Do You Know the Muffin Man?

Working in an English language school in which the curriculum and lesson plans are neatly and rigidly laid out for teachers has its ups and downs. The major advantage is that it minimizes my preparation time for class to under 30 minutes a day. The major disadvantage is that I often disagree with the lesson plans, which focus more on memorization than on comprehension, and which stifle my creativity almost entirely. On an average day, I don't really feel like a teacher. I feel like an automaton. An English-speaking automaton with the ability to saunter through the day on autopilot, thoughtlessly correcting grammar and requesting that students cease speaking in their native tongue. My job is not particularly taxing, but it can be quite boring at times. Case in point: I wrote roughly 27% of this blog post during my first four classes of the day. It can often take a powerful catalyst to lift me out of my self-inflicted bout of lethargy. And today, that catalyst came in the form of a melody.

Having just successfully taught the extremely basic concept of "like," "love," and "hate," to students of a lower than average English proficiency, I was now content to listlessly walk around the classroom in a trance, my eyes scanning the pages of the students' workbooks to ensure that they indeed understood the simple concept that they learned long before today, while my brain was slowly retreating into my fantasy world. It wasn't long before my attention was roused by a brighter than average student who began singing, "Finish-ee, Finish-ee" upon the completion of his workbook activities. The lyrics of this song were unsurprising, as many Korean students tend to proudly and habitually celebrate the accomplishment of their brisk translation skills with a "finish-ee" jingle of their choice, but it was the tune rather than the lyrics of this song that successfully jolted me from my catatonia. It took a few runs through the chorus before I could place it, but before long I was teleported back to my living room in Mobridge, watching my nephews and niece running towards their Grandpa's leg, requesting an encore performance of a "ride" known to them only as "Pony Boy."

For those of you unfamiliar with the short tune, "Pony Boy," I'm sure you aren't alone. To the best of my knowledge, "Pony Boy" is not an especially popular song in modern times. However, this isn't the first time that a student has spontaneously begun singing a seemingly obscure children's song that happens to be extremely relevant to my former life. One of my students with undiagnosed ADHD routinely relieves his burning need to speak by screaming the lyrics of "Do You Know the Muffin Man?" Every time he breaks into the chorus of this song, I experience an almost painful nostalgia to be sitting in my eerily silent home in Mobridge when my mother suddenly bursts into an excessively sonorous version of this same tune for the exclusive purpose of causing me to wet my pants. While this may seem like a strange memory to feel nostalgic for, especially considering the ear damage it causes to my cochlea, it is nevertheless an integral part of what it means to be a resident at the Deacon home.

Although Seon Woo, my muffin man student, can sing the song with almost perfect enunciation, I am convinced that he doesn't, in fact, know the Muffin Man, nor does he know where to locate Drury Lane. Nevertheless, while I am fairly certain that his comprehension of the song differs from my own, and his personal experience with the song most definitely differs from my own, I still find it perplexing to conceive that a 10-year-old Korean boy in 2010 regularly sings the same children's song in English that a 10-year-old American girl used to sing in 1995. I don't know what I expected Korean children to be like prior to coming to Korea. I've been here for too long now to recall all of my initial preconceptions. But what I do know is that I didn't expect my childhood self to have much in common with a modern day Korean child. As is usually the case, my assumptions, however seemingly logical in this instance, have proven to once again be inaccurate. I will concede, of course, that there are plenty of differences between 1990s American children from the Midwest and present-day Korean children from Daegu. I never ate kimchi and rice for breakfast. I never began learning a foreign language at the age of four. I played with my dog after dinner rather than ate my dog for dinner. But while the specific experiences of Korean children may be different than those of American children, their personalities are strikingly similar. Throughout the world, girls and boys of a certain age are convinced that the opposite sex has coodies. While the pop stars of various countries may differ, students everywhere are obsessed with catchy pop music sung by disposable androids. While the content of tests may differ, kids still get stressed out over exams. Although the amount of free time kids have may differ, students still spend most of it playing computer and video games. While they may follow different sports, they still have excessive admiration for sports celebrities. While some things in their respective societies are more humorous than others, poop jokes are funny…always.

My intention when I started this post was to briefly and casually mention that a student began singing "Pony Boy" today in class and it made me deliriously happy. Naturally, I failed at the basic task I set out to accomplish. I had no idea it was going to spawn into a reflection about children of the world. Having now gone too far to turn around, I feel as though I need to wrap up with a profound and enlightening concluding statement. But instead, I'm going to leave you with a cliché that I only partially believe: Kids are the same wherever you go.

Easy Peasy Lemon Sqeezy

It is Thursday evening and I have just returned from a greasy food/drink joint by the name of Beer Cabin. It is not my typical habit to go out for either dinner or drinks on a Thursday evening, but an impending September mini-vacation to Jeju Island (Korea’s holiday island) prompted the event. Drinks were not an original part of the agenda, but some particularly annoying students today led me down the inevitable path of intoxication, and now I find myself home alone at 1 a.m. in a highly problematic position. You see, there is only so much a person can do when they are (a) alone, (b) awake, and (c) slightly drunk. I can’t read my book because it requires too many brain cells, I can’t watch a movie because it requires an attention span, and I can’t do report cards because it requires unhazy judgment. This leaves me with approximately two options: cleaning my apartment, or writing a blog post. For reasons that don’t warrant an explanation, I have chosen the latter.

Of course, I don’t have a clue what I’m about to reveal to my nonexistent audience. Spontaneous blogging is not exactly my forte, which at least partially explains my infrequent posting. I’m more of a premeditated thinker, and I’m already having second thoughts about this idea, but since my only other plausible option involves rubber gloves, sponges, and chemical cleaners, I’m going to attempt to stick this out until the end.



Before I go any further, I feel like I need to clear something up. My earlier claim that I am alone is not entirely accurate. You see, at the present moment, there is a sexy, naked, young woman tenderly nibbling away at my fingers. Her name is Chamchi (참치)...her nickname is Chommers...her English name is Tuna. She is not human. She is Siamese. Those of you who visit my facebook page with even a minimal level of frequency have already been thoroughly introduced to the feline Korean terrorist living under my roof, so I will spare you too much unnecessary prattling here. However, I will say this about my little monster: kitten ownership in Korea is a lot more difficult than it is in America on so many levels. Part of this stems from the fact that kittens are not popular household pets in Korea. Then again, household pets are not popular in Korea in general. What this means is that finding the necessary provisions to please little Chommers can often be a small challenge that occasionally requires a translator. Additionally, the abundant trips to the vet for shots, vaccinations, and emergency eyeball care have proven to be anything but simple. The two-way 30-minute taxi rides bearing a squirming, meowing cat have not exactly been comfortable. Luckily, my incredibly sweet and helpful Korean friend, So Young, has been kind enough to meet me at the vet for some heavy-duty translation regarding Chommers’ various ailments.



Believe it or not, I am driving at a small but significant point with my ramblings, and my point is this: Living in a foreign country is hard. Of course, a large part of this general statement has logical fallacies in it, so allow me to clear those up. My present lifestyle is not hard. My present lifestyle is impossibly easy. Sometimes I find myself thinking about my future self looking back on my present self, and I end up feeling nostalgic and envious towards my present self. I hope that makes as much sense to me tomorrow as it does right now. Anyways, the point is that it’s a Thursday night, it’s well past 2 a.m., I am still mildly intoxicated, and I am not even slightly concerned about this fact. I don’t go to work until almost 4:00 p.m. tomorrow. I finish work at 10:00 p.m. I work 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, and I scarcely spend a moment outside of this time doing work-related activities. I make as much money as an average first year teacher in America, I work half as much, and I don’t pay rent. I have made close friends from no fewer than 7 countries, I drink like a fish almost every weekend, I go on random international vacations frequently, and I am still somehow financially in the green.

Contrary to obvious appearances, it is not my intention to boast. It is merely my intention to highlight the stark difference between my lifestyle and my everyday life. While my lifestyle (at least on the surface) may appear to be lavish, extraordinary, and ever-so-slightly surreal, my everyday life could not provide a greater contrast. When I refer to my “everyday” life, I am referring to those commonplace, mundane occurrences that happen to you every day that you fail to even notice because they are so ingrained into your daily routine. A trip to the hair salon. A take-out order via telephone. A dinner table reservation. When these situations arise in a country in which you fluently speak the language, they are merely tedious chores; when they arise in a country in which you barely speak the language at all, they become sources of severe anxiety. It’s easy to forget how easy the simple things can be back home. I have grown used to my grocery store interactions consisting of three phrases in Korean: “Hello,” (anyeong-ha-se-yo), “bag, please,” (bong-tu ju-se-yo), and “thank you” (kam-sa-ham-ni-da). Any variance in this routine causes my personal cosmos to realign in highly unfavorable ways; I simply cannot function if a cashier throws out a phrase I don’t know the answer to…I avert my eyes southward, smile bashfully, and blush uncontrollably while exhaling a quiet “a-ni-o,” never to learn exactly what it is that I am saying “no” to. Just tonight, a situation arose at the restaurant in which my friend ordered a chicken salad but was brought a salad containing a mystery meat that was clearly not chicken. In an English speaking country, this would be easy to resolve: “Excuse me, ma’am, but I ordered the chicken salad, and it seems that you’ve mistakenly served me a salad containing a few vertically cut Oscar Meyer wieners. Could you take this back, and bring me the chicken salad, please?” Unfortunately for Shell, between the four of us, we only knew how to say the word “chicken” and "please" in Korean. The situation was “resolved” when they cooked the mystery meat for a little longer and put it back on the salad. And this, in a nutshell, is why it is occasionally difficult living in a foreign country. It’s kind of like that dream in which you struggle violently to say something but the words refuse to come out, and the curious bystanders struggle violently to try to understand you, and in the end, you both fail abysmally at this most basic level of communication. Only it’s not a dream. It’s my everyday reality.

And the incomprehensible part is that I’m completely content with this arrangement.