appologies

And I would like to appologize quickly for my comments that might have been offensive to some people. Like I said, these people who don't speak korean are not worthless, they have great worth, are good people, good teachers, and good friends. They are wonderful people who just don't speak Korean.

And I didn't mean to include anyone in my rant who may not be able to learn korean for whatever reason. No, I was targeting those people who would rather spend their time in drunken hazes that lead to mornings of confusion then learning how to communicate with Koreans. And if I still have offended you, well, perhaps I need to rethink my thinking. But then, maybe you need to rethink yours...

1 day...

Alright, now that it is officially Saturday where I am, I am down to one day before my exams. Yes, Exams. I'm not just taking one exam, but two exams. I will be taking the TOPIK beginner exam from 9am to noon-thirty and then I take the Intermediate exam from 2pm to five-thirty. The idea behind this is that I'm sure I can pass the Beginner test, but if I fail the intermediate test, then I get nothing. They don't say, "Oh, well, he did good enough to know Korean." No, they just give me nothing. So, in case I fail, I decided that I should take the Beginner test too.

I'm not ready for that either.

But I'm pretty sure that I will be able to squeak my way through that one. Not because I'm all full of myself, but because I'm in the University of Ulsan's intermediate class and I'm in the POE's "Advanced" class, so either scale would agree that I've got enough of an understanding to squeek through the beginner level.

Doesn't mean I'm not stressed.

Anyway, I just wanted to write in this blog to de-stress. I was thinking of writting an hourly update on my progress toward the TOPIK exam, but then I thought "Since when did my blog become my twitter account?" so I decided against that. Basically, I'm just studying at 2:30am 'cause I slept through most of yesterday (I'm fasting so I didn't have dinner, which meant that I fell asleep at 5, right after I got back, and just slept until midnight). The idea is that I will study until I get tired again and then sleep, and then wake up and get stuff done and then fall asleep again, and basically completely mess up my sleep schedule that way I don't know if I'm coming or going during the test. That should increase my success, right???

Yeah, sure. And monkeys like to watch the NY Stock Exchange.

No, I'm sick. I woke up this morning (and by that I mean Friday morning) to find that I was more sick then before. Is it stress? Maybe. Is it my body trying to let me in on something? Most likely. But I don't have time to talk to it. After the TOPIK, I can sit, relax, and let myself recover. In fact, coming up around Golden Week time, it's Buddha's birthday and Childrens day, so I'll actually be able to sleep. After that, I want to take a trip to Singapore or Hong Kong, because they're so close and I would be incredibly dumb not to take advantage of that.

But right now, I gotta worry about passing my TOPIK exam. You know, 'cause I really want to be justified in my patronization of the Foreigners who have been here longer and know less Korean than me. Of course, the fact that I'm fasting and asking for the gift of tongues is balanced out by my desire to call my brother Racca. Dang. I really need to get back into congruency. I mean, how mean is my desire? How much of a jerk am I?

But seriously though, I was thinking about it today and was thinking that there's no excuse really. See, even if I started working for a company and they sent me out to the most remote part of the world for whatever reason, I think that I would still not be like these people I keep referring to. Consider than these people have been in Korea for 10+ years and still don't have a basic foundation. Or, consider the fact that there are people who arrived the same time I did, and this not being Thomas but being like the people in my "Advanced Korean" class with the POE, and they still miss pronounce many words...

..of course, there's a few things that I need to consider here if I'm going to break these people down. 1) I should not be judging them in the first place, lest I be judged with the same judgement that I judge upon them, 2) perhaps I'm not the best judge anyway, as I seem to be divinely gifted for this particular subject, thus changing my perspective, and 3) they likely have other qualities which I do not posses that make things different in their particular circumstances.

For example, one of these said people may, in fact, be a way better english teacher than I am (which I totally believe is highly likely situation). Or, perhaps these people have been spending their time developing highly fulfilling relationships.

