On the rare occasion when he had something to say to all the foreign teachers, Director Lee communicated with us through Barry, a New Zealander in his early forties. Barry had spent many years teaching English in Japan and spoke good Japanese. He had been employed at FLS long enough to rate his own desk beside Director Lee’s. He was the “Person to Person” specialist and had taught the lessons from that book for so many years, he practically did them by heart, hardly noticing when they reached the end of the book and started again at the beginning.

The walls between the classrooms at FLS were paper thin, and I could hear Barry’s high pitched giggling voice as he ran through the taped dialogue portions of the book. He had the peculiar verbal habit of ending every sentence with “there ya.”. “And Mr. Kim there ya. You will be Mr. Johnson there ya. And Mr. Park there ya. You will be Mr. Smith there ya. They are trying to decide there ya, what time to meet for their squash game there ya.”

In theory, Barry was in charge of all of us foreign teachers. In reality he was a good-natured fellow, who, most days, only wanted to finish his classes and go home. He tried whenever possible to avoid conflict and agreed with whoever was speaking to him at the time or whoever was speaking the loudest. And that, unfortunately, was usually Jean.

Jean was American, in her mid thirties, and the thorn in my side at FLS. With her bulbous nose, blonde hair curled around her head and overweight body crammed into dramatic dresses and perched precariously on inappropriate high heels, she was an imposing figure. Her make-up applied hastily in the dark was always far overdone. Bright blue eyeliner and fire engine red cheeks stood out in ghastly detail against her pale white skin.

She charged in every morning and set the tone of the day with her bitching, complaining, crudities, and mindless banter. She picked up on the language of sex and bodies and threw her comments around at the top of her lungs while the rest of us cringed. Barry, who would have been expected to rein in her outrageous behavior did the wise and cowardly thing and let her go on. If she directed her latest kneeslapper, like the article she read about a penal insert that was too long, at Barry he’d join her laughter and the two of them would howl like hyenas.

She mistook my disapproval and dislike of her for conservatism and continually told me I had to loosen up or I’d never fit in. She felt I needed female company and continually tried to set me up with Korean women she knew. I declined as politely as I could, figuring correctly that this was the last woman in the world I needed as either friend or enemy.

Oddly enough, she was one of the rare foreign women I met that married a Korean man. Her experiences trying to relate with her husband and his family formed the main part of her daily hour-long harangues delivered to her classes. Through the walls I and my classes could pick up every word. My class would often leave their seats and put their ear to the wall when it became apparent that Jean had once again broken down and was weeping hysterically next door while recounting all the wrongs done her.

It was a good month when I was assigned a classroom far from Barry’s or Jean’s. Then I shared walls with the two other teachers at FLS, neither of whom I got to know well but who were better neighbors.

One was John, a young fellow Canadian from Northern Ontario. He’d settled into a life teaching English to escape from a life in the mines of Sudbury. John had an eclectic mind and his classes were exposed to a marvelous range of discussion topics garnered from the many magazines and off-the-wall publications he’d brought with him.

My class would be struggling with the “My Favourite Movie” and I’d hear John delivering a lecture on the aerodynamics of a golf ball in flight or the chemical properties of the stone used by the Aztecs in their temple construction. His students often came to me later clutching their four-page photocopied handout desperate to know what John had been talking about. Many teachers delivered lectures far above their class’s ability to understand and never knew it. The classes would rarely give any feedback except for whining, which they always did and the unhelpful and ungrammatical comment, “I’m boring” to which the teacher always replied, “Yes, you are.”

The last teacher was Alvi, a pretty 32-year-old woman from the Philippines. She spoke a perfect and precise English and was probably the best teacher I met in Korea. She was warm and concerned and interested in her students. Her lessons were well-prepared and at the right level. Yet she was often not very popular with the students. The image-conscious Koreans wanted “American English” and couldn’t accept a Filipina as a teacher no matter how good she was. Every month, she fought a running battle trying to overcome her students’ initial displeasure at discovering she wasn’t American.

I was the “American Streamline” teacher. I never met another teacher who liked that book series, and I have no idea if it was effective or if the students liked it or hated it. But I found its built-in structure essential to get me through the mayhem of a normal day. Each of Streamline’s three books had eighty units and each unit required exactly one hour to complete. That was a total of 240 hours of material and an additional 10 or 12 hours if I used the built-in tests. And it came with tapes, so I could throw the tape into the tiny pink ghetto blasters the school provided and make my students listen to the dialogue or story again and again all in the name of “listening comprehension.” Like Barry with “Person to Person”, by the end of a couple of months I had all the stories and dialogues fully memorized. I could even reproduce the accents all the different speakers used.

Using Streamline was a thinly disguised attempt on my part to fill the hour without going completely insane. I’d tried everything else I could possibly think of and nothing worked. My early attempts at fun and entertaining discussion topics met with stony silence. Controversial topics fell flat, as no one in the class ever disagreed with anyone else. Flights of fancy and imagination met with incomprehension. My use of Western songs, movies, drama and role plays didn’t come close to overcoming their reluctance to speak. My get-tough approach that demanded they speak in proper sentences using more than just the present tense caused a revolution and outraged cries that their grammar was better than many a native English speaker (which was utter nonsense). Somehow I never quite got the hang of teaching.

Teacher: “What would you do if you won a million dollars?”

Student: “But Mr. Douglas, I don’t have a million dollars.”

Teacher: “I know. Imagine that you do.”

Student: “But I don’t.”

I take out some Korean currency and hand it to the student.

Teacher: “Here, that is one million dollars. You can do anything you want to do. What would you do?”

Student: “Mr. Douglas, this is Korea money.”

I take out a magic marker and write one million dollars on the note.

Teacher: “There. Now it is one million dollars.”

Student: “But it’s not real money Mr. Douglas.”

At this point, I usually scream, pull out my hair and change the subject. I search for something really controversial and exciting and come up with the standard ‘what would you do if you knew you were going to die the next day’ discussion. To give them the idea, I tell them what I would do and make up an incredible series of fun and dramatic episodes detailing my final hours. I spin around the room waving my arms and sweating and finish my story with me poised at the door of a plane flying six miles above Seoul and just as the sun rises I fling myself out the door to hurtle down, cheating death of its right to choose the final moment. The students, are, of course, stunned (or bored – it’s hard to tell the difference).

Okay, I think to myself. That must have inspired them. Now I’m finally going to get a glimpse into the Korean soul. One student tries the literal game with me: “But Teacher I’m not going to die tomorrow.” But I’m not having any of it.

I rush to the front of the class and write in three foot high letters the word “IF”. Then I write the word “WOULD”. I grab the student by his lapel and pull his nose to within an inch of mine while I deliver my ‘imagination’ lecture. IF and WOULD are the two most powerful words in the English language, I say. IF I could I WOULD. IF I could travel I WOULD go to China. IF I could do anything I wanted I WOULD…. And I give a hundred examples talking of fairy tales, fantasies, novels, movies, wishes, free will, dreams, and illusions.

Now, IF you were going to die tomorrow, what WOULD you do?

The students are terrified. The Teacher is angry and they don’t know what it was they did wrong. They don’t understand what I expect of them, but they try to give me an answer. One by one my students sum up their final day and night on this planet for me: I clean my room. I go to Church and pray. I go to sleep.

It takes all of two minutes to go around the room and hear their identical stories. They believe there is only one right answer to every question, and when I didn’t specifically say the first student was wrong they all quite logically repeated his answer. And I’ve still got most of the hour to fill.

Jean, Barry, and even John never experienced the same level of frustration. But I think that was because they were each willing and able to talk non-stop themselves for the entire hour. Each of their classes was a mini-version of David Letterman or Arsenio Hall.

I can talk a blue streak myself, but only if I have a listener I respect. And I found that my Korean students didn’t inspire me. Their lives were in general so empty there was nothing to work with. On Monday morning,g all teachers try to kill a few minutes by asking that most awful of questions, “What did you do on the weekend?” We all knew it was hopeless, but we couldn’t resist it, just as we couldn’t resist “Introduction Monday”. It used up some of that dreadful hour, which often seemed to stretch into infinity. And all the students would answer in monotonous repetition, “I watched TV. I slept. I met my friends.” In fact ‘watched’, ‘slept’ and ‘met’ were the only simple past tense forms any of them ever mastered. I found myself sharing far more of my own weekend activities than I wanted, simply to waste time and in a desperate attempt to show my students that there was more to life than TV and sleeping.

Eventually, I understood that there was no winning this war. The best I could hope for was survival, and I called a truce. I opted for a holding pattern and discovered the wonderful qualities of Streamline. I felt guilty that these students were throwing away their money to hear me imitate yet another Streamline Unit, Jean weep hysterically, John hold forth, and Barry giggle ‘there ya’. But in our defense, I noted they always had lots of money and what else could we do with silent students that had no opinions, no lives, and no distinct personalities?

One talent my students showed was an incredible flare for complaining. Even the meekest student out of whom I couldn’t coax a syllable found his voice when it came time to whine that the class was “boring”. In the beginning I respected these complaints and switched from idea to idea trying to find something that would spark their interest. But everything was greeted with groans and moans until finally I’d turn it on them and ask what they wanted to do. And I’d swear that is exactly what they’d been waiting and angling for all this time. With a smug expression they would say, “I don’t know. You’re the teacher. You decide.”

This more than anything else settled me into my Streamline routine. Why waste my time creating entire course curriculums when no matter what I did it always had the same effect? And by month three, rather than apologetically begin the day’s lesson, already mentally cringing at the expected rebuff, I’d burst through the door with a suit of armour of indifference. “Open Streamline Departures to Unit 49” became my battle cry! I’d anticipate their moans and groans and laugh at them. The first student to plaintively cry “I’m boring” would get my readymade lecture. “Yes you are boring and you’re so thick that after fifteen years of studying English you still don’t know the difference between a verb and an adjective!” The first student to complain that they already knew the past tense or whatever the day’s material covered would be sent to the front of the class for a calculated attack showing for all the class to see that they didn’t have a clue about it. They may have “studied” the past tense in grade school and even passed a test on it, but they had never in their lives used it in spoken English and that was what they were here to learn.

 

 

 

Tags: Director Lee, FLS, Korea, Korea - First Days Teaching English, TV