Why I was born to teach, and I hate it.

The title of this post might be the most obnoxious thing I’ve ever typed.

However, I had an amazing, artist-chasing-muse moment teaching my adult class on Wednesday night, and I wanted to share.

The buildup was the kind of thing that just happens with me sometimes. One of my adult students, Rachel, mentioned she’d like to work on her reading comprehension, and discuss articles in class. She apparently wanted celebrity gossip, I found out later, and Eddie, the other student, really wanted no part of it. He seems to think that studying vocabulary lists is the best way to learn a language.

Anyway, after trying several different sources, I finally find that scholastic.com’s articles are about the only news that these two adults are going to understand at all. So, I sent them this, without the dressing that gives away the intended audience: US Embassy Attacked. I hoped against all hope that I could get two uncomfortably-like-my-parents people to follow my lead in a discussion that was bound to end up in nationalism.

Eddie and Rachel came in, both slightly late, but class could begin in earnest earlier because Eddie is usually very late, and this time he was not. At any rate, they began griping about vocabulary. I had gone over a fair bit of the vocabulary at the beginning of the previous class, repeating that I wanted them to ask every last question they could find re: vocabulary right now, and giving them a light primer on 20th century Eastern European history. In their second language.

So what happened? On the whole, I was disappointed. “Nationalism” translates to Korean with a very positively-connotated word, and Eddie loudly declared that Kosovo should be its own country if they are their own ethnic group. I explained to him that this was literally nationalist, and then explained to him that the word nationalism had some negative baggage in English. (For example, the contraction of “Nationalist Socialist”) Rachel mostly listened, and asked for clarifications on the details of the article.

We talked for awhile, and Eddie expounded on people needing their own homelands. It was clear that Kosovo needed to be its own country, because there were people who were not Serbs living in Serbia.

I inquired about his knowledge of America’s ethnic makeup. With some light prodding, he conceded that there was a mix of ethnic groups in the United States, getting along relatively well, and that he’d rather live in United States than an independent Kosovo. I asked if he had any ideas about why this might be. He said he didn’t know, and then looked expectantly to me for an answer.

I don’t have one.

I then re-iterated 2 statistics from the article. 60% of Serbians are unemployed. The average monthly income is roughly $250. A region of this country that is legendarily worse off than those statistics, and cites that as a reason for withdrawing from the country, has just declared independence. I asked Rachel and Eddie what generally happens to a country during a civil war. This drew blank stares. I then took a minor risk, asking if their parents ever spoke with them about what it was like to live in Korea in the thirties and forties . (For those of you unaware, Korea was a Japanese colony from 1910 to the end of World War II, with your standard “You would have gotten thousands of coffee table books if this happened to white or sort of white people” atrocities, and then there was this war.)

They didn’t seem to catch on that civil wars are bad for people. I finally went for broke. “Eddie, let’s say you live in Korea, and you make 250,000 Won (korean currency = $250) a month, and your extended family is generally unemployed, so you need to help them out with that as well. You have an option to live in Tokyo, and make around 3,000,000 Won (about 3,000 bucks) a month. You will be away from your people, but you will be able to feed your family. Is that more important than being under Korean rule?”

He finally acknowledged that yes, maybe feeding his family was more important than living under Korean rule.

I asked why Russia and China don’t like the idea of a new country, and America does like it. This, frighteningly, led to blaming communist solidarity. I explained that Russia is no longer a Communist country.

I gave in, and went briefly through the discussion of why China and Russia don’t want Kosovo to be recognized as its own country. I wrote the words “Taiwan” and “Tibet” next to China, and “Chechnya” next to Russia. Eddie gave me the gorgeous “Ah-ha,” which baffled me, considering his apparent unfamiliarity with the fall of Soviet Communism.

This isn’t even the good part.

10 minutes left in class, Eddie says “Hey Greg? I have a question.”

“What’s that, Eddie?”
In perfect English, the best I’d heard all night:

“What is the difference between a mob, a rioter, and a protester?”

Ecstasy, orgiastic joy, my face reddens. After 45 minutes of bluster, Eddie has asked, in perfect English, a question I would be thrilled to hear an adult ask me in his native language.

I would like to kiss him. I elect to shake his hand, which leads to some confusion.

“Uh, What?”

“You just asked an excellent question, Eddie.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

I quietly loathe myself for axiomatically equating high household income with a healthy country, but I am not comfortable taking my real positions with them just yet. Or my broader ones, anyway. I am not looking to convert people. I’m simply really fucking tired of reading out of a textbook with people who I know must care about something besides advancing their career and watching Sex and the City without subtitles, respectively. That is all.

