Another Language Teaching Story

Another funny thing that I came across while teaching highlights the limitations of translating by dictionary when you have a limited familiarity with the language you're learning. One of the sentences my grammar book used to illustrate the present continuous tense was "The sun is shining." Simple, right? But when my student brought her completed exercises to her next lesson, she asked me about that example, clearly baffled. I was scrambling to figure out how to explain what it means to shine, thinking about shoes and pennies and water in sunlight, when my student pointed at her lower leg and said "Shine?" Then I understood: knowing that she would find only verb roots in the dictionary, she cleverly looked up shining minus the -ing and got....shin. Well, no wonder it didn't make sense to her to say that the sun is bottom-half-of-your-leg-ing! So we had a talk about how spelling changes when you add -ing to verbs, and the problem was solved, and I bet this student will always remember both shine and shin now.

What Happened this Week?

This week I:

• took another hike with Keegan.
• failed to find the trail until reaching the top of the mountain.
• was directed onto the trail by picnicking Koreans wielding scissors. (They were grilling bulgogi, and scissors are often used to cut the thinly sliced beef.)
• had my picture taken by a Korean hiker, whose overall attitude was that of a man snapping a picture of a rare species at the zoo.
• nearly had a heart attack riding my bike on the scary, windy, hilly roads north of our apartment.
• had my first two lessons with a new student whose knowledge of English grammar is encyclopedic but whose basic speaking and listening skills are way behind.
• went to a lunch that featured lively conversation in English and Spanish and a lovely coconut flan.
• left my lights on, ran my battery down, and learned just how easy it is to push my car around the parking lot for a jump.
• had my first knitting lesson, during which is was discovered that my independent attempts at knitting involved the wrong needles, inappropriate yarn, and a knotty, unrecognizable mess that could not be called knitting.
• learned to knit the right way!
• bought and then painted a hard-shelled Korean pumpkin for Halloween with Glenda and Keegan.
• was chagrined to see what Keegan chose to paint on his Halloween pumpkin (see below).
• watched hours of kitten antics.
• disciplined kittens for their antics involving plants, curtains and my exposed flesh.
• rearranged furniture, painted a picture frame, picked out photos to have printed and framed, baked granola, and bought new plants for the apartment.
• enjoyed another whirlwind week on Geoje Island.

Painted pumpkins, L to R: Ellen's, Glenda's, and Keegan's.

The Meaning of Children

I had an interesting exchange with one of my students this week. We were reading a story about a woman who had quadruplets, and one of the exercises after the story asked my student to write how many children were in her family and then how many boys and how many girls. She wrote that she had no children in her family, but then she wrote that she had two boys, which I know is true because we've talked about her sons before. I asked her how she could say that she had two boys but no children. She said "No. They are not children. They are 19 and 25." I was surprised - I've never really thought about the fact that child can mean both "young person" and "offspring." So we talked about how children can grow to be tweens and teenagers and young adults, but they are always your children. My student looked at me like I was crazy when I told her that it's possible to talk about "adult children." But in the end, we both learned something. That's what makes language teaching so much fun.

Parking Madness

Parking in Korea can be quite an event. First of all, there's parking on the street. Finding a free parking spot in town can be interesting. Cars park along both sides of narrow streets full of shops. This makes is difficult to drive down said streets, which often have about one lane's worth of space available for actual driving. It's often necessary to pull off to the side of the road to let someone else pass. As you drive around looking for a spot, you have to be aware of the lines on the side of the road (you can park on white lines, but not yellow, although this rule is often ignored). Many times, a potential spot appears, but as you approach, you see that it's taken by a scooter. Or businesses will sometimes put plastic gas cans out in front of their shops to make sure that people don't park directly in front of the doors. Since there's no sidewalk, it is possible to park literally right in front of a shop door, and of course shopkeepers don't like that. So even if there aren't gas cans out, you have to be conscious of this and avoid being yelled at by proprietors. Finally, a tiny spot turns up, and then you have the challenge of squeezing into it. This situation is one of the major reasons that I love my tiny Matiz.

We are fortunate that we can park easily at our apartment building. Buildings that were constructed in the past often have fewer spots than the residents have cars. In this case, there are some unspoken parking rules that help everyone have a place to park. First of all, it's common to have your cell phone number posted in the dashboard of your car. This can be written on a card, etched into a fancy plastic doo-hickey, or cross-stitched in a cutesy design. This way, if you're forced to park somewhere that blocks another person in, that person can call you and ask you to move. Another solution, which we encountered in an apartment building parking garage in Jinju, is to leave your car in neutral with the parking brake off. This way, you can double park, and the person you're blocking can just push your car out of the way when necessary. Watching our host in Jinju push cars around so that we could go out for an evening spin just struck me as so odd! But it's an effective solution. And another good reason to have a car that's, like mine, barely bigger than a golf cart.

