Uphill battles.

So I was sitting in the office today and a woman I had never seen comes in and starts talking to me. She's an office worker downstairs and started asking me all the basics (Where are you from? When did you come to Korea? 등). She told me she spent some time in Indiana and was very happy when Indianapolis won the Super Bowl a while back. She also knew a little about Penn State, where her sister once went to school.

After a few minutes we moved on to where I went to school and what I studied. I said I majored in English at a school in Pennsylvania, and the conversation took a predictable turn. The gist of her words are in italics, mine are in telligent (hahaha *cough*):

"Do you have any certificate for teaching?"
"No."
"You have no certificate for teaching middle school?"
"No."
"Ah. That is becoming a problem for Korea. Foreign teachers are increasing and they don't have certificate."
"Certificates aren't necessary for Korea."
"It is becoming problem for Korea. Many foreign teachers do violence in schools."
"No, they don't. Usually the Korean teachers do that."
"A foreign teacher last year, I read, did violence to a student in a hagwon, I think. Do you know hagwon? I read that."
"I don't think so."

I was like "Bitch must not know who the fuck I am, I'm the 원어민 bitch!" I happened to have a print-out of the Naver article about the teacher who taped shut the mouth of one of her kindergarten students. I showed it to her, and this woman asked me if a foreigner did that. Didn't wipe that smug shit-eating grin off her face.

I did bring it up at the teachers' workshop the following period, and mentioned that foreigners resent that line of questioning. Thankfully at least the two (ha!) teachers there agreed with me, and they were surprised to hear from me how often that topic comes up in person and in the media. Jesus Tapdancing Christ, of all the things to bring up on a first meeting . . . and it wasn't but seven days ago that a teacher at our school---the teacher designated as the fucking school disciplinarian---beat a student with her own shoe in front of nearly 1,000 students and teachers. Do violence. Shit. After I said that she asked me how I felt about hitting students, and I said "It's Korean culture."

Whatever. This is but one of the uphill battles I feel many of us are dealing with in our attempts at being respected members of the school community. Her feelings are not shared by everyone, but they are shared by enough people to make them a cause for concern. Hell, a few weeks ago the science teacher told me that Canadians can't find jobs back home so they come to Korea. Fuck, I'm a part time stripper and I do hair.

Today's workshop was between the more cooperative of my coteachers. Nevertheless, I'm moving toward more teaching at the workshop and less "free talking," or attempts at it. I brought up the thing about misspelling my name on the school website, and how often this happens. I said that while it's not a big deal for Koreans, the constant errors represent laziness and indifference to many English-speakers, including me. I brought up how the textbook doesn't write 한국말 but rather 우리말 for Korean, and just as Koreans take pride in their language, so do Americans in theirs. Though English may be a joke, a test subject, or a status symbol to Koreans, it's part of my culture, and I am interested in teaching it as best I can and in presenting it in a respectul, meaningful way. It's certainly rendered dull and useless in school, by teachers who could help students more by just staying home, but it's hardly lifeless for the hundreds of millions of people who have grown up with it. English is more than something to stick in ice cream commercials or some weird symbols you haphazardly throw on t-shirts and posters, but that kind of out-of-context bullshit is why you have students who can't apologize, but who can spit out "i'm so sorry but I love you." And that's why I have cut down on catcalls, and have eschewed the dancing monkey act as much as possible, while still providing informative, entertaining lessons. Well, I do my best anyway . . . some of my lessons have been pretty worthless, but I still take pride in the efforts.

I then asked them to come to me if they have any questions about American or English-language culture, because the textbooks usually have little cultural tips in each chapter. I pointed out that these are usually either oversimplified and outright wrong, and brought up the example of the 6th grade "blackface" skit, the redunkulous tips in the elementary school books, the unchecked use of nigger in dictionaries, and the garbage featured in New Countries, Far Countries, a best-selling children's edutainment history book.

True I've been kinda down on my coteachers lately, but I had planned to bring up the blackface skit and the comic book as part of a lesson on representation of foreign cultures anyway. While I don't play the part of a raving lunatic at school very often, and I don't think I've ever brought up "foreigner issues" before in the workshops, I don't think it's inappropriate for teachers to use workshop time to address some of the huge cultural gaps between native speakers and their Korean counterparts. As I said before, and as I'll get around to in a long-ass post one of these days, the way native speakers are imagined and presented in Korean schools plays a huge role in how successful they can be. Trying to work among colleagues---and under the influence of parents, reporters, and politicians---who have fairly narrow understandings of foreigners weakens our professional standing and undermines what we try to do in the classroom. That a stranger, someone on "our team," would bring up the "dangerous, unqualified foreign teacher" motif within ten minutes of meeting me, and on the strength of something she heard last year, shows me that I still have a lot of work to do.

Whatever, it's the weekend and the weather is warming up. I'm overthinking the issues a little, but that's what blogs are for. Here's a cute video of a 10-week-old Shih Tzu playing with its reflection: