Barbie Teacher Is Schooled on the "Sea of Japan”

Every Monday and Wednesday I have the challenge of starting my day with screaming 6 year olds and ending it with a small group of men and women in their 30’s. I actually prefer the 6 year olds; they require significantly less work. The students look bored? Easy. Put on a stupid face or make them repeat some random English word three times fast. Laughter ensues. Problem solved. In my adult class, I actually have to put together handouts and what not so that we have extra material to fall back on if the Topic of the Day is a flop. In other words, I have to do work. Work! Totally not what I came here for! As a result, I like my younger classes best because they require the least work. That said, when I can overlook the fact that I’m a lazy twerp, I realize than I learn more about Korea during my discussions with the adult class. All that work creating vocabulary lists and discussion questions (*cough* ten minutes *cough*) is not for naught!

I arrive to each of my adult classes with a Topic of the Day prepared for discussion. The accompanying handout, which is hastily throw together between sessions of facebook and ass scratching during break, is comprised of an introduction to the Topic of the Day, relevant vocabulary, discussion questions, and related articles. When I first started leading these classes I didn’t actually bother to prepare anything whatsoever, because I had no bloody clue what the heck I was doing. Four months later and I’ve smartened up. Barbie Teacher learns quickly! Or possibly just overlooks the obvious for an inexcusably long time before finally acting like Normal People.

The Topic of the Day for the first Monday back from the Chinese New Year was “Natural Disasters”. The previous Monday I had been totally lacking in inspiration and actually selected “Weather” as the Topic of the Day. To me, discussing the weather for an hour is incredibly painful. Surprisingly, they were actually interested. On one hand, this was fantastic. On the other, it was Total Balls since it meant that I couldn’t just change the topic in the middle of class to something that sucked slightly less.

At some point during the “Natural Disaster” discussion, I was talking to my students about how being on the Sea of Japan rather than right on the ocean makes a difference in regards to some weather-hooey. Whatever the Hell point it was that I was trying to make totally died when I uttered: “the Sea of Japan”. One of the men turned his nose up, glanced my way with more than just a touch of disdain, and advised me that the correct name is “the Sea. Just ‘the Sea’” (I looked this up later and determined that South Korea has fought to have it internationally known as “The East Sea”, not “Just ‘the Sea’”… but whatever, we’ll give him a pass). It was at this point that I remembered reading something, months ago, about how Koreans absolutely abhor that anybody refers to this body of water as “the Sea of Japan”. I presume that the underlying issue here is that after hundreds of years of bloody, bloody battles and some outright ass kickings from their not-always-so-friendly neighbor, some Koreans are a little displeased that the body of water which the entire east side of their country borders bears the name of their former bully. Understandable.

I apologized profusely for my blunder, and then proceeded to blame the entire thing on the United States. They nodded and took this as an acceptable passing-of-the-buck. Thankfully, nobody sought further explanation as to why this was the fault of the United States, as I had none to offer.