Summer Camp

When someone says "summer camp" what do you think of? Swimming, horseback riding, hiking, group activities, games, and most important, staying overnight wherever the camp is.

I worked the last week in July and the first week in August at the Kyungsung University Talk Talk English Camp. We had activities, but the kids were only officially there for three hours per day,* and the closest we came to swimming was the water-balloon toss and fight. There was also some study involved, which the kids took with surprising good grace. There were snacks, but only two days had serious food: the day we cooked hotdogs and the day we had Papa John's pizza.

The schedule was not exactly brutal, but compared to my usual university load it was hard. We taught three 50-minute classes in the morning, with a 10 and a 20 minute break, then an hour lunch break and the same schedule in the afternoon with a different batch of kids. Six hours a day with kids isn't bad if you are used to it, but I am not used to it. Last semester I had 18 hours of class in one week, compared to 30 during camp. But my 18 hours were with people who were on the verge of adulthood, some even spilling over into it. The kids were all in fourth, fifth and sixth grade, so essentially they are little, slightly crazy people. More energy than the college kids, but every bit as inclined to stare into their phones if given the opportunity.**

But mostly nice, crazy people. Many of them are Maxine's age, so it was interesting to compare them. Of course, even the best of them didn't speak English as well as my girl, but there were a lot of similar behaviors. This is truly the age at which my sense of humor starts to be effective. Whenever we play hangman and a student guesses the letter U, I reply by saying, "Me?" to which they inevitably say, "U!" This can go back and forth three or four times before the student trying to play a serious game here either gets it and laughs or starts to have a little mental breakdown.

You know, I really treasure the little breakdowns I cause. They are, each and every one of them, special to me.

Even though the hours were long, in our ten days of camp we had four days in which the students came and worked on books, like a regular English hogwon (both "o"s sound like the "o" in hog, a hogwon being a private institute for ensuring that students continue learning into the evening after school is finished.) The other six days were:

1. Opening ceremony, including a trivia game, and the "Mommy Quiz," a configuration like the old Newlywed Game in which the student and their parent write down their answer to a question and get points for having the same answer. I volunteered to be emcee for this event, and spent far too much time wondering what was going to happen next. Fortunately, I have reached the point in my life where I am not overly embarrassed to be in front of a crowd and unsure of what I am doing. In fact, that sounds a lot like my regular job.

2. Mini-Olympics! Dodgeball, relay races, tug of war, water-balloon toss, all of your standard Olympic sports writ small, combined with the humiliation and smells of gym class. It was a sweatfest of a day, though the tug of war was the only event I seriously participated in. There were enough kids that they easily pulled the teachers and staff across the line, though in the afternoon we managed to beat the boys.

3. Hot dog/smoothie/treasure hunt. These three activities took a total of about 2 hours, leaving us to fake it for the last hour. And it was ridiculously hot standing around outside eating hot dogs. By way of clarification, the treasures (cheap little toys) were the only thing the kids hunted for. The hot dogs were cooked outside and served with minimal fuss to any kid who wanted one. The smoothies were made indoors with milk, frozen strawberries and this nasty strawberry syrup that the kids would have been just as happy to chug straight up. "Teacher! Syrup!" was the rallying cry for the day.

4. Paper schooner kit day. Here you can get some very cool model kits that don't require glue. The pieces are printed on paper coated perforated styrofoam sheets about 1/16 of an inch thick. The pieces fit together with clever little tabs and slots to make a lovely model. This year it was a bluenose schooner, allowing, no, requiring me to make "schooner or later" jokes until they sank. The kids enjoyed this (the schooner making, not my jokes), the teachers mostly sat back and watched or helped the uncoordinated kids. Or sat back and watched the uncoordinated kids struggle.

5. Bridge building contest day. This was my idea: give each pair of kids 50 disposable wooden chopsticks, one roll of tape, and a set distance to span. After 90 minutes, pile textbooks on the bridges until they break. It went well enough that they will likely do it again next year. The winners were surprisingly artless structures of bundled chopsticks taped heavily together. I was hoping to discover the future engineers of the group building amazing structures. Maybe next year.

6. Closing ceremony/Market Day. During the two weeks of camp the teachers had some pretend money that we gave out to students who behaved well. On the last day the kids could buy cheap (and not so cheap) prizes. We did random drawings to decide who would go first from each group. It killed some serious time, and let some of our staff (not me) strut the stage acting silly and entertaining everyone. I found myself laughing uncontrollably at multiple points, so I call it good.

