one "use" a red-spotted stuffed giraffe? I was unable to answer her question unequivocally, and I wanted to turn it into an opportunity to use the language, too – we English teachers can be very sneaky, that way.
"What do you think it is used for?" I asked back. She shrugged, and several of the other girls in the class began to whisper to each other – so I extended the same question to the rest. "How should she use this?" I asked.
It wasn't, actually, a very successful class discussion, as class discussions go. We decided maybe she could use it as a christmas tree decoration, next December, or perhaps she could use some thread to attach it to her cellphone, as a sort of chunky-but-cute decorative device. And there was always the option to "play" with it, but with these older kids, that seemed like a kind of last resort.
This afternoon, I left work, and the sky was a deep cerulean. Not the par-for-course yellowish haze that makes me feel like I'm living in a sort of extremely cold version of Mexico City, sometimes. The result of two days of continuous snow and wind, with warmer temperatures that had meant very little of the snow stuck. But now it was much colder, and with the blue, sparkly sky and fragments of crunchy ice on the sidewalk, it was very Minnesotaey.
I've almost never run into anyone from the school outside of the school – Ilsan is too big and densely populated to accidentally meet people, maybe. But I was about halfway home when I passed a student, Isaac, on the street. It's an odd thing, how context defines behavior. In class, Isaac is one of those students who is brilliant but insolently lazy and imperious. Not a bad kid, but not one characterized by fawning politeness or traditional Korean notions of deference, either.
But here on the street, passing on the sidewalk, with no one else around, he executed one of those quick but deep bows Koreans reserve for their much elders. I nodded my head, hopefully the right level of return respect courtesy, and then waved "hi," American style and grinned at him. And puzzled on the what makes someone behave one way in one social situation, and another, in another.
I came home and had some rice.