Weeks in Review: Trailblazing, Traveling, and Talking

Lots has happened in the past few weeks - we've gone biking and hiking and visited Jinju again. I've met Brazilians and Ukrainians and acquired another student. Here are some of the details:

Two weekends ago we had quite a hiking adventure! We decided that we were going to hike a mountain overlooking the Samsung shipyard where Keegan works. We saw a sign for the mountain, so we parked by a small village and started walking. We went through some rice paddies and when the concrete path along the fields came to an end, we saw a small track leading into the woods up the side of the mountain. We forged ahead. The trail got rougher and rougher, and we brushed aside more and more spiders, and finally we realized that we were not on a trail at all but were instead hacking our way up the side of the mountain in rugged explorer fashion. My calves and ankles were screaming as we plodded up the steep mountainside through brambles and sandy soil that crumbled away under our feet. Finally, I heard a call from Keegan up ahead, and he said that he had found the trail! After less than ten minutes of walking on the real path, we were at the top of the mountain. Unfortunately, the weather was not so nice - drizzly and hazy, so our views were a bit disappointing, but we were proud of our rugged adventurousness!

On the way back down, we took the real path, curious to see exactly where we had strayed. Well, it turned out it was at the very, very beginning. On the concrete paths that led through the rice paddies, we should have taken a sharp right at one point. But there was no marker at all, only a signpost where the trail started, which was not in sight from turn that we missed. Well, now we know.

Last weekend we went back to Jinju for the annual lantern festival - maybe you've already seen the pictures on Flickr. The festival had everything you could hope for in a fall festival - food, games, crowds, and a very impressive display of lights and fireworks. All of this had a distinctly Korean flair, especially the food, which was fascinating. The first thing we noticed was small mobile food carts parked along the side of the road selling seafood and ricecakes. My favorites were trucks whose entire back ends were covered in stacks of enormous crabs. There were also the perennial favorites bbang tigi, which are rice cakes made in a funny machine. The machine pours about a quarter cup of rice into a small cylinder and then covers the cylinder, which I suppose is very hot and at a high pressure. When the pressure gets too high, the cylinder pops open and shoots a rice cake out with a satisfying "bbang!" There were also several stands selling a very hard kind of slightly sweet peanut brittle, which the proprietors cut up with scissors that looked like they had cleavers for blades. Also for sale were dried squid and silkworm larvae, which smell terrible and look like something the contestants on Fear Factor used to eat.

The main attraction of the festival was, of course, the lighted lanterns floating on the river and displayed along the shore, and they were amazing. We saw fire-breathing peacocks and a fire-breathing dragon, an enormous pogoda at least two stories tall, bulls and matadors, and countless others. On the shore, there were tunnels hung with all kinds of lanterns made by festival attendees, and there were walls of red lanterns, too. There were booths where you could make wire lanterns (unfortunately, you had to have a reservation), and there was also the opportunity to buy a small lantern that you could attach a wish to. These lanterns had a candle inside, and after you wrote your wish on the lantern, you could float it down the river. There were also floating footbridges that you could cross to get a better view of the lanterns on the river. It was all just overwhelming, and I'm so glad we went.

This week has been full of social events. On Wednesday, I went to Quizno's, favorite hangout of the Okpo foreigner population, for a meeting of the Brazilian Ladies of Geoje Island. One of my students was eager to introduce me to her friends, and I was eager to go. The Brazilian women are a talkative, friendly, noisy bunch, and I enjoyed spending time with them. Many of them speak very good English, but of course now I am intrigued by Portuguese and want to start learning. If I am going to start spending time with a group of Brazilians, I'd probably be able to pick up the language more quickly than I'm picking up Korean! It helps that there are a lot of similarities with French and Spanish as well.

On Friday, Glenda and I invited our EFL students over to my apartment for tea and snacks. We had a Brazilian contingent and a Ukrainian contingent, but everyone seemed to do very well speaking and listening in English. It was a fun, interesting gathering full of fun, interesting, intelligent people and lots of chances to talk about and observe linguistic quirks, so I was really in my element. There may not be any money in adult ESL, but it sure is a wonderful way to meet the best kind of people.

Here are a few pictures from the get-together:


Our tea group. My student Rita, who is doing fantastically, is on the left. Next to her is Andrea, also from Brazil; Elena, my new student from Ukraine starting Monday; Alla, our neighbor and Glenda's student from Ukraine, and Glenda.


Pepper discovers the tea cozy is just as its name suggests.