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.
