[MORNING CALM TALES] Carving jack-o'-lanterns at an English academy and the 'Great Pumpkin Showdown' of 1991
It was October 1991, and I was teaching English at ELS, a private English language institute in Seoul, when a rather unusual confrontation took place just outside my classroom. One of the institute’s cleaning women stopped at the classroom door and stared into the trash can. For a moment, she didn’t say anything. Then she looked at my students, looked at me and began speaking rapidly in Korean. I…
![[MORNING CALM TALES] Carving jack-o'-lanterns at an English academy and the 'Great Pumpkin Showdown' of 1991](/img/17125694)
In October of 1991, a peculiar incident unfolded outside my English classroom at ELS, a private language institute located in Seoul. A cleaning woman, who stopped at my classroom door, stared into the trash bin before addressing my students and myself in rapid Korean. I recognized enough of her words to understand that the conversation had nothing to do with cleaning the trash.
Her tone alone sent an eerie chill down my spine. The root cause of her agitation centered around a pumpkin, or more accurately, the contents that had once resided within it. As I approached the final year of my tenure teaching English in Korea, Halloween began to gain some traction. While most of my students had never encountered the concept of trick-or-treating, carving a jack-o'-lantern, or dressing up as witches, ghosts, and monsters, I saw the holiday as a fantastic opportunity to expose them to a taste of Western culture.
During this period, English teachers could introduce some of these traditions into the classroom, offering a much-needed respite from the routine of grammar lessons and pronunciation exercises.
Written by urgent.news from The Korea Times's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
