If living in Korea has taught me anything, it's to live in the moment. Koreans are notorious for last-minute schedule changes, no matter how high up in the administration you are. Classes are regularly canceled and the native-speakers don't know until the students don't show up. I guess adapting a "live in the moment" mentality is a kind of defense mechanism so that the more anal of us don't completely give up on time management all together.
Yesterday I went into a coffee shop near my apartment with full intentions of memorizing a page in my Korean vocabulary book. I do this a lot because... it's normal? Isn't it normal to go to a coffee shop alone, if you have work you want to get done? I don't study well at home, and the library is full of students cramming for finals, so a coffee shop is a wonderful place to pump myself full of caffeine and sugar and plow my way through whatever work needs to get done.
No no, not this time. The coffee shop owner looked at me with eyes full of pity and asked me to sit with a young girl to drink my coffee, that way I wouldn't be alone.
So studying didn't happen.
The girl ended up being a middle school student, actually one of Michelle's girls, Subin. She was really cute and completely fascinated by my Korean. We chatted for over an hour about life, her schedule, exams, our favorite KPop boy bands, our favorite dramas, typical middle-school-girl things -- and I was able to do it all in decent-enough Korean.
As I was leaving, the coffee shop lady asked me for a favor. She showed me an English textbook and explained that it was her son's. He's a high school student who, apparently, is good at math but hates English. She asked me, if I could, to come back the next day at 5 or 6 and chat with her son in English.
With the whole "living in the moment" thing in mind, I said yes. I told her (in my EXTREMELY blunt Korean, since I haven't learned enough grammar and vocabulary to be politely subtle) that I wouldn't be able to teach grammar or vocabulary, or translate the textbook for him. She said that was fine, she just wanted him to meet me and for me to talk to him like I talked with the girl. She was apparently impressed that I had learned enough Korean to be conversant, but had only been studying for 2.5 years.
I had just been talking (read: complaining) to my co-teacher earlier that day about how frustrated I was with the Korean English education system. My students were coming in all day with short, 1 page hand-written essays for me to edit and they were TERRIBLE. I was complaining mostly about how English class isn't taught in English -- the teachers speak Korean the entire time -- and how that's completely backwards if they're ever going to learn the language comprehensively. (Korean classes, however, are taught ONLY in Korean, even from the very beginner level. What's up with that, Korea? You clearly know how to teach languages, so why don't you apply it to the English curriculum?!)
Anyway. I hope Subin and this high school student come away thinking that, if they actually practice the English they learn in the classroom, they'll be much better at it. That English is not a dead language. It's not just translating paragraphs out of a book and memorizing vocabulary words. That there's actually a really big world out there where English is used to communicate and express people's ideas.
At the very least, I'll probably score free coffee and waffles out of it.
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