A Mickle of Annoyances

Day 4 of the headache. I know my mother would tell me to go to the doctor, but I already know what he would say. He would ask my symptoms, try not to act surprised at me coming to see him with only one minor thing wrong, blame it on the heat or the air conditioners at work or something, give me some medicine, tell me to drink lots of water, and send me on my way. I can take medicine and drink lots of water on my own. The idea of preventative medicine doesn't seem to exist here. The medical care seems similar to how they treat typhoons: don't do anything to get ready but then solicit donations to repair all of the damage. Nearly every summer the same storms come, yet nothing is done before the typhoons hit. My head could explode tomorrow and they'd talk about how it was too bad that it happened, but then not change how anything is done. Such is Korea.

I was going to take a day off from exercising yesterday, but found myself too hyper to not do anything. I went a shorter distance than normal, but when I returned home the new shoes had rubbed the back of my feet so badly that my sock was soaked with blood and sweat. Yuck! Today I used band-aids before going out, so have kept the damage from getting any worse, although it doesn't seem to be any better.

As for yesterday's classes, Tomas (3 PM) made a big deal of saying that Sam was his friend, so I asked Sam (4 PM) if Tomas was his friend. Sam very emphatically said "NO! Tomas is a bad boy!!" I thought maybe they'd had a fight (they're in the 3rd grade) but Sam went on to explain how Tomas takes things from the supermarket.

At 5 PM we read a story about teenagers stealing a car and the owner hanging onto the car as it drove away. The 7th and 8th graders said that they felt bad for the teenagers because their future was damaged, but that as long as their parents paid lots of money to the car's owner then they wouldn't have to go to "teenager jail" for very long. I asked them what would happen if the parents were poor and couldn't pay anything. Sally said that the teenager would have to go to jail for longer. She added that if the kid is under a certain age (14 or 15 Korean/12~14 Western, she wasn't sure exactly) then the parents had to go to jail, too. I asked her why, and she clearly explained that if a young kid does something wrong, then their parents didn't teach them well. Then Ben asked how Sally knew all of these things--was she spending a lot of time at the police station in trouble?!

The day ended with samgyetang since we missed eating it on whatever day we were supposed to have it. I was not at all impressed. I don't like ginseng, and the soup consisted of half a chicken and a little rice, with a lot of spicy side dishes. Not a great dinner.

I finally got my resident ID card back today. I asked Mr. Kim about it again on Tuesday, and he said that the director of the academy out by the airport picked it up and would give it to Mr. Kim when they got together Wednesday evening. Today Joelle gave my card back to me. I don't like it going through so many hands--more chance of it getting lost that way! The new expiration date for the visa is written by hand on the back of the card. The previous time it was typed/computer generated. Is that something to be concerned about? I guess I'll find out when I try to leave the country!

Word of the day: mickle. One of the adults (Grace) used it today and at first I thought she was remembering a word wrong or pronouncing it incorrectly (or making up a word, she's been known to do that, too!). She showed me the word in the dictionary, and I had no clue--I'd NEVER heard or read it before. After class I looked it up in two different English dictionaries--not there. Then I looked it up online and found it, but there was very minimal information like how old of a word it is and if it is still in common usage and if so, in what countries. My feeling was that it's an old word but the limited etymology didn't help. I had Mom look it up in the 1828 dictionary we have at home and it said that it was obsolete but still used in Scotland. The word was obsolete in 1828--what's it doing in a present-day Korean-English dictionary?!?! It means great, a lot of, much, etc. and is also written muckle and mockle. Synonyms are: batch, deal, flock, good deal, great deal, hatful, heap, lot, mass, mess, mint, peck, pile, plenty, pot, quite a little, raft, sight, slew, spate, stack, tidy sum, wad, whole lot, whole slew.

Joelle....................sometimes I want to scream!! Today she was going through the various Daily Reports and writing down which ones hadn't been done. She asked me if the other foreign teachers knew that they had to be done at least once a week and I told her that I was pretty sure they knew. Later I asked them and they both told me that they do them most of the time, but then Tanya said that Matt had stopped doing them because of his extra classes. Matt's attitude got to me today--yeah Joelle is annoying, but she is the manager. His feeling is that he shouldn't have to hang around after work putting the reports into the computer because he doesn't have "breaks" during the day to get them done. I'd much rather have a streamlined schedule than have two days where I have an hour off in the middle of classes and then have to be at work later.

Back to what I was talking about.....later Joelle put papers on everyone's desk showing what daily reports that person had missed. She didn't say anything, the paper was just waiting when I came back from my first class. It made me angry, especially when I started looking at the classes she had written down that I had missed. She wrote down classes starting in the first week of June, the week before we were told to put them into the computer. Hello! Then one class wasn't mine, while another I share with Matt so it's unreasonable to expect him to tell me what he did in his class and me to input that into the computer. (The system is designed such that only one foreign teacher and one Korean teacher can have a class listed on their online schedule, or so they say. It sounds strange to me.) Yet another couple of classes I looked back on the paper record that I keep and saw a check next to them showing that I entered them into the computer. Either there's a problem with the computer program, or someone deleted them, which isn't so difficult to do as there's no confirmation "are you sure you want to delete this" warning that comes up. I wrote notes on the paper as to some of the major things, and then filed it away. I have 7 weeks left. While I'm still working hard at teaching, I'm not about to go back over 2 months to put data into the computer that no one will ever use! Matt told me that he had torn his paper up into tiny little pieces and placed it in the paper recycling box. That Joelle had enough time to do all of this tells me that she needs more to do! Wow was she ever pulling the power trip today.

During the 5 PM Hacking test I caught Allan cheating. One of the kids said something to him in Korean and I looked at him at about the time he moved his backpack slightly and handed his paper to me saying "I don't know." All of the words were spelled correctly except for the last two which he had left blank. I looked at his bag and found his hacking book (5"X7" size) propped up inside such that he could see it but the bag would keep it from being seen by other people. I didn't want to accuse him unfairly, but the evidence was looking pretty strong. I asked him one of the harder words that he had written correctly on his paper and he couldn't answer it orally. He then admitted cheating and tore up his own paper and begged me not to tell Miro. I wanted to keep him for an hour after class for him to study and retake the test but he had a doctor's appointment. I ended up giving him a stern lecture and having him retake the test before he went home. He got 5 of 30. He promised that he would never cheat again. Or at least be more careful about how he does it, I guess!

Miscellaneous tidbits: Billy kept saying "hair driver" instead of "hair dryer." Kane guessed that the girl in the story we read was getting a bomb for her birthday gift because her boyfriend didn't like her anymore. Brandon said that I looked like a sumo wrestler with short arms, while Jessie disagreed--I look like a chimpanzee with long arms. Great students I have!