At 9 am this morning, I got a phone call from a number that wasn’t in my list of contacts in my phone – so I didn’t know who it was. Often I don’t answer these, as they’re often people selling things – Korean cellphones receive a lot of spam and marketing calls.
But for some reason I answered. A child, speaking mostly in Korean. And, “It’s Jenny!” And, “…teacher!…”
Obviously, this was one of my students, calling me. Many of my colleagues of the foreigner-teacher persuasion are highly critical or sceptical of giving out one’s cellphone number to one’s students. I always do. I don’t mind the occasional random call, and mostly even the youngest ones have pretty good phone etiquette, although obviously it’s the case I have no idea what they’re saying to me half the time if, like this one, they are speaking mostly Korean.
This girl was chattering way. I had no idea which “Jenny,” this was, of the many Jennys I’ve had as a student. I caught the phrase “보고 싶어” which means “[I] miss [you].” So that indicated a past student rather than a current one, probably. Still, I was racking my brain, as I tried to figure out what I was agreeing to. Her English was quite limited, but she clearly was a student who was used to chattering away at me in Korean and expecting me to understand – some students in the lower grades are like that: they don’t really internalize the idea that I’m not fully understanding them. The opposite of middle-schoolers, who often fail to internalize that I do in fact understand substantial bits of their talk, despite repeated evidence to the contrary.
As I finally extracted myself from the muddle of a conversation, I realized who it was: Yedam. A second grader who left Karma a month or two ago.
When I got to work, I told my coworker Gina about the call. Gina had been Yedam’s homeroom teacher. “Guess who called me?” I asked her.
“Yedam,” she grinned. “She called me too.”
“I think she misses Karma,” I commented.
There is an ephemerality to teaching, as the students come and go, sometimes so quickly but with such a strong impression during the time you know them. I have always had a weird attraction to what I think of as the “ephemeral arts”: doodles, sandcastles, etc. But I had a sudden insight that this ephemerality might be what draws me to teaching, too.
Apropos of ephemerality, if not exactly topical: a picture of my stepson Jeffrey from Minneapolis, 1993.
I love this picture. My visit back to the US was too short to really connect with everyone that much, but it was worth it in that I did get to connect with a lot of people.
The morning dawned to lightning and thunder. Thunderstorms are more rare in Korea (at least Seoul) than in the American midwest, but more frequent than in California, where they’re almost unheard of, especially in the north where I grew up.