So Many Firsts...

 I turned 54 years old this year, and I am still doing and experiencing new things. This should not be surprising, as my parents have led the way in doing new things in the past 20 years, including becoming involved in prison ministry, and many other things that are not my stories to tell.

But this year it has felt like the changes are dogpiling me, and it's going to get even more intense. I can't even get into all of it, but here are a few:

1. New learning management system (LMS). I've been on Google Classroom since Covid hit, with a little experience using Canvas many years before that. I was really leaning into GClass, but my university decided to drop it. So this semester I've been reacquainting myself with Canvas. It's certainly not a major change, but it does mean reconstructing a lot of tools that I had built for GClass.

2. For the past three weeks I have been experimenting with "flipping" my classroom. This will not require an extra-large spatula, or trampolines, and have not been using my middle fingers any more than usual. Instead, I am recording lectures that explain what I want students to do. They watch it as part of their homework, then do some writing to prepare for class. When they come to class, we can almost immediately start conversation exercises. My previous student talking time over two 50-minute periods per week was about 45%. This way I can push it up to around 90%. It's huge, but the prep on the video lecture is a bit rough. This is a fairly big change in mindset for me, and since I'm doing it mid-semester it's a big change for my students. Some of them hopped right on board this train, but some have dug in their heels. I may very well pay a penalty in poor student evaluations at the end of the semester for this move. Stress.

3. Last year I submitted a proposal for a new course which did not get approved. I am revamping it, and trying to make a course that will be acceptable. It's exciting, but it also falls into that "planning ahead" category which vexes me so easily. On it's own, not a big deal. Throw in a weird mental block on my part, and it is a struggle for me to not just give up on the idea and shred it to make confetti to throw at my pity party.

4. I did not max out my overtime this semester, but I'm one class short of doing so. I'm teaching nine classes with a total of about 190 students. For me that is a lot of people to deal with. Not a deal breaker on its own, but with everything else in my life this year, it's a handful of grit in the oil, just keeping track of all of those students and their assignments and their attendance and their excuses for not attending. At heart, teaching is an act of will, and even with cooperative partners, the more people you are teaching, the more willpower is required. And not all of my students are cooperating.

5. I have Mondays off from Kyungsung Universities. In the past, I've used my day off to catch up, plan, sometimes just chill out. But this year I am filling in as English teacher at the Waldorf school from which Maxine graduated and where Quinten is still attending. I teach four classes, 7th through 12th grades. The classes are not huge: the 9th and 10th grades together are my largest class at 15 students. Eleventh and 12th grades have a total of 10 students. Eighth grade has (I think) 10 and 7th grade has eight. So about 42 more students. They are fairly high energy, low ability, but also low fear and better able to focus than many of my university students, for Waldorf reasons.

6. I teach a small group of Waldorf school parents one evening a week, and attend band rehearsal on another. These insure that I am not getting enough sleep early in the week, so that I get to dose up on caffeine via my go-to beverage, the iced Americano. Which feels like it could be my nickname by the end of this year. We spend an hour working on their English, then they spend an hour working on my Korean, and it has made a huge difference for me! My Korean language skills have improved a lot in the past couple of years. 

No. That's not quite correct. I have improved my Korean a lot over the last couple of years. Which leads me to a new experience stemming from points five and six above:

Today was Teachers' Day in Korea, which is kind of a big deal. It's a government holiday, so I stayed home most of the day to get some work done. I could not attend the festivities at the Waldorf School to celebrate yesterday, but there was a local library fundraiser this evening at which I received a few cards. This year I received four cards, one each from a parent of one of the classes I teach. One was a beautiful, water-colored piece of cardstock with meticulous Korean writing on it. No envelope, so I noticed it right away and tried to read it.

Usually I breeze past messages in Korean that are longer than a sentence or two, but this one was directed at me, by a mother who I know, about her daughter, who has been doing very well in my class. I couldn't understand all of it, but I found that I was past a threshold that I did not previously realize existed: I could understand enough of the letter to get feelings from it. She told me that her daughter had been worried about having class with me and fitting in with the other kids (she went to a different school for a couple of years and just returned). The mother told me a little about what her daughter was doing in my class, which was very interesting to read, like hearing your own voice echo back out of a cave reshaped such that it might have been someone else calling out, but still recognizably my own.

I found myself moved to tears. It made me so happy that the student felt cared for, and that she shared it with her mother, who shared it with me. On top of all that, I was reading and understanding it in Korean!

As I said, it's been a stressful year, and it's only May. This letter was so refreshing, a reminder that what I do makes a difference. It's not always easy to see when you're in the trenches, so it's good to have a direct reminder from time to time. And it's the first time that I've ever been moved like this by a text written in Korean! So I am kind of proud of myself for that as well!