My biggest complaint about the camp was that our classrooms were on the top floor and had insufficient air conditioning to cool a room with a dozen kids and a teacher. Next year we will be in a different building, so that should take care of that.

My second biggest complaint was that it wasn't really camp. It was fun, but there is nothing like a 24/7 camp for building community. On the other hand, if I had had to stay there 24/7 I would not be writing to you now, as there is no internet service in jail.

I did one thing distinctively different from my fellow teachers: I brought my ukulele. My students learned "Obladi Oblada" by the Beatles, though they were a bit shaky on the second verse about buying a 20 carat golden ring (ring!). My playing, at least on that song, improved a lot. Unfortunately, I never got anyone to record us. I will have to record myself doing it solo.

So it was a tiring two weeks. My poor kids had to stay with the in-laws where there is air conditioning and television. I don't know how they survived. Horyon says I shouldn't do it again next year, but it was pretty good money and didn't kill any of our vacation plans. Not that we had any, or ended up making any. But that lack was not because of this camp.

Now it is a full month since camp ended, and I am just now posting. I will get into the whys and howfors and whatsits*** of this delay in my next post, which will cover the move.


*Some of them showed up an hour early, and some hung around for as long.

**Seriously. if I had let them they would have played games on their phones until their little batteries died.

***Can you believe it? Spellchecker quietly accepted whatsits! But not howfors!

The D-word

This morning, before the kids woke up, I was watching episode two of the first season of House of Cards*. Maxine came in and asked what I was watching. I told her the name, and that it was a grown-up show, not really interesting or suitable for kids. That was mistake number one: nothing is so enticing as forbidden fruit. Mistake number two was figuring she would get bored with it and leave. After all, there was no action, just conversation. Unlike some shows I enjoy, there had been no physical violence so far. There had been one sex scene earlier in the episode, but it was tame, and with no nudity, and I was ready to pause if I sensed something like that coming. But I had forgotten about the colorful language: mistake number three.

One character asks another, "Who are you boinking** to get this information?"

I play it cool. Maybe if I pretend there was nothing worth noticing, there will have been nothing worth noticing.

The reply, "I didn't boink* anyone!"

I've been a teacher for almost twenty years now. I can shrug this off. Then Maxine turns to me and says, "Boinking?" I stop the video as the horses gleefully gallop away, and decide how to proceed.

"It has to do with sex. You know what that is, right?"

After a brief pause she says, "Aha! The D-word!"

I'm all out of poker-face at this point. She can immediately tell that I have no idea what she is talking about, and mercifully gives me no time to come up with any D-words that will make this situation more awkward than it already is.

"Dating!" she says.

I take a moment to process. "Close enough," I say, relieved that my eleven-year-old daughter is not going to be discussing things that I am reluctant to write in my blog, but somewhat concerned at how she has connected sex to dating. "This conversation will continue soon, sweetheart." I want this to be true, but I know that my Powers of Procrastination (capitalized because they really are that powerful) may swoop in and pummel this promise into passivity.

"In the meantime, don't use that word. It is too easy to offend people, or make them think that you are a bad person." She assures me that she doesn't speak English often enough for this to be a problem. Aside from at home, church is the only place where she speaks English regularly. What could go wrong?

Maybe I'd better have that talk tomorrow.****


* Yes, I have just started watching it. I see why so many people like it. I have three weeks of vacation left. Four seasons of 13 episodes each means I may end up wasting the rest of my summer vacation.

** They did not, in fact, use the verb "boink." They used a word which I avoid using in my Roblog. In fact, the closest I have come is in this post about my final days at Wal-Mart.*** Reading that makes me glad to be here and now!

*** Spoiler alert, I used the word effing. My Uncle Tom was the principal of a school in a town called Effingham, which I liked to believe was founded by people who were really, really angry at their ham.

**** Just to clarify, I mean the talk about the word boink, not "the sex talk." The sex talk is not one conversation in this family, but a series. My feeling is that if we talk about it often enough, she will be comfortable talking to me about sex, even if she wants to talk about something embarrassing, painful, or worse.

Ukulele Day 10 - Stand By Me

I've been working on this one for a couple of days, sort of.


I took Thursday off, didn't play at all. I was out of the house most of the day, and got home around 11 after a fun evening with Rick. It was supposed to be my life group, but everyone else dropped out. Happens sometimes.