BUT, I can't say that is the case for all of these people, because I KNOW that some of them are actually just wasting their time, as they have told me about their situations in detail. That still doesn't mean that I'm not just more blessed then they are, but let's remove the possible outliers and look directly at some of the people who I know I can talk about with some certainty (assuming of course that they have other qualities that still make them good people, but I'm examining their language abilities, not their worth as a person. I know that these people have great worth, especially in the eyes of the Lord).

Two acquaintences of mine have been in Korean for 15+ years. These gentleman have Korean wives and jobs here in Korea. One is part of a small business trying to promote new works in the Tech field, and the other owns a foreigner bar and has been part of several small business endavours such as this. But both of these men have been held back by their lack of language skills. In my mind, if they are married to someone who speaks another language fluently (and in the case of one of them, has a couple of children who speak Korean as their native language but English as their nearly native second solely based on him being their father) and has been married to this person for years, they should have been able to learn a significant amount just from attempting to create dialogues with their spouse. Also, if they have been busy with business in this country, and they've been hindered by language, why haven't they tried to rectify this situation?

For clarification purposes, one of these men has been trying, but seems to have a complete inability to perform basic pronunciation exercises. Strangely enough, this same person speaks at least 2 other languages as well, being a part-time professor of French at the Uni.

I blame this kind of situation on lifestyle choices. They could have but they didn't. This brings me to some other aquaintences who also seem to have a problem with the Korean language. These aquaintences haven't been in Korea much longer than myself but don't seem to have any understanding of tense or grammar. Why? The answer can only be found when you look at their lifestyle. This group generally spends their time after teaching communicating with each other or going out for drinks. Most of these people go to foreigner bars, where they can order in english. They drink, they might go to a Karaoke place (which always has songs in english), and sometimes inter-date. This means that their lifestyle is much the same as living in the US, with the added benefit of less bills and thus more spending money. But, their life is almost completely in english. These people are the ones that make it hard for me to ride in Taxis or meet new people, because they help develop the belief that all foreigners are here to get drunk and try to pick up korean chicks. Thanks guys.

Now, considering my own complaints about trying to learn Korean, I'm sure there are many ways to justify these people's behavior, but I think that it's more of a situation of laziness than of actual inability. It's a question of application. Many of this latter group have just finished school (college) and are still in that transitional period before entering the "real world." Some people would call this an admirable move of maintaining ones youth as long as possible, and such "youth maintainence" actions are good things, but when you completely forget about learning because you "are bored with it," well, you don't get any sympathy from me.

I say again that I would not be like them if I were put in some far reaching place in the world. They leave work eventually, right? I mean, they drink and have fun often with their foreigner friends, so they obviously have free time. Why don't they use some of that free time to study? Some of these people are always trying to pick up girls at the bars and clubs. Why don't they try talking to these girls in their own language?

See, now you can go ahead and throw these questions back at me, but I actually can respond. I do study with my free time, and I do attempt to talk to people in Korean. However, more than I few times have I said something in Korean, thinking it was the correct sentense, only to have it thrown back at me with the question, "What the hell are you talking about?" That's really disheartening. But you can ask Eun-mi or Taseol, or anyone that gets a text from me these days, I try to use korean with people who I know understand it. I would do the same thing if I was in Nepal, Norway, Argentina or the Phillipines. If you are in the nation, it is really dumb to waste the opportunity and not get to know the people. And how can you get to know the people if you don't understand what they are talking about?

Well, now that I've ranted about something that's been bothering me for a while, it's time to get back to TOPIK studying.

Happy Trails people

2 Days...

I bet you're wondering, "What happens in two days?" The answer is: in two days I will be sitting in a room at Busan University with a bunch of other foreigners trying to show that I've got the skills to pass the TOPIK (Test Of Proficiency In Korean) beginner and intermediate tests.

I am not ready.

You see, the test is very vocabulary-oriented. I am not a very vocabulary-oriented guy. I'm grammar oriented, so in the end...I'm screwed. But hopefully I can squeak by. What do I get if I pass? I get this neat little certified that authentizes my Korean abilities and basically gives me justification for being a douche to all the foreingers who have been here for 10+ years and still can't speak Korean (like the dude in my class at the University who's been here for 16 years). It also becomes something I can put on my resume to make it look like I went through some intensive course (apparently learning Korean in one year is impressive to most people), and I can argue for credit back at PSU (whatever).

