Caveat: háblame solo de nubes y sal

Maquin10

Lo que estoy escuchando en este momento.

La Máquina de Hacer Pájaros, "Cómo mata el viento norte" (1976). Es difícil de creer que esta canción surgió de la Argentina de la época de dictaturas y desaparecidos. Se quisiera buscar significaciones secretas…

Letra:

Como mata el viento norte
cuando agosto está en el día,
y el espacio nuestros cuerpos ilumina.
Un mendigo muestra joyas
a los ciegos de la esquina,
y un cachorro del señor nos alucina
háblame solo
de nubes y sal
no quiero saber nada
con la miseria del mundo hoy.
Hoy es un buen día
hay algo en paz,
la tierra es nuestra hermana
Marte no cede,
al poder del sol
Venus nos enamora,
la Luna sabe de su atracción.
Mientras nosotros
morimos aquí,
con los ojos cerrados
no vemos más que nuestra nariz.
Como mata el viento norte
cuando agosto está en el día
y el espacio nustros cuerpos ilumina.
Señor noche, se mi cuna,
señor noche, se mi día,
mi pequeña almita baila
de alegría, de alegría.

Caveat: a sum of small events

Sometimes, a sum of small events can add up to a
very bad day.

Earlier, I met a friend (and former
coworker) for lunch and I was telling her about the recent evolution
of Karma Academy. How I feel that it's become too focused on
"business as business" and is forgetting the business of
education. I'm not sure what the solution is, but it's becoming a
much less pleasant place to work, in my opinion.

Still, I can't rule out that it's
partly subjective. My own feelings about my indefinite stay in Korea
have been evolving, and I keep returning to what has been one of my
core reasons for being here: my desire to somehow learn Korean.

But I'm not. I'm not learning Korean. I'm failing. This isn't Karma Academy's fault (though it
might be karma's fault, with a lowercase 'k'), obviously, but my
feelings of failure about that project are impacting my ability to
maximize my potential in my work environment.

These feelings of failure are further
combined with my coworkers' utter lack of demonstrative compassion
about my efforts to learn – it's mostly just amusing to them that I
want to learn Korean, as they seem to find it strange if not
downright suspicious that a foreigner wants to learn their language,
and they definitely find it amusing (in a laugh at me rather than
with me kind of way) that I'm so remarkably bad at it, especially
after having been here for so many years.

So I was talking about that with my
friend, and meanwhile I have a toothache that means I should be
seeing a dentist, which I've been procrastinating on. I fear dentists
more than North Korea. But lately, when I eat something spicy, it
really, really hurts to eat it. The fried rice at the Vietnamese
place where I was having lunch with my friend was a little bit spicy.
Normally I really like spicy food – I love spicy food – but because
of this toothache it really hurt. So I was in pain.

I need to go to the dentist. I will go
on Monday.

Anytime I feel pain, I feel negative
about human existence – this is natural. It's harder to keep a
positive outlook. This toothache is so much my own fault, because I
so despise if not downright fear dentists (due to past bad
experiences) and so now… it's my fault, and I'm feeling this pain.

Now I'm just whining, aren't I?

But then there's this next thing. I had
a rather horrifying class, during my last scheduled hour at the end
of the day. The class was so horrifying, I wrote about it
separately, in a previous blog post… so look for it and read about
it [broken link! FIXME] there.

Then one more thing happened. I came
out of the horrifying class to be told by the assistant director that
I'd had my students do the "Parents Day Letter" assignment
(see previous blog post) wrong, anyway. You see, there were special
prepared papers that the students were supposed to fill out, not just
write them on regular paper. These letters are supposed to go to
parents, of course, but only on the special prepared papers – like
forms to fill out.

I felt really upset by what had
happened in class, and now this was like a "last straw" –
because I really had zero recollection that I'd been told about these
special prepared papers.

"Perhaps you told me this in
Korean, not realizing I didn't understand?" I asked the
assistant director.

"No, I told you, in English,"
she protested.

Nothing is more upsetting than the
feeling that one is losing one's memory. At least… for me. So on
top of these other issues, I'm losing my memory, too.

"I really don't think you told
me," I complained, feeling helpless. I felt very angry, though.
"I really don't like how so often people don't tell me what's
going on around here," I finally exploded.

It wasn't exploded exploded. But I was
showing my anger, which I really rarely do.

I added to my rant: "And
then people think they told me because they said something in Korean
and they think I understood," I added.

