Teaching A Language

Hi again reader.  I'm assuming you got here accidentally or incidentally.  I sent links from tumblr and twitter- warm welcome to those of you who found me thataways.  I have yet to share my blog with my family or friends because DMZJazz is not turning out to be what I promised to those beloved people.  Mostly it's polemical and stream of conscious travelogue instead of photos and recaps.  I'll get there soon. 

But until I get hatemail I will direct my thoughtbeam at the general audience.  I hope I'm being frank and encouraging and honest. 

The origins of the adjective "frank" meaning direct; unreserved, come from the Franks, the primordial French people.  My mayonnaise ancestry is part French, so I will keep the candid component and hopefully reject the snooty part.  Anyway, my blog still feels like a flickering bulb in the sea of cosmic net darkness, which is quite literally what I am, but the last thing I want to do is write condescendingly.  It's not insight if it's not shared, it's not wisdom if it's condescending.

In the last two to three years I have written a few hundred pages of probably pointless, incredibly cathartic, multi-narrative poems, stories, expositions, lyrics, and a novel that I'm still bangin out.  I'm not worried about being succinct or sounding like an expert.  Communication is my objective. 

Talking is love, free thought, freed thought.  Geography, etymology, language, rapping, conversation, paradox, literature: my passions.

I'm also a fan of radical thinking, both in the popular conception meaning dangerous or unorthodox, and in the critical, return-restore-to-origin sense that Angela Davis uses- the historical root- the radish.  Delish. 

Teaching English as a Foreign Language is pretty hard.  Not impossible, just tough.  The act of teaching itself- instructing, is not hard, in fact I love it.  But what I 'm discovering is this love of mine is an ideal, theoretical hope that I am able to communicate important things in an accessible way.  Obviously this tends to differ from the reality, the sweaty process of teaching.

When I say teaching ESL is hard what I mean is the entire experience is a hard, fleeting, semi-successful, impenetrable idea for everyone involved.  While teaching ESL is hard, without question, the students of English face a much more daunting task. 

Learning English as a foreign language is far more difficult than just teaching it.  No question. 

Learning English is especially tough when you're learning from a teacher like me.  Kidding... sort of.  I must avoid self-deprecating humor in public in Korea because it's a very odd, foreign, very not-funny thing here to ridicule or undermine your own authority.  I know that from experience now. 

What I'm getting at is my lack of credentials in my own foreign language background.  I took 6 courses of Swahili in college, 3 years of High School French, and am not even close to beginner level in either.  Yeah, I get a few phrases.

Conversely, I have attempted to learn Spanish from poetry (Nicanor Parra, Gabriela Mistral, César Vallejo) and from Mexican movies on my own time and I am probably most able to communicate in that language.  It helped working with ESL Latin@ children for several months back home.  If you're reading, kids and ESLAsC people, I miss you all.

My qualifications are actually rooted in standard form.  Old Jazz standards like pedagogy, TEFL certification, conference attendance, etc- the system.  That's scary to think about.  But I felt before teaching and still hope that I have some ability to transcend the rigid form of the classroom and really motivate... or something.  That's delusional.  The classroom and the baggage of a school system is a barrier to learning. 

You also can't have an English "conversation" class with 20-40 people.  Theoretically, this is impossible, conversations have six or seven people, maximum.  But there is some room to work, and a lot of leeway in terms of my lesson plans.  So I am at the beginning of getting to know the students more so as to better engage.  It's tough, like I said, but I love it.



Probably my first day here at school I abandoned the hope that I would deeply root English in their minds.  My job is not to make them learn, my job is to help learning, to inspire, which is precisely what my language teachers did to me.  My French teacher and my KiSwahili instructors are absolutely incredible, inspiring, wonderful, heroic (no joke) humans.  Hero.  That's my reasonable goal.

I am uncertain that I am inspiring any learning whatsoever.  My only basic goal is to create a comfortable environment where English is accessible.  If anyone has any pointers on how to get the environment in a groove, like giving it your own sass n pizazz, I'm all ears.  A giant ear.

I have dreams- day dreams and sueños that I am speaking fluently and confidently in Korean or Spanish or Swahili.  I wonder if my students dream like me.  I know some of them do.  I try to sympathize with their struggle to learn English by saying "I am just like you in Korea."  "I only speak a very very little, so we're all students."