Why do I want to accomplish this? I don't know. I don't actually know why I want to say I did it. Maybe it's because Japanese was relatively easy for me. Okay, it was really hard, but compared to trying to learn Korean, it was really easy. I'm not sure if that's the nature of Korean or if because I've been learning Japanese for almost 10 years now. Of course, I learned the most in the 2 years I was there, but that was preceeded by 4 years of study, which probably did a good job setting the base. In the case of Korean, I had one year and then WAM! thrown into the deep end and told to survive.

But it seems like survive I might. Hopefully.

Am I stressed? Ninja duh!

So, wish me luck. I only hope my jacked up ankle doesn't flare up in the middle of the test and make it hard to focus. I'm gonna be praying like crazy tomorrow and Saturday that I might be worthy enough for the gift of tongues. If they Lord's will is that I use the Korean language in the future, then 1) I will learn it and 2) I will do well on the test. I have faith, the only question is: Am I worthy?....

ouch.

Happy trails people

Kicking it into Gear...again

So, it's been a while since I wrote in my blog, and it turns out that I actually do have people reading this thing. That's been a strange revelation because, well, I'm buried deep in Blogspot's server. I actually didn't know that my friends and family read this blog since no one seems to leave comments, so I stopped, but it turns out that they actually do.

So, here we go.

Last night, I went to bed at 3am after having a long conversation with Thomas's Roommate. The guy slept in my roommates bed because my roommate didn't come home last night (I'm seriously beginning to suspect that his home is actually very close to here), like most weekends, and Thomas was then able to have his girlfriend and close friend Nathan (the same that appears in my photos or stories because he too is a TaLK scholar). It is "Open House" this weekend, which is pretty much just 48 hours of the students doing whatever they want, going where ever they want, and basically having a good old time. Fortunately, most of the foreign students are either a little older or a little more respectful of the area, so there's no a whole lot of drunken orgies going on. :)

In fact, my Japanese friends had girls in the their room last night, and everyone was drinking, but it was interesting because the typical Japanese drinking fest is loud and full of stories that you can't tell anyone about, but they were calm, contained and decent.

Actually, last night, while I was brushing my teeth and other things, I ran into one of the Japanese girls and a couple of guys standing outside the bathroom labelled with the symbol "여" signifying that it was designated for females. This only occurs during Open House times, and its just a logistical way of making sure that the women who visit have a safe place to go to the bathroom in the Men's dorm building, a place normally off limits to them. But this particular girl was embarrassed and blushing, ranting about how it scared her. I stopped to talk to them, and it turned out that one of the mongolian students, either oblivious to the new designation for the bathroom or oblivious to the meaning of the symbol, had gone inside and was using the bathroom, and she'd walked in on him. It was interesting and eventually cleared itself up while I was chatting with them, but it was funny because she was speaking in Korean at first until the guys said, "Oh, he lived in Japan, so he can speak Japanese." I guess she wasn't listening when I was talking back to them.

Anyway, my situation is interesting. To cover most of what's happened to me since I last posted, I'll give a brief rundown.

-I made two music videos, both now on Youtube. One is a mix of G-dragon from the Korean Hip Hop band "Big Bang" and Maroon 5, both singing their hit "This Love". The other is a compilation of Supernatural episodes done to BoA's song "Eat You UP." On facebook, This Love is fairly popular, but the supernatural video is actually doing better on Youtube.

-I got rejected by a girl who claimed she "wanted to be my girlfriend, but is too busy. If I wait a year, when shes a 3rd year, then she'll be ready." I call this a rejection because 4 days later she started dating her roommate, a guy she barely knew when we first met.

-I haven't finished my "Dictionary of Basic Korean Grammar" but I have been studying pretty intriquitely, and that includes a 6-10 hours of speaking nothing but Korean every week, which isn't alot, but it's alot more than I had before, and that has made a huge jump in my abilities.

