This week I wanted to tell you about the summer English camp that I recently worked at. For those who don't know, "summer camp" in Korea is code for summer school. The camp is a six day program hosted at a university. The kids show up, are given atrocious orange polos, have their cell phones confiscated, and are assigned a dorm and roommates. Every day they attend six different "booths" (themed classes), participate in team-building activities, and participate in an evening program like a talent show or mini-olympic competition.
In addition to running one of the booths, each foreign and Korean teacher pair was responsible for one class of fourteen students as their homeroom. Here's me and my homeroom on the first night with our beautiful new polos. The students are presenting their class poster and cheer to the rest of camp. See if you can figure out who's shy!
My booth was science, and our three classes were about the phases of the moon, writing in code, and shock absorption. That last one was an actual vocabulary item. I have no idea who comes up with this stuff. Bizarre as the target language was, the classes had a lot of fun activities in them, like licking oreos until they resembled the phases of the moon, and building a "lunar lander" out of scrap materials in a sort of egg drop competition. It seems like the kids had fun, at least I hope they did, but I don't want to focus on the booths today.
I wanted to focus on a few of the funnier anecdotes from camp, like when I met a student for the first time and he told me I looked like spider man. I misheard him and thought he said I looked like a spider, so I thought we were ripping on each other and told him if I looked like a spider he looked like a squid. Squid is a pretty common insult here, and it means that someone is super ugly. I assumed it was based on live squid, but I have since been informed that it's actually based on this kind of widely available dried squid snack:
It smells about as good as it looks, but it's actually pretty tasty. Either way, I told this kid he looked like that monstrosity, and it took an awkward conversation with my co-teacher to figure out that he was trying to give me a compliment. I just hope I didn't legitimately hurt his feelings, but I think he was okay since he was joking about it by the end of camp.
"Actually, I have a wife."
"WHAT. No! You're too young!"
Her friend heard her yelling and asked what was going on in Korean. When she explained, the friend yelled, "WIFE!?!?!" in Korean, which got the attention of my whole homeroom. They asked what was going on, it was explained, and the girls yelled in chorus, "NOOOOOOO, JAMIE, NOOOOOO!!!!" My coteacher told me, "You probably shouldn't have said that" and I'm still not quite sure how serious she was being.
Towards the end of camp my homeroom caught wind that one of the other foreign teachers was going to participate in his class's talent show. Despite their chances with me being permanently dashed a few nights earlier, they really wanted me to participate too, so the girls taught me this dance:
"Cheer Up" by Twice
As you might expect I performed spectacularly, and one of the other foreign teachers gave me this sketch to commemorate the moment:
I will treasure it forever.
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