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As I've mentioned before, one thing I really dig about my hagwon are the 'field trips'. For the January edition of portable learning, we trekked all the kids out to a local hill, or Mega Sledding Emporium, which sounds much cooler, and demanded that they hurl themselves down a treacherous icy slope over and over again. The educational merits of such a life-endangering task are suspect, but I suspect the kids learned a lesson or two about not falling out of inner-tubes and the dire consequences of throwing snowballs at teachers.

The kindergartners were fun. I camped at the top of the incline and shoved other kids out of the way so our precious babies didn't have to wait in line. Herald first, bitches! Some of the smaller ones were scared so we rode with them. I don't know about the other teachers, but I'm pretty sure I made the whole experience more terrifying by screaming things in their ear the whole way down, things like "AAAH! NOOOO! WE'RE FALLING OUT! WE'RE GOING TO DIE, ESTHER! ARE YOU READY TO DIE??" Most of them were all like "Hells no" and wouldn't ride with me again, but I think a select few enjoyed our whimsical brushes with mortality.

Something I've always found hilarious about children is the way they look all dressed up in snow gear. You know what I mean: the bundled-up marshmallow kid who can't put his arms down by his side because he's wearing eight layers of jackets and has to waddle around, arms akimbo, like a penguin? Well imagine a whole squadron of such inadvertant buffoons trying to struggle up a hill; clumsily grasping the straps of their inner-tubes, falling down and losing their mittens, trying to kick each other in the back of the knees because they're pissed off. I was losing it - everywhere I turned there were children slipping and sliding and tumbling and crying and looking ludicrously fat. I took pity every once in a while and dragged a handful up the ramp while they sat imperiously in their sleds and looked around at other kids as if to say, "Check out pimp ride is mine! I school have Western slaves... do you got Western slave? Think no, biatch!"

We've been working more on ebonics than grammar lately.

The locale itself was pretty ghetto: a half-assed circus tent and a bunch of staff members in red jackets sitting around a hobo campfire. Some of the older children got lost in a sea of dirty food huts and had to be dragged away from their noodles; some of them saw the circus show and were tight-lipped about the probable atrocities witnessed within. There was an inflatable bouncing castle. It was generally agreed, by the foreigners, that the Mega Sledding Emporium was pretty kife and didn't deserve the name Mega Sledding Emporium, which works out well because I just made that name up and it sorta sucks anyway upon reflection and the sledding place's actual name was really a jumble of Korean symbols which meant something like "Yo here is some sledding for poor folk!"

The other major activity for the kids, beyond the glorious incandescence of snow sledding, was sitting on an old wooden board and scooting around on the ice by jamming two sticks topped with rusty nails into the frost and lurching forwards. I'm totally serious. Look!

So this was an utterly retarded bit of tomfoolery, but we had fun with it by pushing the kids around super-fast and ramming them into each other like bumper cars. I was a little surprised that nobody took a nail in the eye, but they have really poor motor skills. They'll get better at impaling when they're older. Anyway, they managed to injure themselves quite nicely by falling down so many times, and it was a battered and bruised cadre of children that were sent back to their mothers. The key point was that they were still smiling at the end of the day, and learned a valuable bonus lesson along the way about the temporary nature of pain. So I guess the field trip was worthwhile.

The older kids were fun too. They, being better versed in the cruel ways of life, were able to inflict and withstand many snowborne assaults over the course of the day. I was hit in the face by innumerable snowballs and kicked many inner-tubes down the hill in retaliation. It was all in good fun though, and teacher and student alike banded together to form a juggernaut wall of downwards motion which swept aside the frantic whistle-blowing of the hill attendant. Being older, the afternoon children were also heavier, and that precious attribute lent itself well to devastating collisions and DNA-like strands of mobile assault squadrons clinging to each others' tubes as we all screamed down the incline.

We got in trouble numerous times, but played the stupid Westerner card over and over again, even after our students worriedly informed us, "They say stop holding on... five time now! They say five time! Is danger!" Is danger, indeed! The stupid Westerner card is like a platinum VISA of unrestrictable fun, an immunity to rule and regulation and cultural more alike. In the end, every affronted Korean just shakes their head and wonders how idiots like us got into the country, while we gleefully get our way and continue acting like idiots.

It's a pretty nice setup, if you happen to be an idiot.

Posted by Chris at 08:46 AM >> Commentations (2)