-Doran, my co-teacher, quit and I have a new person whose name is "Choi Eun-mi" pronounced as "Che" like in "Checkers", "Oon" as is "Spoon" and "Mee" like "Meet". She's cool, and actually the reason behind the Korean Speaking time because we came to an agreement: I speak with her in English for a few hours a day, and she speaks with me in Korean a few hours a day. We obviously don't see each other every day, but enough.

-There are only 3 weeks left until my TOPIK (Test of Proficiency in Korean) Test, so I have to study hard because I might be getting grammar, and I might be improving my speaking skills, but the test is mostly vocabulary. Damn Koreans and thinking that vocabulary is the key to a language.

-I moved buildings during the winter break time and then moved back when the semester started, and now Thomas lives across the hall. We've been seeing each other more often, which is cool.

-Geoff, my good friend in the TaLK program, went back home to LA. This has been a good and bad thing. He and I basically hung out with each other all the time, which means that I'm sorta alone again. But, I've been meeting up with other friends, so I've been developing relationships with people like Adrienne, Grant, Mao, Marie, Thomas, Eun-mi, Sera and Yasuyo.

-Having started the new semester, I have new classes. One is on Modern China, one is on Korean Politics (which is self study/private tutoring, so I have to read a bunch of books basically for a grade), and the last one is Intermediate Korean Conversation. Apparently I've been doing pretty good with the language.

-My new students, which many are the same from last semester, are so intense and off the walls when their teachers aren't around, that I'm not sure what to do with them. I don't know when they stopped respecting me, but I've spent all my classes at a loud roar, and last time, it degenerated into a bunch of people playing Rock, Paper, Scissors and drawing on the back of their homework. Sigh.

-I started taking the POE free Korean classes, and somehow got placed in the Advanced course, but I'm more advanced then the course. It's fairly clear to me, as the teachers are busily going over grammar principles and vocabulary that comes up so frequently in my conversations with Eun-mi that I forget when I learned it.

-As part of the ULSAN POE/TaLK Cultral Tour program, the TaLK Scholars all took a 3-day trip to Jeju-do, a semi-tropical island south of Korea. It's called the "Hawaii of Korea" as it is tropical-ish, the largest of a small island chain (all belonging to Korea), and has a group of native peoples that are not Korean. It was really cool, and there's some amazing things on Jeju. I was suprised to find that many people on Jeju speak Japanese as well because of the large amount of Japanese tourists. It apparently has some pretty strong parallels to the Hawaiian islands.

Well, I think that's about enough to get things caught up. I'll start posting on a regular basis (crosses fingers) now that I know that I have an audience. I didn't start this blog for an audience, I started it for myself, but I guess not that I have people waiting for their next fix, I should get on top of this thing.

Happy Trails people.





p.s. I hate the new Youtube.

Languages (and fluency)

Okay, so it's been a while since I updated this thing. And, unfortunately, unlike the last post, this is not going to be all that interesting. It will be significantly shorter though...I really got to get on top of this blogging thing.

Anyway, I was up at 4am this morning, for reasons I can't explain very well. I wasn't able to sleep and so I just turned on my computer started working on stuff, making headway into some of my projects.

Let me explain what I've got going on.

Because I was annoyed at the lake of Korean Grammar books (or the inefficiencies of those books), I started making my own Grammar book, based almost entirely on the "Dictionary of Japanese Grammar" series (I say series, but it's really only two extremely thick books). I think that the one I will complete here will be the "Dictionary of Basic Korean Grammar" as I'm hard pressed to get anything too overly intricate. I'm trying to take the stuff that you really need to know in order to communicate effectively in most circumstances and calling them "Basic", which is working out fine. I'm also trying to give easy-to-understand explanations based on how I've come to understand the grammar principle.

In order to do this, I'm compiling info from several sources: "Navigating Korean", Seoul National University's "Korean Conversation" books, "Korean Grammar for International Learners", Cambridge's "Using Korean", Ganada's "Korean for Foreigners", and KoreanClass101.com's Newbie, Beginner and Intermediate lessons.

