Korean education does not appear to have much time for general knowledge or creativity. While the children leaving the system are certainly doing well in maths, science and often a dab hand on the piano, it is often a narrow range of topics that they seem to learn. There are stand out children who have a wide range of interests and understanding of the world, but they always seem to have learnt this at home due to travelled and well read parents.
I suppose the same could be said for kids back home, but everything seems magnified here.
Outside of hating Japan, viewing Africa as dirty and lauding Korea, many kids really have very little knowledge about the rest of the world. Which makes it very easy for me to appear far more well read and educated than I am.
I wowed a class of 12 year olds with my knowledge of capital cities. "Teacher what is the capital of Kenya?" why that would be "Nairobi". And gasps of amazement. Of course the best thing in such a quiz is that the people setting the questions do not know the answers. This means that even if I am stumped by an outlandishly obscure question such as "What is the capital of Wales?", I can say "Grimbinlop" and my audience are still stunned by my intellect and clap their hands with delight.
I was due to go to a pub quiz or "trivia night" as the American organisers called it and this quick fire question round in my class was honing my skills. I got home and decided I needed some more severe testing but then got a Skype call from Little Spoon who is of course back in LA. Well I figured it would be similar to the quiz in my class and even if it was not testing, I could once more pretend I was a genius.
But somehow I ended up asking her questions on capital cities and decided to throw her the curve ball classic of "What is the capital of Australia?".
Of course she fell for it and went with Sydney. The fool. I sniggered and offered her a second shot. At this point people either remember the answer (which is Canberra by the way you ignorant scum) or they say something like Melbourne....pfffttt...as if!
They don't however think outside the box like Little Spoon does and answer with "Madagascar".
So I went to quiz night a little unprepared. I was with my friend Tanya who recently told me that when she first met me with her fiance Steve she hated me so much that she told him if he wanted to spend time with me in the future he would have to do it alone. I was delighted to see that I have not lost the knack of providing people with an excellent first impression of myself.
Apparently she had thought I was sexist and ignorant! Bless her pretty little head, it had probably been that time of the month. But since then she had learnt how wide of the mark she had been and we were now a brilliant quiz duo.
We bumped into my friend Minix down there and with his degree in classics and ancient history we stormed through the history round. Tanya blitzed a music video round with two more team mates Ariella and Natalie and I was biding my time to unleash my plethora of wisdom.
Capital cities did not come up! Nor did my other areas of expertise which are hip-hop from 1993-1997 and the question "Who was the infamous son of Agripinna the Younger?".
What a stupid quiz. We came joint fifth.
There was a bonus round where one person answers a question for a big cash prize. It was something about Laotian mythology. I was in Laos not long ago, but only remember tubing, laughing at hippies and nearly being decapitated by a small masseuse. Why didn't I pay more attention to their mythology?
If only there had been a question like "What is the most surreal answer to the classic question, 'What is the capital of Australia'?" then perhaps I could have claimed the jackpot. More depressing was the fact that although I say capital cities did not come up, there was in fact one question on the subject. It asked what the capital city of Greenland was.
I didn't know. Apparently it is "Nuuk", which sounds suspiciously like the sort of answer I would give to my 12 year olds if I didn't know. I looked at the quiz master closely for signs of deceit, but he appeared to be playing straight.
So I will be back next week, this time with Dubs as another team mate. Until then I will make myself feel smarter by another question round with my kids later today. This particular class don't know shit! Ha ha. I'm the worlds most learned man in that classroom.
But although they don't know much about the world outside Korea and although they struggle to create stories in their projects or be imaginative, they do have a variety of pencil cases and t-shirts bearing almost poetic prose.
Because as anyone who has lived in Korea or many other parts of Asia will know, people have English words and phrases on all manner of clothing and more often than not it is a random stream of unconnected words that means nothing. For example "Flower, Happy The Sunshine Girls" I beg your pardon?
But I looked at one girl named "Hotdog" who always sits near the front and has so much energy that I feel like spiking her chocolate milk with Valium, and saw her pencil case was decorated with what appeared to be a poem.
It was written in fancy lettering within speech marks, so I picked it up to read, and it was not a random string of words.
It read well despite one grammatical error and it told a dark, haunting tale that gave me food thought.
You could say that this was a truly profound pencil case and this snippet of literature may well change your life. Enjoy...
"The rabbit trying to trick the cat into sitting on her broken chair, while the monkey is pedaling along on his squeaky bicycle."
A SQUEAKY Bicycle. The Bicycle was squeaky! Think about that for a moment.
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