I would like to apologize in advance to my girlfriend for her friend/roommate’s image making it into my blog before her image. Take a cute picture of us together. Get it to me.

If you were wondering, yes I am starting to listen to twee pop, and the bad cardigan grows in 4 weeks after you decide that Beat Happening doesn’t suck.

A half-baked thought on education.

Tonight my adult class uncovered something I was probably better off not knowing.

Okay, the lesson was on describing abilities.

The sentences structures in the book were “Are you able to . . .,” “Can you . . .,” and “Do you know how to . . .” I pushed “Can you . . .” hard, and they were curious why. They thought that being so direct in English was rude.

I told them it was not.

This then led me into a conversation that I thought someone with a relatively high level of fluency and reading comprehension would know about English by now.

Sushi in Japan.

One thing I did in Japan merits a blog entry and is not terribly personal.
I went to a “real” sushi restaurant. This is sushi the way it was originally. All the contemporary exotic “fusion” and upscale adaptation stripped away, and all that’s left is raw fish, men who I pray are passionate about their work, and a very small place where you cannot take pictures. Yes, I’m serious. That’s why I don’t have pictures. Otherwise, I would have gotten a ton. The place was fascinating.

Life After God.

I just had my browser erase approximately 1000 words of development in my political thought, as well as about 8 links, and I still have a relatively lengthy draft of an experience I had in Japan on tap. However, in the course of writing the political discussion, I felt it was necessary to talk about something perhaps too personal for a blog. We’ll see.

I no longer believe in any extraordinary/supernatural/spiritual/what-have-you powers. I felt this way as an adolescent and young teenager, then became a somewhat boring deist, and then returned to atheism. My reasons for the final step might be worth hearing, and the background allows it to make any sense anyway.

I was a gloomy kid. Maybe not in kindergarten and such, but in grade school I was pretty damn pessimistic. I had reasons. The fascist attitudes of both the social environment and majority of teachers in the Catholic elementary school system of my youth were not a good place for me. There are people who do well there and are nurtured and find what they need and so on. I wasn’t one of them. I became increasingly bitter and nasty through elementary school, which included junior high for me. The most tangible case of my gloomy bitterness was, as someone who literally never had to study to get decent grades, failing one quarter of Religion class at my school because I conscientiously refused to memorize The Beatitudes, or even write anything in the space provided on the test. I now recognize the amazing literary and intellectual significance of The Sermon on The Mount. However, I was in 6th grade, loudly self-identifying as an atheist, and certainly did not get a fair chance at The Gospel of Matthew by the comically bad instruction I was receiving in religious studies.

Moving on, the Jesuit High School and eventually my weirdo college slowly drew me further into the fold of halfhearted Deism, and would have continued in that direction, no doubt, had I not made a very unusual acquaintance my senior year of college.

Jack Angstreich located me due to his interest in my undergraduate program. He was surfing through lists of “Johnnies” on Friendster.com, and I stood out due to my interest in Sergio Leone’s films and well as aforementioned Deism, which by that time had turned to some variant of Dualism. Jack talked me through the flaws in some of my thinking (over the course of 8 or 9 months). This focused mostly on dissecting and discrediting Plato’s Theory of Forms. At this point, I was increasingly unhappy because I didn’t know how to find out if I was doing what was morally right, if what I wanted to do was what God wanted me to do. One’s will needs to be in accordance with God’s will to be truly happy in life, by mainstream christian theology.

Y’know what made me happy? I am not making this story up.

One night, lounging around my parents house, a failed enterpreneur at age 25 and an hourly part-time employee of an overpriced chain of sandwich shops, I almost bawled my eyes out to a friend I had met on okcupid.com because I was having an intense emotional experience in the process of rejecting God. Previously, I thought there was a possibility that what was best for the world might not be what made me happy. With the Old Testament’s God, The Gospels’ God, and especially God according to Paul of Tarsus, and especially especially Augustine of Hippo, and no doubt with Thomas Aquinas, it is perfectly realistic that God wants you to be unhappy, if temporarily. This leaves the question “when should I be happy?” I shit you not, I was at an impasse with my counselor with this question for at least 2 years.

By giving up God, I could unreservedly work towards what I thought would make me happy, always. I had nobody to answer for except my own conscience. I didn’t have any obligations besides those I put on myself. Morality became what somebody else thought was best for me, i.e. “usually bullshit.” Everyone talks about these incredible journeys of salvation, moments when they “knew God was there” and how awesome that felt.

The absolute most wonderful night of my life I declared that there is nobody at the universe’s helm, there is no necessary beginning or end, and nobody is in charge. I have never been happier in my life than I have been since that day in fall/winter of 2006, sitting at the counter in my parents’ kitchen, and accidentally stumbling across a theological discussion. I now believe myself completely incapable of art in any true sense, as I have no gods besides, well, human happiness. This is about my only regret, and experience tells me that I make pretty shitty art anyway.