In the end, I've come up with a ton of grammar principles that I find to be fairly necessary for most conversational needs. The book "Korean Grammar for International Learners" has a whole lot more grammar than I'm using, but Korean Grammar for International Learners is so complex that it requires: 1) A basic understanding of the Korean language beforehand, and 2) that you understand linguistics. Both of these are broad assumptions, hence the inefficiancy of the book. I predict that there will be 2 or 3 books totally before I can call this project "complete".

But anyway, that's what I worked on. In the end, I was bored and started walking myself through a lecture I might give on language study. I did this because of my second project which is going slower because of the lack of neccessity behind it, which is "Japanese Fluency in 6 weeks or Less." Yeah, I've got this delusion of graduer that I might be able to create a race of superhumans capable of speaking Japanese after only 6 weeks of learning. This would be an intense program, but I think I could pull it off.

As I walked through my fake lecture seminar thing in my mind, I came up (rather, was inspired with) with 6 steps (or laws, I have to test these things) to fluency. I decided that I'd put them in this blog and call it good. So, here we are.

6 step process to gaining fluency in a language
1. Step 1: Determination
a. You have to decide that you want to learn the language. If you don’t want to learn, not matter what happens, you won’t learn hardly anything. You may pick up random basic phrases, but that’s only if you are listening and if you want to keep those phrases in your mind.
2. Step 2: Dedication
a. You have to put effort into the language. You have to pay attention to anyone speaking the language and listen to the words they say and how they say them. You can have translations all the time, but if you aren’t actually listening, you aren’t actually putting forth effort, you won’t learn much more than if you didn’t want to learn the language.
3. Step 3: Language does not exist
a. Communication does exist, but languages do not. Language is an arbitrary word we’ve attached to a method of communication. All communication is articulations and established orders and reasons is arbitrary
4. Step 4: Learn Grammar
a. Despite the fact that language that does not exist, grammar is like the roads of a civilization: without roads, you can’t connect cities and people, and without grammar, you can’t connect sentences or ideas.
b. A language is like math, you plug in the parts in the places they should go. Once you’re past that, it’s all vocabulary.
5. Step 5: Get a dictionary (but don’t just read it)
a. Dictionaries are useful to learn a word, but the people are your best source for learning new words. As they say them, look them up.
i. 1st time: won’t remember it.
ii. 2nd time: You probably won’t remember it, but you will kick yourself for not remembering (which will cause your brain to mark it as important)
iii. 3rd time: You will likely remember it after this point because your brain has already marked it and now it’s becoming repetitive. It won’t necessarily be integrated into your vocabulary, but it will become fairly high on the scale of words you suddenly understand.
6. Step 6: Become involved in that culture
a. A lot of what we learn in communication comes in context, and without context, we don’t understand. A phrase or word in a different context may means something different or may mean nothing at all. When we give ourselves a cultural background, we will learn much more from context alone, and have more things to talk about, than if we don’t get involved.


Well, hope things are going well for you guys. Happy Trails people.

The Day After

Here it is, the day after my favorite holiday of the year, and I find myself bored, alone and a little nauseas. Last night, after I finished teaching, I met with my presentation group for the class “Contemporary Issues in International Relations” and we went over a basic plan for our presentation. I say basic, because there’s still a language barrier and said barrier has been getting in the way more and more. Still I trudge along with a saying in my heart, a saying that I read on the side of a building: “Language study is a marathon, not a 100-meter dash.” Boy is that ever the case.

After spending my entire Saturday researching for my presentation and then eating a 5000 won pizza from the restaurant “Pizza School,” and after watching “The Forbidden Kingdom,” I can’t help but think back on this time spent here in Korea and wonder what it’s all been for. Why am I here? What am I hoping to accomplish? And is 1 year going to be enough time to do so? Maybe it’s the fact that since 8pm last night, the only person I’ve talked to in person was my roommate, and that was only when he came in to get his stuff together for a trip to Daegu. All I know is, here I sit, in a silent room, in Korea, 20,000 miles away from anything resembling Halloween, 20,000 miles away from anything resembling home, and I can’t help but think: Was it worth it?