And now it is after 1 a.m., guaranteeing that I will not be quite at my best tomorrow. But I got this story written out before sleeping on it, topping off the whole experience with another little sense of accomplishment.

Newish Job

This month marks my return to Kyungsung University, where I worked for four years (2003-2006).  Things, myself included, have changed enough that it feels like a completely new job.  This is mostly a good thing.

The most significant change is that class sizes are now limited to 15 students.  I believe that the previous limit was 50, though it may have been 60.  The difference this makes in teaching is similar to the difference between carrying 15 and 50 marbles with nothing but your bare hands.  I now have six classes, with a total of about 80 students.  My first semester at KIT I had a total of 350 students.  Last fall set my record for fewest students at 136 enrolled, and just under 100 regularly attending.  Even then, I did not learn many names.

I am now teaching only 2nd year students, whereas at my previous job I was teaching 1st and 2nd year students.  In keeping with the marble theme, 1st year students are more slippery marbles.  They have just finished high school in Korea, which is a challenge the likes of which most of my readers never have faced, and they are ready to avoid work of any sort.  To them, college is like the steps you take after crossing the finish line in a race, but before you settle down and put your nose to the grindstone at work.  Second year students are more like jagged marbles, easier to hold on to, but sometimes more painful.  They will work if they have to, but are less likely to put up with what they perceive as bad teaching.  The more English teachers they've had, the pickier they get.  I find it especially bad if they have had a very lazy teacher who demanded nothing and let them leave early all the time.

In general, English classes at Kyungsung University (which I will from here on out refer to as KSU, which will no doubt be confusing to my friends who fans of Kansas State University, and thus have difficulty processing change) are better optimized to actually teach students.  Though both KIT and KSU English Conversation Classes are two hours per week, at KIT the classes are all in blocks, so they meet one time during the week for two hours.  KSU has what I think of as a more traditional structure, meeting on two different days for one hour each day.  This offers two main advantages: less time to forget what was learned between lessons, and a lower likelihood of reaching English fatigue during class.

If you have not learned a foreign language, it will be difficult to understand foreign language fatigue.  Speaking and listening to a foreign language takes a lot of mental processing power, the same way walking is harder with small children fastened to your wrists and ankles.  Some people can talk in their native language for hours with no problem, while some of us get tired of it relatively quickly.  In a foreign language, that threshold comes much sooner.  The lower your level, the sooner you burn out.  With apologies to my bilingual friends, this is my empathy attempting to better understand my students:

Imagine that you are in class, listening to trying to listen to the teacher talking, while half a dozen other conversations are playing in one earbud in your left ear.  The teacher is from a country that claims to speak English, and considers your language to be a perversion of the Queen's English.  From time to time the teacher uses words which you simply do not recognize, and every word sounds different from what you are used to, sometimes subtly, sometimes unrecognizably.  In addition, this person has a bizarre sense of humor, making jokes that you do not even recognize as such.  If that doesn't sound so bad, it is because you are not imagining well enough.

So I like the small classes split into two different days, though I do have one class that only meets for two consecutive hours on Friday.

I also like my schedule in general.  It is not vastly superior to the schedules I've had at KIT, but there is one significant difference: no night classes.  I am home every evening to enjoy the company of my children.  I have a total of eight hours of gap in my schedule, but it's in only three chunks.  Some of my coworkers have that much in six or seven chunks: an hour here, an hour there.  I have two three-hour breaks and one two-hour break.  Even two hours is long enough to walk home and have an hour to waste time on Facebook do the dishes.

The biggest positive right off the bat for me is how close KSU is to our home.  I can walk to our office building in 20 minutes without pushing too hard.  Granted, I have to leave home 35-40 minutes before class to either avoid the elevator crush or recover from hiking up the hill plus ten flights of stairs.  Not wimpy apartment flights, but big, extra half-floor flights.

There is room for one of these on every floor!
(Yeah, that's the 7 1/2 floor from "Being John Malkovich")

I don't think there's anything as cool as an extra floor between the regular floors, but between the 5th and 15th floor there is a gym membership worth of free exercise.  All I have to do is come early enough to not be sweaty and panting when I get to class.

So not only am I exercising more, I am hardly ever riding the subway.  I work two days a week at Apple Tree Elementary, where Maxine goes to school.  It's about a 40 minute walk from my office, through pleasant neighborhoods with shops and places to eat, as well as the U.N. Memorial Park.

Of course, all of these walks are easily converted into much shorter bike rides, which I want to do.  That will free me up to take longer rides during the week, maybe even during those long breaks.  I am also hoping to bike with Maxine to and from Apple Tree three times per week.  She got a new, grown-up sized bike for a late Christmas present.

I like the old school lines and colors.

