The ESL student that I was assigned to for our Service Learning Project is Myungseon Lee. She is a woman in her 30s that is from South Korea. She is in the Level 4 ESL class (most advanced class available) so her English is exceptionally good. She is a social butterfly and loves talking to other students in her class and almost always introduces me to a new student every time we meet up after the class.
Over these last couple weeks that we have been meeting I have been trying to do different activities as a conversation started and to just open her up to more American culture and hopefully in turn gain more insight about the Korean culture. Last week I thought it would be a good idea for us to get together and make cookies to show her an American tradition so I went to the store the night before and picked up eggs and butter to be prepared (I was almost sure I had everything else I needed back in my room since I had make a batch just the week before). The next day we met at the Rec at 1pm like usual and went over to my dorm, Milton Daniel, since there is an oven in the basement there. We started mixing the appropriate ingredients when I realized I didn’t have any vanilla, enough oats, or any chocolate chips (so much for being prepared!). Myungseon was such a good sport about it though so we just tried making a small batch to see how they would turn out. We filled up a tray and started baking them.
While we were waiting for them to bake I started asking Myungseon more about her life in Korea. She told me that she had worked as a software engineer for an American company and had worked incredibly hard for ten years. She then married her husband who she had met from work and they had moved to America to live in Michigan near her husband’s family. His job had then transferred him to the DFW area. Since Myungseon had worked so hard while in Korea she decided to take a break from work while they were in America. After the urging of her husband to improve her English though she enrolled in the ESL classes here at TCU. I asked her if she planned on going to work again or what she wanted to do once she finished the class. She said that she did plan on working again but nothing as hard as her work before. She mostly plans on travelling though. That led into a discussion about all the places we wanted to go which is of course a practically unending discussion…
By this time I noticed that the timer hadn’t gone off yet so I went over to check the oven and realized that I hadn’t set it (seriously?!). The cookies were thin burned crackers. Myungseon insisted we tried again though so we started a new batch. She had told me before we had started that she had once tried making oatmeal raisin cookies for her husband (because those are her husband’s favorites) and she had just simply “failed”. Apparently I wasn’t that good at making cookies either! The second batch didn’t get burned but they were still pretty thin and not especially tasty. Myungseon ended up taking all the cookies home (including the burned ones) to give to her husband (since he is a “meat and potato” kind of guy – “he will eat anything and does not even taste it”). I saved the rest of the batter so that I could buy the rest of the ingredients and try and make them again so that we could have real cookies next time on our coffee outing.
More to come…
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