Meghan은 간다, Meghan ya no esta aqui

Culture Clash!

I just finished my Friday morning class. It's a great group of kids, and I enjoy being with them. Last week's class's focus was "point of view" which was not very exciting, but today's topic was "culture shock". Now, I'm not sure I would assign this topic for a bunch of elementary students who are learning English, but whatever. The topic was introduced by a few clips from the Disney masterpiece Pocahontas II . Insert sarcasm where needed.

First clip: John whoever greet Pocahontas and her dad, and brings her a horse. Clip 2: Pocahontas and her father go to England to meet the King. They are dressed up and meet the propriety that is England. Clip 3: Pocahontas has a culture shock or culture "clash" when she sees the English torturing a bear for fun.

I also got to tell my students about my own culture clashes, such as people shoving and pushing in the city. Or, about how at any store here you are shadowed by a salesperson, when at home nobody does that. I told my students that sometimes I want to tell those salespeople to go away!

So, our class was talking about differences between cultures. We kept to more mundane things, however, like greetings. Four different pictures, of different cultures greeting each other. Apparently the Eskmos greet each other with a nose rub? Okay. I asked about how they greet everyone. Then I told them that I didn't know much about when to bow.

Me: When I was first a teacher here my student bows to me. I didn't know what to do! Do I bow?
Students: No, Teacher!!
Me: Why?
Belle: Because you are older!!

Okay, so I learned that lesson. Then i told them about how I accidentally did not bow to one of my student's parent. yikes. They laughed with me. I also told them about how in Mexico friends greet each other with a small cheek kiss. I told them that I am not used to that in America, but that when I am in Mexico, I do that with my friends. At this point, Michael, a 5th grade boy, freaked out. He was quite disturbed by this idea. I told him he could now go kiss his friends and tell them he was being Mexican. He not-so-quietly declined that offer.

Moving on to greetings, we had a column of different ways people greet each other, and the kids had to decide if they were American, Korean, both, or neither. When we got to our first bowing one, I told the students: "Let's just say... Americans never bow."

My little, precious, front-toothless Julie says "whyyy?"

I didn't know how to answer that. "Because.. we just don't."

So the kids then had to put together a little presentation about some sort of situation where Korean and Americans could clash. They all chose holidays and I got to tell my kids a lot about American holidays. I had to explain stockings for Christmas, and how on Thanksgiving we eat a lot of food and the men watch tv. I know, it's generalistic, but that's what you have to do.

At the end my kids were assigned to write haikus (they'd never done it before), and so I had to simply tell them what syllables were, and then set them off to write haikus about Korea, to introduce a new person to Korea. I gave them an example of my own, about America:

America is
about people old and new
the same and different

(give me a break, i wrote it in two minutes)

So here are some gems from Rick and Michael:

Korea is a
very small country but it's
a funny country

Korea is a
very popular country
it is very good

All in all, a good morning, and a not so bad reason to get out of bed in the morning.

During a break I asked Julie about what you do when you lose teeth as a child in Korea. Apparently you throw the tooth from your rooftop, a swallow comes to take the tooth, and then the swallow will then give you new teeth. Keep in mind that that's probably the right answer, but this is all explained with the kids piecing together sentences, words, and motions.

Because we were all being silly with each other, my 9th grade student, Nicole, asked me "In America.. in school... do they permit... color hair?" I told her that yes, they do. Rules here in Korea are very strict for school children. No makeup, uniforms, no perming or coloring hair. She asked "what do they say no for?" I told her that schools in America are very easy and that really what they care about are clothes that are not distracting, such as too short skirts.

ah. culture.

posted by Meghan @ 9:03 PM