Okay, maybe I’m just sad that I was so busy that I didn’t have enough time to come up with a decent costume, but anyone who’s seen my costumes over the past few years knows that they really haven’t been all that great, so that’s not really an excuse. Maybe it’s the fact that as Halloween night began, I fell asleep and then woke up early the next morning. No candy, no trick-or-treaters, no scary movies. The lamest Halloween ever. I mean, at least the one I spent in Japan, we had a costume party at the church, so that was fun. But as Korea is not a Halloween celebrating country….well, it just didn’t happen.

Well, anyway, enough of that, this blog/diary thing is long overdue. It has been 3 months since I came here to Korea, and I really haven’t posted anything for two months. That’s just shameful. And here I was all pimpin’ this page as the place to go when you want to know what Scott is up to. Wow, I doubt anyone even reads this thing anymore. Oh well, it’s cathartic and it makes it so I can look back on the days I spent here.

Basically, I got placed at Cheokgwa Elementary School (척과초등학교 for you inquisitive folks) teaching 13 hours a week. Now, originally, I signed a contract for 9 hours a week, all of which was supposed to be afterschool programs, but that changed. Yes, that’s right, it changed. Would you call it exploitation? You might.

Anyway, it works like this, I teach 6 hours of regular English during the school day, required to follow the Korea-prescribed curriculum, which I have to say is really weak. I mean, we’re doing things like, “How many cows?” In the third grade, and not the full “How many cows do you have?” Oh no, just “How many cows?” Why? Because they say that the kids won’t remember it otherwise. News Flash, the kids aren’t really going to remember it anyway. The only thing they’re really going to remember is how it felt to learn it, and whether or not the teacher was really fun. I mean, if the class basically blows, they won’t remember, but you teach them a game, you dance like a loon, and all of a sudden, they remember stuff.

But what do I know, I don’t even have a degree. Anyway, that was kinda the mentality when I started. There was this overwhelming feeling of “Who do you think you are?” when I started. Mostly, it was from the other teachers who found out that I’m still in school, and there we were, all sitting around feeling awkward while we tried to work together. That changed when two things happened: First, I went to the school’s campout activity, and Second, I started that English Living Room program.

Alright, so the campout was fun, and instead of leaving, like many of the teachers did, I stayed the entire night, coming out and talking to the kids at 2am because they were still up. The PE teacher was trying to excite them back to sleep, but all it was doing was keeping them up, so I came out and hung around, making jokes and generally giving the kids an opportunity to speak English. I think they liked it, but the most interesting thing was that I met almost all of the parents, and I taught the parents my Preposition “In, on, under” lesson :P If you are ever placed in front of 100 parents, I recommend you make sure they realize that you are much better than they are, it works, I promise. And the best part was, because I’d taught the lesson in the after school class, half of the kids sang along with the song, and showed that they were just as good as their parents…always a smart move when you are trying to prove you can do the job.

So, that leveled the playing field. Suddenly, all the parents felt as though I was a good addition to the school, and being that I am the first foreign teacher at Cheokgwa, the next batch better thank me from the bottoms of their friggin’ hearts. Good step forward if I do say so myself.

Anyway, the second thing that happened was that I started the English Living Room program. Now, this wasn’t my idea, it was the idea of the provincial office of education, and thus, got added to my hours. So, those extra 4 hours…yeah, that’s the living room. What do I do? Well, I teach the intermediate kids even more English. It’s kinda like doing a free Academy program, and basically, I teach mostly with Youtube and iTunes as my friends. We read a little from a text book, we watch Disney clips via Youtube that utilize said textbook lessons, and almost always sing a song. My goal: to instill a recognition of English as a functional language.

Now, how does this help prove my point? Because my assistant in this English Living Room is the vice principle…and the only comment he has ever made to me about my teaching style is “You are a great teacher. Organized, interesting, insightful. The kids love it, and you teach them well.” Apparently, the Provincial Office agreed, because when they came to review our school, they took Ms. Yi out of the picture and put me in as the full-on English teacher, which to them was just an easy step but has increased my work double fold. It’s a terrible time to do it, since I just finished midterms and now have a bunch of presentations and an experiment to do, but it did one thing: showed the school that this guy from the US, this undergraduate student who claims to have taught English in Japan, actually knows what he’s talking about. Since then, no comments about my experience, and the only thing I ever hear is: “HAHAHA, He’s so funny.” That’s right, successors, you better walk tall.