In which Greg juggles several priorities, then does the inevitable.

Once again, I find myself debating exactly what I want to share with whoever happens to find my blog.

I went to Japan this seolnal (“Chinese/Lunar New Year”) and stayed with someone I met over the internet.

Okay, fuck it.

I went to Japan to visit a friend and her daughter. I met this friend through the online dating site okcupid.com while I was still seeing my ex-girlfriend. I suspect said ex-girlfriend still periodically reads this blog. This will be taken as a scathing self-indictment. It isn’t.

Moving on.

Tokyo is a compulsively tidy place, with lots of very narrow streets. The ramen is expensive – 12 bucks for a bowl and a can of beer. I will grant that the ramen is very, very good, but still. It’s (varyingly) thin broth with noodles, onions and (occasionally) a slice of pork.

Y’know what? I still can’t write worth a damn about anything that I feel like sharing with the internet. So I’m done. I apologize to the roughly 3-5 people I know of who were waiting anxiously to hear all about the trip. Call me. I just don’t know how to write meaningfully about my life while maintaining the kind of distance I feel is necessary in a very public forum. Please try to understand, gentle reader. I am recognizing that this blog will never be even a very good source of information about anything except me. That recognition comes with choices I’m not ready to make. Seriously. I don’t even know how comfortable I am posting a picture of my friend and her daughter here. Would you continue to read if this turned into a discussion of my political thought? Seriously.

That’s what I’ll talk about. The only time I got any response to anything was when I said that Mark Steyn was Full of Shit. I still agree with that, but I found the assumptions made about my views the most frustrating.

Political thought is probably the only thing I know I give a shit about. Therefore, it would make sense that my blog deal primarily with it. The ideas I’m interested seem to come up in the heading of “sociology” in most places I’ve seen them, but my distastes for some elements of academia (particularly its organization) arise upon saying that.

This is going somewhere. Over the course of the evening, reflecting on my undergraduate education led me to a work I was (pathetically) unfamiliar with that relates to this crossroads.

This will be good for me. It got me to read a “real book,” albeit online, about politics. That’s a step. I mean, I’m trudging through Moby Dick at present, and good ‘ole Vladimir Ilyich has managed to capture my imagination.
So yes. Apologies to those who were mostly reading this for updates on my life. This blog may shortly turn into a series of reflections on my political thought and reading, which will likely include some discussion of my day-to-day life as it relates to the aforementioned.

I find that much more interesting. And my opinion is more important than yours.

I need to write, let’s see if I say anything worth hearing.

At 26, I’m doing all the things you’re supposed to do before you’re thirty, in the wild, youthful sense.

I am living such a comical bachelor existence that I really didn’t know people lived like this. (I dare you to guess the last time I made myself a real meal. I’m not proud of it, but it just works.) When I don’t feel like going to work, I wait to the last minute and spring an extra buck or two for a long-distance bus, or even a cab. I sleep pretty much when I want to, as long as it’s not between 2 pm and 9:30 pm or so. I have a trip to Japan on tap that is such a potential nightmare that I’m embarrassed to give the interweb all the details. I’ll wait until after the fact. I have no doubts I will have a blast, but I’m sure that someone slightly older and “wiser” might second-guess me.

Otherwise, work is becoming not-insane. I have no reason to believe anyone is dissatisfied with my performance as a teacher at the moment. I will now go into why things may get better at work shortly.

Currently, my employer uses North American elementary school reading books in ESL classes. I suspect that mothers push for this on some sort of hype they’ve been fed. However, the needs of someone learning to read English who already speaks English are dramatically different than those of someone who barely knows the Latin alphabet and needs strict reinforcement in speaking of Subject Verb Object sentence order. But, Korean mothers need to feel that their kids are in “advanced” or something classes, so we continue with the books, slowly but surely. I effectively develop my own “curriculum” since there really is nothing existing to teach. I need to create my own circumstances to get kids to talk. My approach entails adapting the story material to the interests of my students, with slightly-varying (mostly negative) results. About the most success I’ve had is arguing the merits of different First-Person Shooter computer games with the class full of Christmas-themed names. A high school kid once told me where to find find the cheapest “pc room” (hourly computer facility) in my neighborhood, and otherwise simply confirms or denies that he understands the material in various ways, when directly addressed.

I’ve tried just about everything with every class. It’s as if once they are no longer naive and excited enough to just get a kick out of things that sound funny or whatnot, they just don’t give a damn about anything. This is all obviously much better than the sandwich-making before I got here, but it’s not remotely inspiring or terribly fulfilling.

