---Stranger in a Strange Land--------- My Fulbright Year(s) in South Korea: December 2013

Guess who is bad at blogging regularly? That's right. I am.

Sorry for being so infrequent on my updates. I think I have found out that blogging regularly (when it isn't for a paycheck) is really difficult for me. Feel free in the future to tell me that I am being a loser of a blogger and maybe I will feel more motivated to post at least once a month...

Apologies over with, on with the main event. This post will be a little heavier, but necessary to frame my life here.

My life the past few months since I last blogged in August have been so wonderful, stressful, exciting, exhausting, and all other ranges of emotions that I simply can't fit it all into one blog, let alone one blog post. Sadly, I won't be able to recount everything now, but I will fill you in on the most important parts - the predominant one being my students and my teaching life.

My High School - The good, the bad, and the truth

금성고등학교 (Geumsong High School)

My teaching career here at Geumsong High School has been extremely bewildering. I still don't know half the time if I love, hate, or am apathetic towards how my school and students make me. For a very long time, I honestly thought my year at Geumsong was going to be one long experiment on the various pedagogical ways to kill 50 minutes. For the first couple of weeks things were very turbulent as I tried to settle in, gauge my students, gauge myself as a teacher and authority figure, and somewhere in all that madness try to sleep soundly every night. For a while, the sleep wasn't coming easily.

Every lesson I did after the second week just seemed to crash and burn harder than the week before, all the way until it was time to go to Gyeongju for the Fulbright Fall Conference in October. Outwardly I showed to my host family and Facebook friends that school was going well and I was enjoying myself, but I really wasn't. I opened up to some of my fellow Fulbright ETAs here in Naju about how my teaching life left me feeling defeated and worthless; My students were apathetic (and that is being polite), my lessons seemed to not progress five minutes before everyone was either asleep or jumping out my window (actually happened), and to top it all off I was beginning to hold it against my students, even cursing my placement at this school. I doubted why I was here, if I would stay another year in Korea, or even if I would continue to be a teacher at all after this experience. On top of all of this emotional turmoil, I was stuck in a foreign country without the ability to speak the language, which caused a lot of cascading failures in my daily life that amounted to me wanting to throw in the towel.

However, as I mentioned, this all seemed to miraculously change after Gyeongju Conference in October, which my friend Tyler, a former ETA in Naju, told me would happen. I still can't fully comprehend why he was right, but he was. After spending the four days in Gyeongju with all my fellow ETAs, I came back to Naju to what seemed a completely different school and teaching life. My students were extremely open with me, trying more English than I assumed the whole school knew put together, and their genuine happiness to see me in class and in the hallways was invigorating. It was as if by magic my students all lightened up and I had a fresh frame of mind about everything, but now as the semester ends I really think it was primarily the latter - a trip out of town to meet all my fellow teachers and hear varying experiences helped me gain valuable perspective on my life. And above all it caused a change in me. I didn't know what it was for a long time, but now I think I know.

I stopped caring and started caring.

That is, I stopped caring about my bruised ego and lofty (shattered) expectations about what my life would be here. Instead, I started caring about the happiness of my students above all else. I started to plan lessons and class time around my students interests and enjoyment. If they weren't having fun, I wasn't having it. Period. I started working in games that I loved, like MASH (thanks Meghan!) and Mafia, as well as showing the American TV drama "LOST" with astounding enthusiasm and demand for more episodes from my students (my first years made it through episode 3 and my second years finished episode 4). I still can't fully put it into words, but my class mentality has just completely evolved into one that form fits my students as best as possible, which I now realize is what I should have done from the beginning (hindsight...). I was just too blinded by my prideful ambitions as an "educator of the weak masses" to step back and realize that the reality is not nearly as complex as all that. I simply need to be a friend to these kids and have as much fun as them in order to accomplish the ideal classroom dynamic that I seem to be slowly working towards now. Slowly, yes, but ever-progressing.

I am happy to end this post by saying that my life now is dramatically different than it was a couple of months ago, and I was even inspired to blog again today by the overwhelming kindness of my students. Today alone, I have been hugged, sung two twice, applauded for three times (students love to applaud for random things as a sign of approval. It;s extremely adorable), and been given gifts from some of my sweetest students as a thank you for showing them small acts of kindness that I hadn't thought twice about until now. AND one student came to me today and had her friend translate to me that she wants some kindergarten English books to practice English in her free time (!!!). Happy, happy teacher today :)

If you read this far, I worry about how much free time you seem to have and recommend picking up a hobby. But thank you nonetheless, and I hope you found something in my writing enjoyable. I will try to put up snippets of the good things that I have experienced these past few months, especially as I prepare to embark on a trip to Japan for the holidays and living in Seoul during January to study Korean. Many exciting things in the future, and I look forward to sharing them with you more regularly than I have up until now. On that note I will leave you with happy pictures of my happy students making me happy :)