So, teaching has been what takes up at least 50% of my time, which means that I’m pretty much tired every night. I mean, how can someone balance a schedule like mine, making lesson plans and finding videos on Youtube, and not be tired. I joined a Hapkido dojo to lose weight and learn some gut-wrenching martial arts, but I’ve been so busy that I’ve only gone like 25% of the time. Lame. Whatever.

On top of my 13 hours of teaching (which is like 1-2 hours prep from each hour of teaching, so figure that math out) I have 13 hours of classes (and you know what they say, you should study about 3 hours per class, so mathematically speaking, we’re into 55 hours here, plus 21 for food and another 10 hours of travel time, we’re talking 86 hours at the most conservative estimate, which is more than half of the week). You add sleep and you have 84% of my week right there. So what do I do with the other 16%? Well, Hapkido is supposed to take up 2%, and now that I break it down like that, I wonder why I miss so much of it. The remainder gets lost on things like showering, talking to Marie from PSU or Tasol, a girl I’ve been hanging out with a lot, or wandering aimless trying to figure out ways to better improve myself. Oh, and then there’s church, which is 2%. Sheesh, it’s no wonder I feel incredibly busy now that I look at it in a purely numbers game. And that is with the most conservative estimate as far as lesson prep goes. I’m surprised I’m as relaxed as I am…maybe it’s all the sleep I factored in :P

Well, school is going alright. I feel as though I let things slip a little when I went to Seoul, and so I’ve been trying to play the make-up game, but since one of my professors really doesn’t like me, I’m not sure how all the grades are gonna come out. You see, this professor seems to enjoy making points, and enjoys it even more when people agree with him, even though he opens the floor for discussion or asks for opinions. I am used to the system of schooling where my thoughts may actually matter, and my experiences may hold some insight, but apparently, that doesn’t mesh well with his system, since every time I start to speak, he tried to put me on the defensive and turn my argument back upon me. It usually doesn’t work because I only like to quote things that I’ve read, so when he tries to say something like, “Don’t you think that Korea is an exception to that?” I say, “No.” and when he asks why, I say, “Well, because during that same people of time, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong grew equally as quickly as South Korea. All four of these nations are export-oriented, just like South Korea, and they were considered underdeveloped nations, just like Korea…” And blah blah blah, until he just he says he disagrees and then presents his argument against me to the rest of the class…in Korean. Jerk.

Anyway, Thomas backs up my theory that he doesn’t like me since, so I’m not just crazy. But, all I have left is a presentation, a couple of lectures and a final, so I think I’ll just tough it out. BUT, I decided to unenroll from his International Politics class next semester because I’m not a glutton for punishment. Besides, he’s got a very un-American attitude and takes a very reactionary view on the Korean economy, a view that pretty much every expert agrees is the wrong way to go about building up Korea, so I don’t really think I need to hear more from the so far right he’s left camp. And don’t even get me started on how he insulted me in front of the class on the third week, talking about how many people come to Korea to teach English who are underqualified…yeah, really? Go talk to my teachers, or my students, or their parents, or the Provincial Office if you think that this particular teacher is underqualified!!! Jerk.

Sigh, anyway, getting back to something that matters, I like my kids. I like my kids a lot. There are the annoying ones, of course, but the kids are still really cool. They’re goofy, they think I’m a giant, and overall I’m a superstar. So, like Mr. Chase back in Heber, I love my job. That’s why it’s so tempting to sign on for another year. I know I could learn Korean if I had the time, and I know that I’d love my job, but there’s the fact that I still have a lot of school left before I graduate that just solidifies the fact that staying here will not benefit me in the long run. I mean, this is all aside from the fact that I’m definitely heading home as soon as this contract is up because of Leah’s wedding, I’m not even pretending like I’m not going to that.