It's a bit heavy, but she manages.

I think the basket was what sold her on it.

My biggest problem will be sweat and stink as the weather gets warmer.

Wait, my sweat and stink won't be my problem, they will be my students' problem!  I'll just offer them extra credit to not notice my stench.

A few other details make KSU a better fit for me:  though both jobs have shared office space, at KSU I share with only about 12 instead of all 25, and the office is on the same floor of the same building as all of my classes!  At KIT I would go days, sometimes weeks, without visiting the office because it was far from my classes.  Now I have to be careful to be productive during my office time, because there are a bunch of fun guys in there most of the time.

I like my new coworkers, I miss my old coworkers.  In that respect, this change is a wash.  But almost everything else is an improvement.  It's taking me a while to get into it, and I am considering a big shift in my teaching style, hence my lack of posting recently.  It may get worse before it gets better.

Oh, and one more huge advantage: at the bottom of the hill is a movie theater, and I have time to go!  I saw two movies last week ("Imitation Game" and "Welcome to Yesterday".  Science/History and Time Travel/Teen), and plan to go once a week this semester.  It will not necessarily improve my writing, but it will be fun!  $6 for a morning ticket, which I can easily swing on Wednesdays and Fridays, sometimes even on Mondays!  If I can just resist the popcorn and cola, I think I will be all right!

I am excited about 2015!  Sure, my jacket doesn't talk and dry itself, and there are no hoverboards or flying cars, but I am already enjoying my job, my parents are coming to visit in November, and I get to resume my movie habit!  If I can just get my kids to be nice to each other, this will be an awesome year!

Rides 8-11

This week I have ridden every day, following the subway here (20 minutes, though I think I got it down to 17 today busin' my hump) and taking the mountain road home.  I still can't get all the way over without putting a foot on the ground.  Especially if there is a lot of traffic coming up behind me, and especially especially if someone honks at me as he passes.  That happened yesterday and just blew my concentration, and once you stop going up a steep hill it is really hard to get going again.  I ended up walking a way until the traffic let up.

The traffic is not really that fast; they are dealing with stop lights and frequent stops by taxis and buses.  Sometimes I pass cars going up hill, even as I am in granny gear, huffing and puffing and wishing that there was a short cut to getting serious bike muscles and lungs.

Maxine told me that it looked like I had lost some weight.  I'm not sure that I trust her on this one; she knows I want to lose weight, and likes to say things to make me happy.

So I have biked back and forth to work 11 times out of the last 12 work days, missing only once because of a rainy forecast.  I could have beaten the rain here, but there's no way to know that when you set off, so I'm probably better off not finding out.  That puts me at around 92%, an A-.  But they have forecast rain for tomorrow as well, so we will see what happens.  As it is now, I change clothes when I get to work anyway, and my bag has a rain cover.  If it is a light rain, I might ride anyway.

It seems that this is really the only way I will get regular exercise.  I can't squeeze any more significant time out of my daily schedule, and this combines a necessary activity (getting to work) with a desirable activity (exercising).  I know that some people wake up early to exercise.  I just can't do it.  Waking up early is an unnatural activity for me, whereas staying up late comes easy.

In other news, at work they are asking for all of the foreign English teachers to evaluate a big stack of English science books to choose one for next year.  It will be a supplementary book, used a couple of times a month, and probably not by us.  It's hard for me to build up much interest in this, as this school has a reputation for soliciting advise and then ignoring it.  What does it cost them to ask us to spend time?  Nothing.  But we are not considered experts, in spite of our experience and first-hand knowledge.  It is quite frustrating.

And at the end of October it is time for re-signing contracts for next year, and for the school to let us know whether we will be invited to re-sign or just resign.  Unfortunately, there are already rumors about who will not be asked to come back, rumors spread by the people making the decision.  It seems very unprofessional to me, but once again, I was not asked.

The other event at the end of October is Halloween.  We will have our school-wide Halloween party on the 28th, with games, a haunted house, and candy.  It will be a nice break from teaching, but it is ironic that we are doing fake scary at the same time that some of us are going through the real-life scary prospect of losing a job.  I think if the party were after they dropped pink slips, some of our kids might get a bit more scaring than they had anticipated.

December Wrap-Up

This morning I had breakfast with Maxine. First time since November. This month was rough. December is the month of final exams for me. Usually my students sign up for 8 minute appointments and ask me questions pertaining to the topic I give them on the spot. These topics have ranged from my vacation plans to what I do in my free time to how I met Horyon. It's fun, but exhausting. My first year at Kyungsung I had almost 350 students. I don't know how I did it without killing any of them. Or myself.

