Initial Conditions.
This past week has been exhausting and exhilirating, and both for the same reasons. Everything I experience here is so new and stimulating that it lingers in my brain, affecting my disposition for hours, days. Sometimes I feel so alien in this place that I all I want is to see a familiar face to remind me that there's still a world that makes sense to me out there. This just makes it so much more obvious how little orientation prepared us for this experience. My 6 weeks of beginner's Korean has been next to useless so far and reaffirmed what I had been thinking during each class: very little of the material we covered has anything to do with the situations we are in most of the time.
This is not to say I'm not happy here. At the moment, I'd say I'm content, but I see grand potential for happiness: if I get my schedule adjusted, when I get to know my city better, once my friends and I get organized and start meeting, after my Korean language classes start, once I get PAID. But enough of all this introspective stuff, I should give you some real meat; what I actually do in a day and what my first week in my new home has been like.
I arrived in Pohang last Thursday, flown in from Seoul with my co-teacher and vice principal. My co-teacher seems like a nice enough man, smiley, slightly overweight. Jolly. My vice principal is riding the fence between enigma and asshole. He's an ex-military officer: lieutenant-colonel. Apparently he only retired from the military about 5 years ago and came to work for the school immediately after that. He is, however, the son of the founder of my school, and so in that short time, to the great disapproval of some, was promoted to the position of vice principal. He's a very brusque, up-front man. Doesn't smile much. Makes dry jokes and you'd never know he was joking. I still don't know if he's been serious about a lot of the things he's said to me. He often talks about how it's tough being in total control of so many people in the office. He was speaking to some other teachers about me and said "But I don't think he's very smart." Joke? I couldn't tell. No one really laughed.
Anyway, my host family is great. I really love my host siblings. They were crawling all over me the second I got in the door with my 200 pounds of luggage. Just so that doesn't sound too creepy, they're six, eight, and ten years old. They're all very cute, but SO incredibly loud. I think this has a lot to do with the way they were raised; my homestay mother is the very model of a passive Asian housewife, except that she works at my school administrative office 9 hours a day instead of obsessively scrubbing tiles and watching TV dramas, which she saves for weekends. My host sibs get away with everything, and if they whine enough, scream enough, scratch and tear enough, they always get what they want. The thing is, they're not that misbehaved, just very, very selfish. They do everything they're supposed to do like homework and chores, cleaning up after themselves, just when it comes to the little things like cookies or a WHOLE new dinner, they are relentless.
I wish I could somehow explain positive reinforcement to my host mother and that it's even worse to withhold something from your children until their whining reaches your breaking point than it is to just give in right away. Then you're just conditioning them to whine more and more vehemently in order to get what they want. I'm 23 years old! This woman's got twice my years and I could give her a simple parenting tip that would makes her life a thousand times easier. Bah!
This is not to say I'm not happy here. At the moment, I'd say I'm content, but I see grand potential for happiness: if I get my schedule adjusted, when I get to know my city better, once my friends and I get organized and start meeting, after my Korean language classes start, once I get PAID. But enough of all this introspective stuff, I should give you some real meat; what I actually do in a day and what my first week in my new home has been like.
I arrived in Pohang last Thursday, flown in from Seoul with my co-teacher and vice principal. My co-teacher seems like a nice enough man, smiley, slightly overweight. Jolly. My vice principal is riding the fence between enigma and asshole. He's an ex-military officer: lieutenant-colonel. Apparently he only retired from the military about 5 years ago and came to work for the school immediately after that. He is, however, the son of the founder of my school, and so in that short time, to the great disapproval of some, was promoted to the position of vice principal. He's a very brusque, up-front man. Doesn't smile much. Makes dry jokes and you'd never know he was joking. I still don't know if he's been serious about a lot of the things he's said to me. He often talks about how it's tough being in total control of so many people in the office. He was speaking to some other teachers about me and said "But I don't think he's very smart." Joke? I couldn't tell. No one really laughed.
Anyway, my host family is great. I really love my host siblings. They were crawling all over me the second I got in the door with my 200 pounds of luggage. Just so that doesn't sound too creepy, they're six, eight, and ten years old. They're all very cute, but SO incredibly loud. I think this has a lot to do with the way they were raised; my homestay mother is the very model of a passive Asian housewife, except that she works at my school administrative office 9 hours a day instead of obsessively scrubbing tiles and watching TV dramas, which she saves for weekends. My host sibs get away with everything, and if they whine enough, scream enough, scratch and tear enough, they always get what they want. The thing is, they're not that misbehaved, just very, very selfish. They do everything they're supposed to do like homework and chores, cleaning up after themselves, just when it comes to the little things like cookies or a WHOLE new dinner, they are relentless.
I wish I could somehow explain positive reinforcement to my host mother and that it's even worse to withhold something from your children until their whining reaches your breaking point than it is to just give in right away. Then you're just conditioning them to whine more and more vehemently in order to get what they want. I'm 23 years old! This woman's got twice my years and I could give her a simple parenting tip that would makes her life a thousand times easier. Bah!
posted by Uzura at 1:52 AM
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