Lastly, and I thank anyone who’s made it this far down the page, there’s the language thing, which I talked about in the beginning. Sure I can do things like go into restaurants and order food, sure I can ask someone how much something is, but I still can’t do other basic things like ask where I can find something, if someone can help me, even find out what’s wrong with one of my closest friends. Why not? I don’t really know. It might be because I don’t have a whole lot of time to study Korean. It might be because I don’t have a whole lot of opportunities to utilize any of the Korean I do learn. It might actually be because all the Korean I ever learn is vocabulary with some very basic grammar mixed in. All of these things are adding up to become a fairly decent reason for not being able to speak the language very well. I’m just hoping that I can get enough of an understanding in before I have to go home and my opportunities to speak and use my language skills disappear.

That’s it, that’s all, that’s been the time I’ve been here. I’m sure there will be other things that I talk about in the next few weeks, like TaLK trips, the DOKDO problem that everyone keeps cramming down my throat, teaching experiences and other stuff, but for now, this blog is caught up with my life. This is a fairly basic understanding of all the things going on, all the stuff that bothers me, and even has some social commentary. But now that it’s been said, I feel better.

Happy Halloween readers. Hope your day was enjoyable.

Divine Intervention

I know it has been weeks since I posted, in fact, its been a whole month, but I will catch everyone up on the current events in the next few posts. Today, I had an amazing experience and I wanted to post it up while it was still fresh in my mind.

It wasn't the first divine intervention moment I've had in the last month, the first one came about a month ago when I went to church for the first time, and despite being very lost, I had the desire to get on certain buses, ones I had never ridden before, and then I had the desire to get off, and when i got off of Bus 412, I was standing right in front of the church. The Lord made way so that I could get to the church without 1) knowing where I was going and 2) despite my own plan to return back to the starting point and trying the trip again.

Anyway, this one occured today and was really cool. So, those of you who are faith-minded, this story will rock. Those of you who a skeptical, that's cool, but this will probably bore the crap out of you. May it help develope small seeds of faith.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008 10:35 pm
Journal Entry

Today I ran into the missionaries, Elder Clifton and Elder McCain, on their way to an appointment. I was on my way to dinner, so we kept it short, but they decided to give me a mission vocabulary book which they had promised to give me. We parted ways and I ate and went to linguistics class.

Class was an easy day, so I had a lot of downtime and during some of that, I was thinking about the missionaries and received the prompting to Text message the Zone Leaders’ investigator, Scott. I promptly did so, and immediately following, the lady who sits next to me, Ms. Sunbok Yang, noticed the vocabulary book. While I was talking to the professor, she looked the book over and upon my return, she began to discuss it with me.

I talked about the church and the missionaries and after a few minutes of conversation, she told me that she’d received “seirei” (baptism) by the Mormons and wondered if it was the same church. I was surprised, but having been at the center of various different missionary situations like this, I continued talking with her. Turns out that she’s been wanting to contact the missionaries who baptized her, but she didn’t think anyone could find out that information. I gave her the church’s business card, and reassured her that they kept records dating back since the beginning of the church, and if she requested the information, then given some time, they would be able to find it for her.

Later, upon conversing with Elder Clifton on the matter, and after giving a prayer of thanks, the words of Doctrine and Covenants Section 4 came back to my memory: “…see that ye serve him with all your heart, might, mind and strength, that ye may stand blameless before God at the last day. Therefore, if ye have desires to serve God, ye are called to the work.” (D&C 4:2-3)

I may no longer be a called missionary, but being a member makes me an eternal missionary, and if I can continue to serve in the Lord’s toolbox as a member and return missionary, then I am grateful. But the moral is that if none of us, Elder Clifton, Elder McCain, or Myself hadn’t responded to still small promptings, I doubt the Lord would have been willing to work through us. Elder Clifton thought it was important to get me that Vocabulary book, though he could have given me one at any time, and I felt it necessary to respond immediately to the promptings I did receive, and thus it was that the spirit continued to flow and by small and simple means was a door opened, and I pray that by small and simple means a great work will continue forth because the Standard of Truth has been erected and the purposes of God shall be accomplished.