So this year I decided to back off a bit. I had only 250 students (ONLY???), and I had them sign up for 10 minute appointments in pairs. It lowered my testing time from 3.5 hours to about 2.5 hours per day. That one hour makes a big difference, but the bigger difference comes from the students working together.

In each class we worked up a list of conversation topics. In some classes it was only 8 or 9, but one class came up with two dozen, all approved by me. Each pair of students had to choose six topics to bring to their appointment. At the beginning of their ten minutes I rolled a die, choosing one of the six topics. They were to then have a conversation (with each other, not me) about that one topic for the rest of the ten minutes.

Of course, many of them prepared and memorized conversations, which was fine. But I was really grading them on how well they did once they were winging it. My role was usually to jump into the conversation and make some waves, see how they reacted. It was an interesting way to grade, and it required less mental exertion from me. It would have been the most relaxing final exam season ever except for one small thing: I had an extra class.

The extra class was made up of high school students who are about to graduate and start university. I was under the initial impression that they were students who were particularly interested in studying English. That impression was squashed like a python under a two ton weight.

The class was for university credits, and I was to grade it Pass/Fail. Out of 30 students, 16 passed. Pretty lame. My only demand was that they come to class on time. More than five minutes late, and I counted them absent (though they could still be present for the second hour of class). No real grades. No homework. I expected them to work in class, writing conversations, taking notes, all that crazy stuff teachers expect students to do, but without attaching a grade to any of it.

I must have been out of my freakin' gourd.

I'm used to teaching freshmen. I know that the first few classes are largely devoted to getting them to come on time, be quiet, and pay attention. In this class, some of them never got it. It was tiring, and made me look forward to my afternoon exams. I was paid well for it, and I suppose it was worth the money, but it gave me something I didn't really want or need: another reason to leave Korea.

It also reminded me of one reason I have stayed so long: the students who want to learn. There were about half a dozen students who were serious about the class. In a regular class they would have gotten A's and B's from me. In this class, they were the sanity check. They paid attention when I corrected their work. They seemed to learn from it! They were even willing to try working with me sitting next to them, coaching and encouraging them, rather than staring blankly and saying "English very difficult."

The point, from which I have once again strayed an unforgivable difference, was that this extra class was from 10 to 12 a.m. for the three weeks before Christmas. Until December, I had spent my mornings with Maxine. She usually woke up around six, demanding to get that special treat that only mommy can provide. She then went back to sleep in our bed, between Horyon and me. Horyon would get up, shower, have breakfast, and do all that morning stuff women do, then leave for work before Maxine woke up. We would sleep until eight or nine, then kick around for an hour or two until Horyon's father came to pick up Maxine.

I have to admit that I am not the best of company just after waking up. If that were our only time together, Maxine might grow up thinking that I only communicate in grunts and harumphs. Still, I manage to wake up enough to change a diaper or two, get breakfast into Maxine, and perhaps play with those crazy little stackable cups that she has. (It's so cool the way you can fit the small ones into the big ones but not vice versa.)

So in December we didn't get to do that. We basically woke up at 8, had about half an hour to get used to being awake, then Grandpa would come and take Maxine away. It has caused her attitude towards me to cool somewhat. When she's fussy, she doesn't want me, and sometimes runs away from me to get to Horyon. I can't believe how heartbreaking this can feel, even though she is fine with me at bedtime or when Horyon is behind a closed door for more than a couple of minutes.

It's a lot like when we first got married. Before we got married, things were almost always completely positive between us. But the stress of living with someone new, especially someone you love, can bring out the worst in anyone. As can menstruation, lack of sleep, job stress, or any number of other factors. And during that first year I had to learn to deal with the pain of the occasional sharp remark. I have gotten somewhat used to it. It was inevitable that I would, because my personality could try the patience of a saint under the right circumstances. For example, if I have a long-term project with a deadline.

Of course, it helps that Horyon and I can talk about our relationship and feelings. She always apologizes for hurting me, and has gained some control over the impulses to do so. But Maxine and I can't really talk about our relationship. She is only just starting to realize that other people have needs, much less feelings. And so I swallow the disappointment or talk with Horyon about it. In the mean time, I try to make it very clear to Maxine that I am always available to come back to, that I will always love her.

And there, right there, that's the problem with blogging about something like being a father for the first time. At times it is so overwhelming that the best words, the closest analogies, all seem inadequate to express what's going on in my head and heart. The best I can hope for is to stir a memory in the minds of the parents who read this. And for the not-yet-parents, like I used to be, or the never-parents, I suspect it's like reading an article about skydiving, or climbing Mt. Everest; you just can't get it, but I hope you can catch a glimpse of it.

In case I don't manage to get back on before Monday, I hope that you all bring in the New Year well. Maxine slept last night without waking up once. My sole hope for 2007 is that she continues this trend.

Peace,

Rob