There’s a considerable hoo hah surrounding my school’s annual festival at the moment, but I’ll be damned if I can understand most of it. The only solid fact I could gather so far is that it will be held in either October or November and will feature performances from staff and students. Everything else is a bloody mystery. Allow me to entertain you with tales of what has happened so far.

In about April I was told that during my summer camp I would be teaching (a heavily abridged version of) Macbeth to my first, second and third graders. The powers that be decided that they should perform it as a play (they presented this as if it were an original concept) and I was given the school text of it, which I quickly pointed out was actually in prose. Unfazed, my co-teacher suggested that I should “make it into a play”. I agreed to this without issue until the head of english chipped in, suggesting that I should instead make it into “a play that rhymes”. I gave my best half-hearted “OK, that shouldn’t be too difficult” and was completely ignored…needless to say, this was before I had realised that subtlety doesn’t work here.

It took me a while, but I did it. A rhyming version of the layliest of layman’s Shakespeare, all typed and lovely and printed ready for summer camp. I expressed concern to my co-teacher that I didn’t fancy my chances of getting the second or third graders involved without a co-teacher, them being of obnoxious teen age and layman’s Shakespeare being pretty lame in anyone’s eyes. She agreed, and I realised I had just talked myself into planning two extra summer camps-worth of work in a week. Way to go, Caroline.

On day one of my first grade camp it became abundantly clear that them being able to perform a play in English by the end of two weeks was beyond any rational hope. I soldiered on, handing out scripts and splitting the class into groups to perform a small segment at the end of the lesson. I showed videos, showed pictures of each character, explained at painstaking length how I wanted them to act and not just read out the words in a monotone…I even pretended to be a witch for a while, just to make it clearer. They all understood perfectly, could explain the instructions back to me, knew the task and set to it…and after 20 minutes I had 6 groups stood in single file, reading words in a monotone one after the other. It was painful.

Eventually, after a week, I convinced my co-teacher to attend one of the classes after explaining that I didn’t think they were entirely grasping the concept of acting. You can hardly blame them, I said, creative skills are hardly nurtured here. She agreed, came to my class and had decided within two minutes that the play wouldn’t work and that I should do something else. Farewell, now-useless rhyming version of Macbeth for Dummies. Greetings, another last minute camp-planning session. My co-teacher warned me that I was not off the hook completely as the head of english had decided that I would be in charge of a performance at the festival and she would not change her mind. I thought perhaps if I kept quiet and out of the way it would be forgotten.

Weeks passed and I dared to hope I had been correct. One evening last month however, I got a text message from my co-teacher explaining that the head has been asking questions about what I would be doing. She promised to help me with it as the level of english is generally so low in my school that I wouldn’t be able to arrange something alone. I thanked her and heard nothing more until last week, when the non english speaking art teacher burst into the office, gabbling at me in Korean and looking somewhere between non-plussed and angry when I couldn’t understand**. I was confused because the only two words I could understand seemed to have no place in any conversation I imagined having with her. Still she repeated them, and as she became more and more animated I became more and more suspicious. It became clear that I had not misunderstood her…she was saying ‘‘Gangnam Style”.

**Note: I have worked here for over six months and at no point have I been able to understand conversational Korean.

To cut a long story short, she was telling me that I would be dancing alongside some third grade students in a performance of said song during the festival. I have my suspicions that my co-teacher suggested this in order to get herself in the head of department’s good books. Once again I have been prostituted by my own colleagues to get them off the hook for something they don’t quite fancy doing. So far this year I have been forced to play football in front of the entire school and risk my own safety during an unexpected aerial adventure purely so that they don’t have to, so I’m hardly surprised this time…I suspect that my department has mistaken the phrase ‘taking one for the team’ to mean ‘use your westerner as a human shield whenever possible’. The irony of the whole thing is that I’m a fairly confident singer, and if they had just asked me to sing a song I would have agreed without too much of a problem…as it is, I have 900 students either shouting “Gangnam Style!” whenever I walk past or asking whether I’ve ever seen the video. Of course I’ve seen the video kids, I may be foreign but I don’t live in a bunker.

On the plus side…Gangnam Style is a pretty flippin’ brilliant dance, I (along with the rest of the human population and probably some household pets) already know it, and it’ll be one heck of a tale to tell. I hope to God that someone videos it.