On Wednesday I watched a video tutorial for how to play Stand By Me, by Cynthia Lin. (I really hope you watch mine first, because if you watch hers first you will have great difficulty sitting through mine.) The lesson actually centered around the strum pattern, which I had not been thinking of much. My strumming so far has been whatever I felt like. I started with my thumb, then found that the uke is traditionally strummed with the forefinger. So I'm working on this pattern. It's not that hard by itself, but combined with fingering in the left hand and trying to sing in a different rhythm,

I have dealt with minor variations on this problem playing other instruments, but I was never good enough at the piano to spend serious time on it. It's like drawing a square in the air with your right hand while drawing a triangle with your left: either one is easy on its own, but combining them is way more difficult than it sounds.

So I started working on this strum pattern, and added another chord to my repertoire. I now have six chords under my belt: C, F, G, G7, Am and the oddball Am6 (the one I used in "This Land is Your Land"). I'm not even sure where I got that Am6. Had to look it up on an extensive chord chart. So I'm working on solidifying my grasp of them by playing songs that use them. I struggle with remembering labels, but I am trying to keep the labels on these rather than just remembering how they sound or feel. So another goal to work on.

I hate to sound like an old guy, but people today have it pretty good. If I had been learning this 15 years ago, I would have had to seek out the expertise of people who happened to be nearby. Granted, I got started with some help from Conor: he sketched out four basic chords (C, F, Am and G), and taught me how to read chord charts, but then he went to his next class. After just a few minutes I did some Googling, to clarify some matters, rather than just experimenting or waiting until I could ask him some questions the next day. I don't have to buy an ukulele practice book, because I can find lots of instructions on the internet. And I can see and hear so many examples of how to play that I could easily be overwhelmed by all the options.

The toughest problem you face in learning a new skill is not a lack of teaching, but an excess of it. I suspect this is true for almost any skill out there, from language, to math, to playing the ukulele. Make the most of this information age! Go learn something!

Ukulele Day 8 - Amazing Grace - This Land is Your Land

So here it is, a full week into the ukulele experience. I have practiced at least 15 minutes each day, but I'm sure it's closer to 30 some days. I basically stop when my fingers hurt enough

I'm actually writing this on Day 8, but the video below is from last night. I surprised Horyon by playing Amazing Grace in front of her family. I wrote about it in the Day 6 post, which I actually wrote mostly on Day 7. Dang. This is confusing.


So the next video is the one I actually recorded today, Day 8.


Here's the main idea, if you aren't keen to watch the video: today I added a new chord, the D7, and it led to a new song.

Of course, the devil is in the details. I have attempted the D major before, but I have to line up three of my fingers in a row across one fret, and I just can't do it yet without some serious contortions or reversing my grip on the ukulele. But the D7 only involves pressing two strings, so it's easily playable. I was strumming it, and switching back to the old familiar chords, when a song came to mind: This Land is Your Land. It's a bit of a high register for me to sing, but not terribly so.

And I get it! This is why some people just get to be good at playing the ukulele, or guitar, or piano! Because when you can make the songs in your head appear out there in the real world, it's awesome! I knew that before, but I didn't really get it until now.

My first instrument was the recorder, like every other elementary school student. And like every other elementary school student, I learned that the recorder was a foolish instrument, not worthy of respect, and a magnet for mockery. My next instrument, taken up around 5th grade, was the trumpet. I didn't really get it then. Band was just something to do, something our parents made us do. Kind of fun in a noisy, hanging out with other kids way. By jr. high (middle school) band was a habit, and I was starting to see some fun in it, in the cooperation of a huge room full of people who have very little else in common. But there were some real jerks in there, and in all likelihood I was one of them. The band teacher, Mr. Roller, was a good guy, and in hindsight amazingly patient. But he communicated his love of the art form in ways too subtle for me to pick up on at the time.

Or maybe he just hated his job.

Sometime around jr. high I started taking piano lessons. Maybe high school. Four years of piano lessons, and I stopped. I went to Anastasia Medill at Tune Shop in downtown Leavenworth. (I was surprised to find that they have a pretty decent website!) She was a very patient woman, dealing with my pitiful practice habits. I can still play, and the theory I learned has helped in all of my musical endeavors.

In my senior year of high school Leavenworth High School got a new band director, John Lefler. During the first week of school he moved me from trumpet to euphonium. He needed more low brass, and could tell by looking at me that I would do better with a bigger mouthpiece. And I did. Enjoyed it, more and more as I got older. Asked for and received a Wilson euphonium for a graduation present. It's still in my parents' basement, as it is one large piece of luggage to bring to Korea.

