Sprol

“Lessons Learned,” By Melissa Valks in Canada

I had arrived in South Korea at one in the morning the night before from Canada and was scheduled to begin teaching my first class at 6:30am that morning. As I walked down the narrow mountain pathway from my home towards the school, I could feel my throat become sore with each breath I took, and my eyes were hurting so severely that I could barely open them. The closer I got to the school the worse I was feeling and the denser the air had become. By the time I had reached the school and ducked into the washroom I could see the whites of my eyes were blood-shot red and I felt as though I had an instant throat infection.


Walking into the teachers’ lounge I was greeting by my new colleague who handed me my monthly teaching schedule and some loose papers from the director. As I walked down the hallway to my classroom I looked at one of the papers that had been handed to me as part of my orientation from the director. It looked like a formal bulletin in Korean with a penciled English translation written above it. It read, ‘It is the duty of anyone living in Korea to report North Korean spies. Call the spy hot-line and you will be rewarded’ – indicating an amount that equalled about $100 U.S. dollars – with a telephone phone number listed.

I walked into my first class of eight-year-olds and took my place at the front of the class. The students had all arrived early to see their new ‘foreign’ teacher. Although these children technically lived in Seoul, the area was still somewhat on the outskirts and some of the students had only caught glimpses of a ‘foreigner’. For the students to be able to interact with this strange foreigner such as myself – well, it was quite a novelty for some.

The first thing that struck me, other than the fact that we were all gathered here for class before I was normally awake in Canada, was the fact that most of the students were wearing surgical masks. Some were just plain white as doctors wore in the operating room, while others had cartoon characters on the front of them – Sailor Moon was sported on quite a few of the girls’ masks.

My first thought was to suppress my laughter. Did their parents think that I as ‘the foreigner’ would contaminate them? Was this some wacky fashion statement? I had no idea – and I had to find out why they were wearing them. Considering it was an English conversation class, it didn’t seem overly harmful to take a moment to ask about these odd masks.

Through broken English, gestures and wild page turning in their English-Korean dictionaries, I came to understand that while masks were thought to help people recover quickly when they were sick, that the children in this area used them to help protect them from the air pollution. It all came together. My blood-shot eyes – my burning throat. Of course – it was the air pollution. While we had pollution issues back home I had never experienced anything like this. I hadn’t even realized that it was the pollution that was affecting me that morning.

During my time in Korea I would never become accustomed to the severity of the air pollution where I lived. The pollution from Seoul’s eleven million cars all running at the same time would come to settle each rush hour in our area. I would often bring my umbrella in the mornings, convinced it would rain – only to understand later in the day, it was just the haze of the pollution appearing time and again like heavy rain clouds. I would also become used to scrubbing my skin each evening when I returned from work to remove the greenish colouring of pollution from my body – much like the green reside I used to find as a young girl on my finger after wearing costume jewellery.

After our lively discussion, I turned to the class material and took out a large picture that they were each to write down five sentences about it and then share with the class. The first picture showed a young girl and boy inside a home playing, with many things happening around them – a dog spilling over a fishbowl – a cat jumping up on a bookshelf that was falling over – a bird flying out of it’s cage – and the list goes on… In a very small corner of the picture was a small, insignificant window showing a black, night-time sky with stars.

The instant I showed the picture all the children gasped very loudly as if to be impressed – making a, ‘w-o-w’ sound in their voice. I didn’t understand. There was no laughter at the picture depicting all this distress – there was not an ‘oh no’ sound in their voice – it was if they were looking at something beautiful.

One student asked me if it looked like that in Canada. Looked like what? Animals on the loose? No. Many pets in the home? Thinking it was unusual in Korea to see many pets. No. Did she mean the way the home looked? No. She walked up to the picture and pointed to the small window. She was asking – all the students were asking – if I could see stars in Canada like in the picture. I still didn’t understand. Stars? Yes. How is it different here? No one – not one student in my class – in all their eight years of living had seen stars in the sky. One student reported proudly he had gone to an IMAX film the summer before, and saw stars in the film – but no one had seen stars in the Korean sky. Why? I didn’t understand. Well they explained, because the air pollution was so high that all they saw were dense pollution clouds.

That moment – in Korea – in a classroom of eight-year-olds – I had been the student and they were my teachers – and I had been taught a lesson of a lifetime.

Melissa Valks in Canada

From Anecdotes from Teachers of English, more stories there.
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