A few dispatches from my hagwon...

As usual, it's been a long time, and in this week, I found myself breaking up and getting back together with my girlfriend, a feat accomplished by the time-honored conciliatory tradition of sharing a seafood pizza. Available at most of the pizza places in the country, seafood pizza carries the burden of shrimp, scallops, and squid atop its mozzarella, and those of you who know me well would be quick to think I'd puke at the point of ingestion. Somehow, I got through two pieces, and now my relationship with Marie is back at full steam. Bravo!

I've had some primo times at school lately and figured I'd let you in on two stories:

1) While I've never been one to feel assured of my strapping physical appearance, being in the daily presence of awe-struck Korean children does wonders for one's confidence. Being pale is apparently a big plus here, and having blonde hair--even if it's receding ever so slightly-- makes certain students swoon as if it was Brad Pitt explaining frequency adverbs to them. Neal, another teacher at my school, has constantly joked with me that he has a class that is seriously gay for me, asking questions about me all of the time and so on, and I've noticed the male students in this class giggle and mutter out a few excited words as I've walked past them each day.

It turns out that this class was having a Speaking Test, a biannual exam that is administered by one native speaker and one Korean teacher, but Neal had the day off and wouldn't be able to give it to them. Naturally, they scheduled me to take his place, and in the days leading up to the test, he tormented them by refusing to answer who would be taking his place for this day.

On entering the classroom, all of the kids in the class started leaning towards each other gleefully whispering and re-adjusting their seats. Before the test began, one particular boy gathered the courage to ask me questions like "How old are you?" and "Where are you from?", with each of my replies being met with even more nervous laughing. I've forgotten his name at this point, but Neal has told me that he is constantly discussing how handsome I am. Later on, when the test was finished, I brought the class back to their normal room for the last five minutes of the period and we played soccer with a tennis ball. This boy kept asking me questions about MC Mong, and of course, I had no clue how to respond to his rapid-fire assault about K-Pop artists. Since then, Neal told me that he still thinks I'm handsome, but doesn't think I'm as cool as I used to be. I'd like to be able to remedy this someday, perhaps by discussing Maple Story or some shit like that.

2) About a week ago, a fresh new pair of khakis arrived via US Postal and my all too generous mother, and for the beginning of that school day, I was agog with the notion that I now had more than one pair of work pants. At the same time, I was calmly organizing a Halloween day for my pre-school class that involved an appropriately-shit-disturbing reading of "Dark Dark House", an a capella performance of "Monster Mash", and a make-a-monster exercise using clay and paint.

Every other class I had needed to take a test this day, so I was able to go all out for the littlest of my muppets, but one of them in particular, a four year-old malcontent named Tex, is difficult to please. Over the past month, he has taken to attacking me for no apparent reason, only because I usually catch him in the nick-of-time and pretend to body slam him; note again that teachers can get away with a lot more shit than they can in the United States. One brief example of why I choose to act like the Hulkster whenever this kid tries to pull one over on me:

This class has really taken to a loosely-translated version of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" that I sing. I added two extra verses, plus the first time I sang it I couldn't remember the lyrics for the middle part so I just crooned, "Star so bright, star so tall (?), brightest star of them all." I'm pretty sure the rugrats would hang me in effigy if I did this in an American Pre-K classroom, but fortunately Vern, Tex, and Hank can do little more than recite the names of animals, fruit, and some basic prepositions. During this song, I decided that it might be a good idea to start spinning around, and so now everytime we sing "Twinkle, Twinkle", all of the kids spin around and get dizzy; Vern, the Buster Keaton of the bunch, tumbles around the room and tries to knock over as many chairs as he can once the tune has ended. To the point, the first time I performed this ridiculous rendition, Tex walked up next to me, pulled his arm back, curled his fingers into a tightly-wound fist, and walloped me in the crotch. Because I was spinning around, I couldn't see it coming, and upon recovering from said wallop, I decided that Tex and I were no longer cool... thus, fake body slams.

So back to the original story:

I arrive at class with my materials in tow, nail "Dark Dark House" (especially the repeated line: "And was I scared? No!") so well that it sent Vern running around the room in a frenzy, and do a serviceable job with "Monster Mash", although I couldn't get the kids to sing the backing vocals for the chorus. Then I opened the clay and paints, and as if I had released the spirits of some wicked undead motherfucker from an ancient sarcophagus, the kids immediately lost their minds. I had brought brushes, but apparently any suggestion of using primitive tools this afternoon was going to be met by unintelligible Korean babble, and within minutes, Vern had somehow grown a red moustache and Tex's hands looked like a Jefferson Airplane video. Even Hank, the closest thing to a somber presence in that class, was taking a ball of clay and dipping it in every paint pile he could find. Keeping order just wasn't going to happen, so I simply did my best to set a good example by making my own killer clay pumpkin.

What happened next requires a brief definition. Korean boys (and some girls) have adopted an Eastern equivalent to the "Wet Willie" that they refer to as donkshin, which Marie has nicknamed the "Shit Needle". As far as juvenile hijinx are concerned, it's pretty perverse: you clasp your hands together, make a needle with your two pointing fingers, and then do your best to penetrate the sphincter of any unsuspecting passerby.

Now at this point, Tex must have been bored with simply making a mess of himself, so while I was showing Vern my masterpiece, he gave my rear a paint-covered donkshin. I contained my rage quite well, I think... I could have led him to the bathroom by his scrotum so he could wash his hands, but instead I led him by hand, scolding him along the way. I did have the spare pair of pants waiting in the office for me, so it's not like I had to go through the day getting stared and laughed at, and it turned out that the paint was water-solvent. Still, I'm never using paint again with this class.