I’m not sure exactly what it means, but I feel that I’ve come to understand its linguistic pragmatics quite well. The word is “헐” (roughly pronounced as a long, drawn out “hol”). I may be wrong, but I think that its literal meaning may be close to “broken” or “busted.” But in terms of pragmatics, it seems to be used very similarly to the way youth culture in the U.S. uses the word “dude!” as a kind of general purpose exclamation of surprise, interest or dismay. I’m trying to pronounce it authentically and use it appropriately, and a few times my students have been quite amazed and pleased at my having used it. 헐!
Today was a day of contrasts.
I had one extremely terrible, horrible class – a group of lower-level elementary students who just wouldn’t behave. I finally had a loud, verbal tantrum and set them to copying sentences, I was sooo frustrated. I almost never resort to these sorts of make-work “punishments” that are next best thing beating the kids with a stick (which is completely out of the question as far as I’m concerned, regardless of what my colleagues may do).
But I also had a fabulous class for the debate topic, with the lowest level middle-schoolers. The debate question was “Are pets a good idea?” – fairly elementary question, but about right for their level. And they all wanted to say “No, they’re not.” So we improvised, and they had to debate against me – I would make a little speech, then one of them, then I would, then another, then I would, and another. And I selected two of the students to be “judges” and placed a handicap on myself, since I allowed the judges to only score me up to 5 points, whereas they could score their peers up to 10 points. It went very well, and the students won. It was pretty cool, and I could tell they were having fun and actually learning something.
Then I had an interesting occurrence in my TP cohort, where I’ve been forced to give up the “debate program” in favor of a very dry, boring text that’s intended to prep them for the iBTOEFL (internet-based TOEFL) speaking section. They were moaning and complaining about the boringness of the book, and I was trying rather lamely to defend it (and failing, as I really at heart agreed with them). And then, after the class was over, they were standing around in the lobby area on between-class break and the six girls lined up in a row in front of the counter, and Pete was standing behind it, and I heard my name (Je-re-deu-seon-saeng-nim) and something about textbooks in Korean, and, lo and behold, they were holding a rebellion: they were collectively requesting to Pete that their class with me be returned to the debate curriculum. I couldn’t help grinning and I’m certain Pete saw my expression, and so I ran away and decided to let their complaints have their effect. And maybe, just maybe… I’ll get to go back to teaching something that I want to be teaching them. I’m excited.