I’m mentally exhausted and really don’t care that much about anything I want to blog about. I’m going to go read. There are patchouli smells and “Eh?”s that perk me up, and otherwise my uncooperative washing machine and hot water occupy most of my idle thoughts.

I had Cincinnati chili this weekend – one coney, one four-way. It was comforting like you would not believe.

You really wouldn’t believe . . .

 . . . how depressing and awful the post that was here five seconds ago really was.

Ugh.

In some ways, things are great, in other ways, it’s a whole lot of nuthin’.

I have 2 cans of Skyline Chili anxiously awaiting finely-grated cheddar cheese, mustard, and hot dogs, or maybe some spaghetti and some beans that I really can’t believe I’ve been too lazy to eliminate.

I’m not drinking a whole lot, but at really weird times, and weird things. I went through a rice wine phase last week, and yesterday I made myself some gunfire after work. Because it’s really fucking cold.

Cold Showers.

Well, no more of them, anyway.

Since moving into my new apartment almost 3 (!) months ago, I have had a very poor relationship with my on-demand water heater/central heating. These are generally the same thing in a Korean bachelor apartment.

How’s this work? There are pipes under the floor in apartments. Your apartment gets hot by heating, and then pumping through the floor, the apparently-not-safe-to-drink Korean tap water. This is all fine and dandy, except you also control when your apartment sends real hot water to the whopping 2 taps in the apartment.

This is also fine and dandy . . . until the labeling on how to send significantly hot water to, say, your shower, is not only in Korean, but in Korean jargonese that isn’t in dictionaries.
I finally found one way to make my water kind of hot for a couple seconds. This was enough to get myself wet, turn off the water, lather up while freezing in the unheated glory of my bathroom/laundry room, then turn on the water again and wait for it to get hot again. This is obviously not very satisfactory. And it took a widely-varying amount of time for the water to get hot enough to take a real shower. So now, patient reader, I am going to teach you how to take a hot shower in Korea.

WTF.

I just looked at my stats.

Who the hell googled “Greg Schroeder needs”? Seriously. Fess up.

The Name Game.

Part of what makes ESL education bearable is when you have students who are not insufferable zombies.

Before you chastise me, I’m totally fine admitting I’m a mediocre-to-pretty-bad teacher. So, I’ve decided the best approach is to grin, bear it, and talk with the kids like I’d talk to any other kid who seems half-human. It’s been working wonders for my mood. The best example of this is an all-male middle school class I teach.

Now, backtrack with me for a bit, to the first week of December. At the time, the boys had nicknamed themselves Alex, Ben, Dummy, and Monkey Man. This was permitted to stand.

In the spirit of the season . . .

First, Monkey Man became Rudolph, as in the famous reindeer. Then Alex, Dummy and Ben became Sled, Santa, and Present, respectively. This was plenty surreal, even for my taste.

Then, shortly afterwards, we acquired another student. Okay, by “shortly,” I mean “Mid-January.”  I was anxiously hoping that the novelty of the Christmas names would wear off, and some relatively traditional English names would stick. Hell, I’d like them to start going by their Korean names. But that’s a very different discussion. Probably the same discussion that would ruminate on the affinity between the name “Cindy” and fatness among South Korean youth.

Anyway, the Christmas names weren’t going anywhere. We picked up a new student. Somehow, this student was informed that he needed a Christmas-themed name if he was to be a part of the class. I blame Rudolph, who is probably the brightest kid in the class, and the laziest. You know the deal.

So, hoping to avoid the weirdness of “Present” and “Sled,” I ran down the list of Christmas Folklore characters. After Frosty, all parties present at the nativity, Herod, all 8 reindeer besides Rudolph . . . the class claimed that the new boy’s name literally meant “Comet” in Korean. I don’t believe this for one minute, but they seem to think they need to justify giving him a weird name. I seriously don’t give a shit. I hate the practice of giving kids English names in general, and making them ridiculous at least makes me amused while I feel I am destroying their cultural heritage, and my capacity to say Korean words is questioned.

When I first met them, they were comically bad at doing exercises in the books we use. Awful. One day, they were screwing around so much I just gave them the whole thing for homework and told them, rather calmly, I would toss them out of the 7th story window behind me, so help me God, if they got one wrong.

The entire class got 2 wrong. Since then,  things have been better. It snowed today, and rather than play some mind-numbing game that entails speaking English for the sake of speaking English, we went outside and had a snowball fight. I shoved a huge wad of snow down Rudolph’s collar. He squealed like a little girl. The class then assaulted me with snowballs for a good 5 minutes. I finally repulsed the attack, and we went back into the building. It was nice.