What a load of crap.  Me learning Korean and them learning English are two completely different things.  It's a bogus analogy, unfortunately.  Here's why:

Firstly, when I said that in my first few classes it just didn't fly.  On the surface it sounds like it would work- create bonds and whatnot, but for the most part, my students didn't understand or weren't buying it if they did understand.  Most, maybe 80-90% of them are beginners in speaking, despite their great vocabulary and fantastic reading/writing ability.  Strange, I know, but the testing and achievement metric in Korea is written.  Speaking comes afterward.  And for my part, I speak WAY TOO FAST.  They just don't hear me, they feel me, but they can't yet hear me out.  You can't just teach them English; they have to learn English by using it.

Secondly, as a Westerner in Korea, the onus to communicate actually falls on Koreans to speak English, not the other way around.  Foreigners feel a very small pressure to speak Korean compared to the Koreans.  This is because of language imperialism.  The increasing importance of English, the lingua franca of capitalism and globalization.  You might say English is the site of globalization.  So this English imperialism does awful things, useful things too (that's where I come in, more on that later), but mostly it makes people feel inadequate, out of touch.  Every Korean feels pressure to learn English.  Marinate on that, and maybe even extend it a little further, a whole lot further.  The world's less economically advantaged people all feel more pressure to learn some global trade language.

Also, lastly, consider the fact that hundreds of thousands of white guys like me have come to this country before and only a pathetically, abysmally tiny percent of them could say a single word in Korean.  Therefore, Koreans expect and are forced to expect that white folks, foreign folks, mostly white though, don't know Korean because they don't have to.  The burden of communication goes to the Korean, who, if the person is older than about 30, faced compulsory English education in school. 

There is no comparison in terms of when, where, why, and how the languages are spoken.  I am studying Korean but I am not very similar to a Koren student of English.



I feel an intense spectrum of experience and emotion as a teacher.  I had to revise this post many times because it varies greatly from venting to jot-this-down-it-made-you-smile.  Stay away from venting.  Stay away from anger because anger is self-duplicating, transmittable, sustainable.  Listen to Rage Against the Machine if you have to.  One golden moment I shared with a very kind teacher at my school was when we were driving back to town and she played some Rage, we bonded over our teen angst.

I am bonding with my other teachers as well, by blog and in person.  Ask any teacher of any subject at any level, teaching is not easy, but it means something.  My blog is an exploration on the idea of privilege, access, rights, freedom, knowledge, power.  I believe deeply that Education should be universal, free and benefit everyone.  That's a pipe dream but it does exist in some places in the world, specifically Indigenous communities where education is a loving process passed down over generations.  Survivance, a term used in Native writing, namely the work of Gerald Vizenor, a truly marvelous writer.

Education is a benefit and not a cost in places with traditional lifeways.  It's twisted that we in the West concieve of education as a cost.  No it's not.  Education is a benefit to everyone.  The future, we should not even call it "education" or school, we should call it our future.



I am encountering friction and personal-political-ethical dissonance about teaching ESL.  The crushing social impact of globalization is not a beautiful process.  Languages are dying, entire thought systems die with them.  There is a lethargic attempt to redress the needs of the periphery, to that end Teaching ESL is a bandage.  I have constant consternation about my own role in perpetuating the dominance of English abroad, and therefore enabling imperialism. 

That's the political implication.  However, and this is not what I tell myself to sleep better, it's the reality: English is the key to  the information of the world.  This has economic implications, clearly, but the impact of English reaches beyond that.  Of all the science and technical publications, the stuff that shapes policy, frames understanding, and gate-keeps everything, 80% is in English (other studies have it around 90).   I want to unlock these tools and empower my students.  We can start to communicate more in spite of a shrinking mode of contact.  The more people who speak English as a second language, the more English will  be informed by different ways of thinking.  Yes, this implies retaining a mother tongue, that is the challenge facing the world. 

As for my class, I hope to achieve a comfortable, happy, safe place.  I mean that.  You remember feelings better than ideas, so I start there.  Students can move from comfort to intrigue, from curiosity to understanding, from understanding to confidence. 

The current state of the world requires much to counteract; many areas of concern need immediate addressing (the environment, poverty, war, food security).  I'm not teaching them to save the world, but I am teaching a foreign language, so the idea of global citizenship is already embedded in my presence.  I don't tread lightly here.  Everything I do has an impact, which is the case for everyone anywhere, but I need to use this to my advantage and to the student's advantage by creating lessons on topics that actually matter.  So far I have covered global geography, feminist impact of words like policeman, climate change, the rise of elephant poaching for ivory trade, and stating opinions.

I am skeptical but hopeful, that's the pessimist in me.  But we've only just begun.