Day Seven: The Five Stages of Grief & Lando Calrissian
I touched upon this in a forthcoming article, but it should be noted that being in Quarantine is a lot like going through the Five stages of Grief.
- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining
- Depression
- Acceptance
I think we’re all pretty much at the acceptance stage by now, though Denial was probably the most upbeat time in hindsight.
In other news, I received a nice email from the owner of my school who’s in a tough predicament. He has to deal with both sick teachers in quarantine and worried (perhaps hysterical) Korean moms who’re scared that we’ll give their children a new form of A/H1N1 along with an english education and valuable critical thinking skills. So he asked if I’d be willing to remove the photos of us with facemasks from the blog for the time being.
This was a hard decision to make.
On the one hand, I’m from San Francisco, and people from the Left Coast aren’t usually big on sanitizing or censoring information. Personally, I feel that photographs tell a huge chunk of the story, and seeing people with facemasks colored or outside tanning on the balcony in good spirits goes a long way in showing how happy or unhappy people are.
Some argue that it’s worrisome to parents to see their childrens teachers in quarantine, knowing how hysterical K-moms can get. Last year I had students ask me with disbelief how it was that I ate american beef for 28 years of my life without dying from Mad Cow. This was during the whole Mad Cow Korea scaremongering, mind you, so I explained that it’s because people were misinformed about Mad Cow and the media was, essentially, lying. American beef has been on the shelf here for almost a year and I’ve yet to hear of crazy cow claiming a Korean life yet.
Ultimately, it comes down to education and being an educator, and promoting truth and understanding (be it medical, in the case of the quarantine, or political, in the case of the mad cow scare) and most of all, critical thinking.
On the other hand, as someone who is saving money to eventually open his own school, I understand our schools predicament. Here he’s flown us out, housed us in hotels, sent us through training and all of a sudden if things go wrong media wise we’re persona-non-grata to the public. He’s in a tough situation, none of it his fault (I blame a mexican pig, personally).
Plus, he asked nicely and said it was optional, and if I chose not to remove them it was perfectly fine as well, and that’s the sign of a cool boss if you ask me.
So, I’ve replaced the photos of myself with photos of Lando Calrissian from Star Wars for a little while until I’m not able to be picked out of an infectious police line up.
“I thought I told you to fix the Hyperdrive!!!”
