Yesterday, I went into Seoul in the morning. I really don’t do that very often, anymore – I wasn’t even able to remember the last time I went to Seoul on a weekday morning. The reason is that my friend Peter is back in Korea (again!) and we met for lunch, before I rushed back out to Ilsan and back to work. I was happy to see him again – he’s starting graduate school in the fall at Johns Hopkins, and is trying to consolidate his Korean Language skills in the meantime – he’s long ago far outstripped my ability, which leaves me feeling both proud and jealous.
Anyway, my main observation is that working after what should just be a relaxing jaunt into the city for a few hours was remarkably exhausting. I guess I just don’t have the stamina I used to – it makes me feel geriatric and decrepit.
Work, yesterday, was a challenge, anyway. Too much alternation between having to be the “heavy” teacher one moment, because kids aren’t being responsible, and having to reassure them the next, because they’re fragile and burst into tears when things get too hard. To be honest, I personally don’t feel the desire or need to be the “heavy,” but it’s essentially an external requirement of the job – in hagwonland, teachers who never play the “heavy” get criticized for being “too easy” or being only entertainment. The stereotypical Korean parental expectation is: “if my kids are having fun, they must not be learning anything.”
I really like teaching, but I regret that in all my different incarnations as teacher, I’ve always felt so constrained by external requirements that don’t match what I have as my idealized concept of what it means to be a good teacher. I don’t work well with those constraints. Other talented teachers are better at somehow sticking within the external constraints and still managing to stay true to their teaching philosophy, but I think maybe I’m too erratic or something, to be able to navegate that difficult path. It’s really the same problem of finding “moderation” or the “middle way” that plagues most aspects of my life. I’m either too much or too little.
[daily log: walking, 6km]