boys, schools, and boys in schools.

[DH ALERT: Bad news, team. My eldest sister has just notified me that Daniel Henney is currently in America, filming a new CBS medical drama premiering this fall. Further investigation has revealed that it is to be called, "Three Rivers." I'm not sure what this is going to mean for us, but we're not going to give up hope. I wouldn't be surprised to see DH waiting for us outside our local GS25 (a convenience store), having discovered our blog and become a passionate fan of ours. In fact, I will make sure to mention his full name, Daniel Henney, in every blog post so that his Google alerts will notify him of our existence.]

In other news, I have no control over my classroom(s). My writing class consists of three high school boys and instead of going over essays and sentence corrections, they spend most of classtime interrogating me on my dating preferences and nightlife customs.

"Do you have a type? What color? Have you ever dated a Korean guy? No? How come? Are you looking for a Korean boyfriend this summer? No? Do you have a boyfriend?"

"What did you do last night? What are you doing tonight? Tomorrow night? You should come to NRB (noraebang a.k.a. korean karaoke) with us!"

I try to avoid answering at first, but then one of them yells out, "She's getting red!" and then I'm forced to answer to save face. And being myself, I'm soon giving a presentation on past and present love interests and "my favorite color." It's painful sometimes, but we get along for the most part. I bring them snacks and they tell me where to go shopping and which clubs I should frequent. They insisted that I go to this huge transgender nightclub. But, don't exit out the back door, they warned.
In a single day, we broke the blinds on our windows and accidentally set off the emergency alarm, contacting the police. Discipline is important to me.

My AP Lit student and I spent one hour of our two hour session today talking about Macbooks, the iPhone 3.0 software update, and Apple's overall superiority over PCs, which is what you get when you make someone who's never taken AP Lit (but is obsessed with Apple) teach AP Lit. When I tried to assign my fifth grader some vocab homework, he retorted, "and what if I don't do it? What are you going to do?" I paused. Mentally strangling the little twerp, I shrugged, "Nothing." I can't really do anything to him; I have no power...unless I beat the spoiled brat.

Yesterday, we visited Daewon High School, this huge prep school in Seoul where my dad used to teach way back when. It was completely terrifying, chock full of testosterone and teenage hormones. The boys were timid at first, spying on us out of their classroom windows, whispering. But. Then. Seeming to respond to some silent alarm heard by everyone but us, hundreds of boys spilled out of the classrooms and swarmed us, chanting HA-BAHD, HA-BAHD HELLO HELLO.
Jen and I looked at each other and laughed nervously. As they brushed up against and pushed past us, I thought, "We could die like this."

School is a large part of our lives here (and a big part of the lives of Koreans, in general). We spend most of our days in our academy and although all of our classes are conducted in English, our command of the English language is deteriorating at a higher-than-expected rate. Our students' and coworkers' English is decent but stilted; and any discourse with our other conversational partners a.k.a. our top three best friends a.k.a. my uncle, aunt, and mother is conducted completely in Korean. Consequently, Jen and I have dropped all articles, abandoned the gerund, and curtailed our vocabulary to a third-grade phonics book. I'm beginning to read all F's as P's (our gym, Forest Fitness, is called Po-rest-euh Pit-nees") and Jen keeps calling the States, "USA". We've become FOBs after only six days in the motherland. This bears much promise for my SF job apps (and, hopefully, interviews) this coming fall. FML.