If expat teaching life were a fraternity, Children’s Day would be its hazing.
Children’s Day is exactly what it sounds like: a national holiday for celebrating children (like the counterpart of Mother’s/Father’s Day). However, at our school it was a two-day, highly-prepped, blowout of organized chaos. Since I arrived early and didn’t have classes of my own yet, the few days before the holiday I was like the intern helping out with everyone’s odds and ends, which mostly involved lots of lamination and cutting. Then for the actual days — Thursday and Friday — it was decided that I would help one of my coworkers with the dance room, one of the many stations the kids would visit for a set period of time once during their cycle. This was great news to me because I’m a fan of dancing and thought it would be relatively easy to get our kids to dance since they’re pretty young.
Let me set the scene. We moved all of the chairs and desks to the back of our auditorium room, so we had a huge open space. On a desk toward the front of the room was a half-sphere disco ball laser thing that flashed patterns of colored lights all over. Then at the front of the room we had a laptop hooked up to a projector so that we could DJ via Youtube videos. We also had a popcorn machine.
My prediction about being able to get kids to dance was both very wrong and very right.
The best case scenario looked something like this: this kids would file in, we would put on Crayon Pop, and we would all do the dance together. It was SUPER awesome and fun if the kids were into it. We even had a group of four girls in one of the classes that sang all the words and did all the dance moves to both this song and the next song we played. In many of the best groups we would also have a “Let It Go” singalong–with kids belting the words at the top of their little lungs. If you ever wondered whether kids in Korea are as into Frozen as kids in the US, the answer is a resounding yes. Then toward the end we would give all of the kids some popcorn and yogurt drinks, and if the kids had been good we would give a pen to the best dancer.
The worst-case scenario looked something like this: the kids would file in, we would put on something like this (usually the worst groups were the older ones). Sensing already that things would not go well, my coworker occasionally threw in a “Weeeeelcome to Club Purgatory!” The kids would stare at us, stone-faced and unamused, while we danced around in front of them trying to get them to join us. The kids would run away from my coworker shrieking if he got too close. We would ask them what music they liked, and they would tell us either “I don’t know” or “I don’t like music.” At our rope’s end (or maybe as some weird form of punishment) we would ask, “Do you want to listen to some Marcia Griffiths?” knowing that they would have no idea what we were talking about, pretend that their answer was yes, and put on some “Electric Boogie” in the name of our own amusement and their cultural education. Or MC Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This”. They were also thoroughly unamused by that. We’d give them popcorn and drinks, hoping that at least they’d enjoy that.
We did this for pretty much 6 or 7 hours a day for two days straight, with ~350 kids rotating through in groups, so there were also a lot of in-betweens. Some could get into “What Does the Fox Say?”; others were really amused by an old song “Tiger & Butterfly” for reasons we didn’t really understand. A lot were pretty into Crayon Pop, Exo, or some other K-pop.
Popular Korean hip hop/pop girl group 2ne1
I mentioned the presence of a popcorn machine fleetingly, but I should probably note something more about that. The moral of the story is that no matter how much I have matured and progressed in life, I still should never be entrusted to make large quantities of popcorn. We had one of those popcorn machines with a metal pot in a plastic box, which are poorly designed so that if you don’t unlatch the metal pot at the right time when the popcorn is just about done, the stuff that hasn’t gotten pushed out into the bottom of the machine will start to burn. I probably made 20 or 30 great batches of popcorn over the course of two days, but no one remembers all the batches you made well; they only remember the two that left us opening every single window we could find and scraping out clumps of black ash with paper towels thinner than the average toilet paper in the US. We recovered both times, and luckily we managed to not set off any smoke alarms (or there were not any smoke alarms to set off) so we didn’t have to evacuate. But the “auditorium” we were in was one of the only rooms with no window to the outside, so it was hard to air out the smell. We claimed that now we had that authentic “smokey club” feel.
By the end of the two days I had listened to hours of K-pop and shrieking kids, danced to Crayon Pop more times than I could remember, recovered from burning two batches of popcorn, and, in the end, felt pretty ready to take on whatever the job would bring next.
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