Space and fullness

Ramblings on education, life, and progress

I gave up trying to motivate my students.  Not that I don't care, but it's just that the motivation has to come from within or it's not motivation. 


There are about 80 suicides of Korean soldiers every year, and I think the number is increasing (I can't find the article that I read that in).  I can't imagine the hell they were going through.  It is a sad irony that there is a vicious violence within the thing we created to stop violence. 


I've never ever agreed with the ageist narrative that "youth are getting worse and they don't respect elders" but there is truth to it.  I hate to admit it's probably true.  Mom mentioned it happening in her High School science classes.  My HS co-teacher said she sees respect slipping away little by little every year.  And on a micro-level I have noticed one of my HS classes rounding the last curve to anarchy, despite the fact that it started out pretty good in beginning of the year. 


That same HS coteacher is a really inspiring person to be work with.  She stays so positive and doesn't get flustered at all, even when the sinister students mock her.  She told me that before the end the semester the Vice principal asked her, casually, how are you, and she broke down into tears. 


Today I did something I never do.  I yelled at the disruptive HS class "shut up!" and asked them to please respect their classmates who want to learn.  I don't get why they can't just shut the fuck up if they have no interest.  If you genuinely don't care about school, then it takes less effort to stare blankly or fall asleep than it does to chat nonstop, at a loud volume.  They enjoy being disruptive.  There is no logic to be found.


I don't always wake up the sleeping students.  I have to pick my battles.  Sometimes it feels like current conditions are all against me.  I would have never imagined being distressed and depressed in Korea, but I am.  Mainly because of the job.  At least I'm not depressed in Ohio- that's a worse scenario that I am glad to have left.


I still have lots of fun too.  Higher highs and lower lows in this job. 


Soon I will be teaching my coworkers, the teachers of other subjects, an English class.  I am excited to get to know them and to actually teach.  I have a weekly adult class and it's totally thrilling because my adult students are so motivated and ask questions. 


Pupils listening and eager, it's an insane thing to imagine happening in a school.


I'm starting to enjoy getting older.  But on the other hand, I have less and less in common with kids.  I definitely don't always get Korean humor, especially youth humor.  I have no idea how out of touch I will be when I go home.  It scares me.


I miss American culture so much.  I mean, I still hate it generally speaking, but I miss positive vibes and slang and talking to strangers.


There are no inherently bad students.   If anything it's counterproductive to label a student bad because if they think they are bad then they have no room to improve and plenty of room to decline.


It's like the void of learning on a 3D chart that Principal Skinner showed to indicate Bart Simpson's effect on his classmates.  An"unmistakable cone of ignorance" with Bart at the center of the bottom of the hole.  Bad students suck the opportunity from people around them.  Towards the void.


El abmismo se hace más fuerte con la tristeza.  No me importa.


I'm trying a new thing where I just move about all class and ask every student the prompt.  Since they refuse to speak or volunteer.  It works okay.


I've been reading this before bed and it's given me determination, sadness. 


Los poemas siempre se divertiden.


I told Claire about this the other day and we agreed.  We worry that there are so many words they don't know, it's hard to even pick an entry point.  But as I reflect on the reflection, I think maybe the opposite is true?  They have huge vocabularies but can't quite piece together complete ideas.  Yeah.


This is the problem that makes me lose sleep at night- in my experience teaching there are equal amounts of big (my entire conception is so wrong) problems and small, isolated (damn that announcement speaker is so loud) issues.  They overflow and I am constantly treading water and abandoning entire ships.  Totally incoherent.


English is a schizophrenic language.  It's complicated beyond reason and there are so goddamn many words.  We don't need all these words. 


My college Swahili professor once told the class that anger and frustration were the same thing.  They scoffed and disagreed, getting angry and frustrated.  Then he asked them to explain the difference and they only got more angry and frustrated that they couldn't distinguish the two emotions.   They are the same.


Lately though, I can fake it till I make it.  If I pretend to be confident in my lessons students respond better.  Just yesterday what used to be two unruly classes actually sat and listened and participated and took notes.  THEY TOOK NOTES, BY THEIR OWN CHOOSING.  NOTES OF STUFF I WAS EXPLAINING.  THAT HAS NEVER HAPPENED.  OK, NOW THAT I THINK ABOUT IT, IT HAPPENED A FEW TIMES EARLIER BUT I'M STILL YELLING ABOUT IT.


And some of them came up to me and said in Korean that the class was fun. 


재미 있었어요


My HS coteacher said she was afraid that foreign teachers would return home and share a negative reputation of Korean students.  I assured her it's the same everywhere and it's really a tiny minority of "bad students."  Again, I hate that term and the concept that students are just plain bad, but for the sake of brevity I berate the badness.  It's not just bad students, the education system is bad. 


School needs to address the fact that it is fatally linked to an atrophied capitalist system of exploitation and corporate pillage rather than a sustainable, beneficial model of uplift.  Our system makes students bad because it's spiritually bereft and 100% outmoded and doesn't offer enough options. 


I am guessing students would still talk in the back of the classroom even if the class was "Video games 101"


I hope any prospective teachers, especially EPIK or other English as Foreign Language teachers, take the time to consider the difficulties of teaching.  My line is always open if anyone wants to chat about it.  I also enjoy talking about things that are good.

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.