In university I took lessons from Scott Watson, and learned to play the trombone from Max Bonecutter (the coolest music teacher name I've ever heard) the year Scott went on sabbatical. I had a lot of fun playing in the Tuba Euphonium Ensemble, as well as concert band. I tried marching band my first year, but it just didn't work for me. Probably because of all the time you had to spend pretending to be interested in football games.

One summer during university I took an internship working at seven different summer Church camps. I wanted to bring an instrument, so I took my Yamaha alto recorder. I played that recorder every day, whenever I had time, and got to be very good at it. It was still considered a very uncool instrument, but I was good enough to play along with campfire songs and at talent shows. I may have changed a few minds regarding the recorder, and I will always be fond of it. I also acquired a bamboo flute and a tin whistle around that time, and enjoyed playing them as well. Though the flute uses a completely different ambrature (mouth shape), the fingering was mostly the same, so I don't count them as separate instruments.

I bought an autoharp before my wedding, and accompanied myself on a song a wrote for Horyon. It was way, way, way too long, but by the time I realized that I was stuck in the middle with no idea how to get out. Fortunately it got cut a lot in our wedding video. I don't usually count the autoharp as one of my instruments because all you have to do is press a key and strum: instant chords. Sounds pretty, but not very versatile. And that was in early 2001. Since then I had not picked up a new instrument until last week.

So this is my sixth instrument, and my first real stringed instrument. (I know, pianos have strings, but you play them by striking them. Easier to just put them in the keyboard category so synthesizers and pipe organs have some company.) I already feel like the guitar is looming somewhere in my future if I can't get really comfortable with the uke. Time will tell.

It is Day 9 now, 40 minutes until Day 10, so I need to get my practicing done. I hope you are enjoying this journey, because I sure am!

Ukulele Day 6 and Parent's Day

No video. I just don't have time to mess with it.

Today was Parent's Day here in Korea. We had my parents-in-law over for dinner, as well as my brother-in-law, his wife, and their son, Joon-young.

Of course, it is Mother's Day back in the States. We called my parents this morning before church, which was a minor miracle considering our usual Sunday morning rush and coming at the end of a four-day-weekend. But we pulled it off, and I cooked banana-blackberry pancakes. Mmm.

My wife did an amazing job. She stayed up late last night prepping the kalbi-cheem and jellyfish salad, then after church today she went to Apple Tree School and cleaned classrooms with other parents to prepare for the return to school. When she came home, she finished preparing dinner for six adults and three children. Her mother and sister-in-law also brought food, but she totally rocked the dinner. Good job, Honey.

Of course, part of Parent's Day involves kids doing little performances for their parents. Quinten and Joon-young did a little song-and-dance, Maxine played the violin, and I played a song on the ukulele for the first time in front of people other than my wife and kids. I played and sang "Amazing Grace," impressing everyone, even though my chord changes were slower than I would have liked. I wish that I had thought to have someone record it, but I don't feel too bad about it. Maybe I'll record it for Day 7.

It was a good day.

Ukulele Day 5, and my kids - Amazing Grace

Yes, I did not update the past two days. I also did not record myself. Is a daily recording really necessary? Here's today's recording:

No, I will not apologize, nor offer excuses.

Instead, I offer these insights into my process of learning the ukulele:

I am working on a few short term goals at this point. The first goal is to be able to play the C, G and F chords cleanly. The second is to be able to switch between them quickly. A slightly longer term goal is to be able to switch between them cleanly without looking at what I am doing.

A medium term goal is to accompany myself while singing in church. I'm not sure how long I need for this, but I plan to volunteer as soon as I feel comfortable. 

My long term goal is to be comfortable enough to improvise in front of an audience.

My super-long term goal is to charm the birds out of the trees and make people fall over dead from listening to how awesome I am.

Enough of goals, on to what I've learned: I already knew this, but I am gaining a practical knowledge of just how many songs one can play using just these three chords. And I plan to exercise that knowledge on my path to expertise.

I want to build up calluses on my finger tips as well, so that I can endure playing more than 20 or 30 minutes at a time. I'm not sure whether or not it is a goal by itself, but I'm sure it's coming about with the daily practice. For now, my left index finger constantly feels like I have just attempted to catch a frisbee only to have it bounce off of my finger tip. My middle and ring fingers feel like that happened yesterday, and my pinky finger is wondering how long before the pain arrives.