The fact is, I'd much rather believe that she was
misremembering and had said something in Korean where I hadn't
understood, than it turning out I had had some kind of weird blackout
during some announcement in English in the staffroom yesterday.

There was no resolution to this, except
to underscore that if I would just get my butt in gear and learn
Korean, I wouldn't have the excuse I took recourse to above, and
perhaps I'd have known about the special prepared papers.

All of which is to
say, I'd traveled in a full circle back to my earlier frustration I'd
been expressing to my friend about being unable to learn Korean
adequately.

Caveat: With A Baseball Bat

or… The Horrifying Class

My students are filled with passive-aggressive anger toward their parents, and I almost wanted to cry today, having to interact with it. Korean parents push their children so hard. And sometimes unkindly.

We've been having the students write "Parents Day Letters" – Parents Day is a Korean holiday on May 8th, that is sort of a combined Mother's Day and Father's Day. The idea is that the kids get gifts for their parents, or write them letters, etc. So as an activity at Karma, we're having the elementary kids write Parents Day letters, in English.

One boy, in 6th grade, wrote his letter, and it was filled with the appropriate platitudes: thank you for raising me, thank you for helping me with my problems and being there for me, etc., all in the somewhat unnatural English to be expected of only intermediate ability, limited English. But then he came up and showed me something. At the end of his letter, he'd written "I love you." He pulled out something he had in his pocket, a flashlight. It was a black-light flashlight. "I wrote in invisible ink," he explained. And indeed, he had written in invisible ink: superimposed on his "I love you" was a clearly visible "I hate you" under the black light. I didn't know whether to amused or appalled.

I shook my head. "Do you think that's a good idea?" I finally asked.

"Maybe not," he admitted, but grinning.

"Are you going to change it?" I prodded.

He shrugged, and returned to his seat. I may intercept the letter.

Then a 5th grade girl refused to write her letter. She was suddenly refusing to speak English. She's a pretty good student, but not very consistent, and she gets frustrated easily. I got a little bit angry, saying she had to write her letter. She wrote it. She brought it up and showed me. It said a lot of platitudes, but near the end it said, "Mom I hate you x 10 x 100 x 100 x 100." You get the picture. She was angry at her mom.

She was standing in front of me. I circled the phrase in her letter. "I don't think you should say that," I said. I could tell she was angry. I could see she was even on the verge of tears.

"But it's really true," she defended.

"I understand," I said, blandly. I really believe adults should validate the feelings of children as much as possible. "I think sometimes we shouldn't say things that are true," I suggested. "How about writing about something true that you can agree with. Something about the future?"

I crossed out her words and sketched out a possible answer on her draft letter. What I wrote was to the effect of: "Mom, I hope that in the future you can help me and show me your love." I pointed to my draft sentence and asked the girl, "Can you agree with that? Is it true for you?" I was kind of prompting her, and happily composing her sentence for her, because I didn't want to add layers of frustration with the English language on top of the frustration she was feeling with this assignment and about her parents.

She wrinkled her brow and studied it, to make sure she understood it – it's in English, after all, and she maybe had to sort it out or translate it in her head. Finally she nodded, but then she said, "I don't want to give her this letter." Adamant.

"I think you have to," I said. "It's the assignment."

She shocked me, then. "I really don't want to. Why should I give her this letter? My mom hits me with a baseball bat." Tears were coming, now. "yagubaeteu," she emphasized, repeating the term for "baseball bat" in Korean just to make sure I knew what she was saying.

I just stared at the girl, then, a little bit slack-jawed. The other students were staring, too. "We'll talk about it later," I said, somewhat awkwardly. I let her wrinkle up her letter draft and stuff it into her bag when she returned to her seat. At the end of class, I asked her was she OK.

She spoke rapidly in Korean, to the effect of: the bell rang, I'm getting out of here, leave me alone.

I let her go.

In the US, we're obligated as teachers to follow up on these kinds of revelations. Korea doesn't work that way – especially for foreign teachers like me, and especially not in a hagwon environment like mine. The most I can do it mention it to her homeroom teacher or the owner of the hagwon. Past experience with this kind of thing tells me that nothing at all will happen.

Parental child abuse as we conceive it in the US seems largely unrecognized as a crime in Korea, as far as I've been able to figure out. Yes, there are laws on the books about it, but they're only enforced rarely if at all. Just like the rules about corporal punishment in schools. Some schools follow the rules, some don't. Enforcement is random.

Helplessness is not a happy feeling.

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