I have found (after a conversation with a friend) that I don't usually need to press as hard as I do, so I can let up on my index finger. But sometimes I do need to press hard, so I need to figure out how to conserve my fingertips until I've got so much fingertip stamina that I go around pressing all the buttons for everyone. One thing that helps with this is practicing at night. I find that if I am strumming softly, I also tend to press the strings with my left hand more softly. If only I can get my left hand to relax the same way when I am strumming loudly. 

I have found that watching YouTube videos of people doing awesome things on an ukulele is not a good idea. It's like sitting down with a pocket knife and a stick on a moonlit night to whittle a moon lander. I need to take in enough to keep the dream alive, but not so much that I get discouraged.

I have found that ukulele is not properly pronounced "you-kuh-lay-lee", but rather "oo-koo-lay-lay." Pronouncing it this way makes me feel like I have joined the in crowd. It also encourages me that at least now I can spell it correctly.

It is fun to do something new and challenging. I mean, yeah, raising kids is challenging, no doubt. My friend Rick and I were having lunch with Quinten a few weeks ago. Quinten got up and announced that he was going to the bathroom. My heart swelled with pride as I told Rick, "It is such a relief that he can finally go to the bathroom by himself. It makes me believe that being a full-time parent won't last forever." 

Front teeth are optional.

Then Quinten's voice soared from the bathroom, "I'm poo-ping!" Rick laughed as I stood up to go wipe clean the anus of another human being. 

As you can see from his picture, Quinten is in the process of losing his baby teeth. Last week the dentist offered to take out those two front ones, as they were a bit wiggly. Quinten's reaction, as I understood it, was "Yank 'em, baby!" That same day he and Maxine started their week-long spring break. I swear that Quinten has been at least 50% naughtier since loosing these teeth. I have a few hypotheses to explain this behavior:

1) The front teeth contain some sort of gland that regulates behavior. Without these glands, kids just go nuts.

2) The weight loss in his head has freed up some extra energy, which he is using to cause trouble.

3) It is only May, but he is already excited for Christmas. (Yeah, that's a link to the Spike Jones song.)

4) He is used to a routine. An extremely subtle part of the routine is how the inside of his mouth feels to his tongue. Whenever his tongue feels that huge gap, it tells his subconscious that something important is missing, and maybe mommy and daddy will disappear forever if he doesn't do something to anchor us to the here and now. So he does.

5) He is completely aware that his cuteness factor has leapt to heights it has not seen since he was an infant, and could get away with vomiting all over everyone and pooping in his pants because he was so cute. He knows that at this moment in his life, he can get away with anything. ANYTHING. So he does.

Maxine, on the other hand, has recently lost the canine teeth that flank the two top front teeth. The sight of her reminds me that I once had a camp counselor who called me "Chipmonk." But the glasses are the big game changer.

See what I mean?

Suddenly she went from being my little girl to looking like a high school student! More and more often I feel that I am catching glimpses of the beautiful woman that she will one day become. Beautiful and funny. She is still willing to hold my hand in public, and I treasure every moment that happens, because I am worried that it won't last much longer. It is no longer acceptable sometimes when her friends are around, though I never push it. 

I have been telling myself that many girls reach the point at which they scream, "I hate you," at their parents (I'm betting on her mother being the main recipient, because it's just like that), preparing my heart to continue loving her no matter what. So far so good. 

So Maxine and Quinten are my main audience. I want them to not only see me do something not that well, but not be ashamed to do it in front of others. Right now they have no grasp of the internet, and no idea how permanent and public this is, but someday they will. And in the mean time, I will make my efforts here more visible and public as I go.

Ukulele Day 2 - Because He Lives

So today I recorded a song, "Because He Lives." I had run through it a few times, and decided to keep my first take. If you just can't stand the sound of someone practicing, I suggest you skip this one.


This goes against most of my instincts. I'm listening to the audio as I write this, and wincing mightily. Like most, if not all people, I don't like to put work out there that is not the best I can do. And my instincts tell me that I can do better than this.

But I can't. The me of right now just can't do any better. I expect the me of tomorrow to be better. If I were to spend another 30 minutes working on it, the me of right now might actually be a tiny bit better, but it wouldn't be the me of this very moment.

And my purpose is to show how I am progressing. If I'm already awesome, how can I get better? So you get it as is: struggling to find my singing pitch, hair down, mosquito net snag and all.

This is fun!