Countdown

Well, folks, I've now been in Korea for 14 months, and I gotta tell ya, I'm just about out of posting ideas. I know you got used to me posting at least once a week, sometimes twice a week, for quite a while there, but that's just not going to be happening anymore, I don't think.

I have ten more weeks left here, and right now I'm concentrating on figuring out what I need to get done before I go, how I'm either going to get all my junk home or who I'm going to leave some of it with, and which agency I'm going to choose to get me my next job. I actually really like the agency I went through, but there's another agency called Footprints that sends you to Korea, Taiwan, China, or Thailand (working in Thailand is shit, I read) the first year, then you have options all over the world for places to teach after that. That sounds cool. I also saw this ad on daveseslcafe.com for jobs in Gangwon, the northeasternmost province, that pay well, give you settlement bonues, give you only 22 classes a week (I teach 34), AND give you 5-7 weeks of paid vacation, plus all the normal flight, rent, severance payment, and insurance benefits. What a dream. Those jobs were through an agency called JejuESL or something, so I'll have to check that out when it gets closer to me actually coming back here.

I'm also concentrating on saving money for my four months of unemployment and traveling coming up, so I won't have many more adventures to write about before I go. I will be going to Seoul and on a tour of the Demilitarized Zone in the north next weekend, though, as well as to Gyeongju to see the cherry blossoms the weekend after that, so look for pictures and words about those to come. Beyond that, I may just be posting info about the whole leaving process for those who are teaching in Korea, or thinking about it. There are a couple things to take care of that might be of interest to those people for the future.

Anyway, thanks for reading and keep checking in periodically. I may be losing steam, but I'm still chugging along as best I can.

Silly Engrish Notebooks

The kids buy special "English notebooks" for English class, and they're usually pretty ridiculous. They have silly characters or photographs and a lot of nonsensical motivational or cutesy bullshit in Engrish. There's one notebook that even talks about the wonders of English and has a picture of Paris on it.

Sometimes the notebooks have something particularly inadvertantly funny on them, like this one:

Danny's House

Last Sunday I went to the home of one of my students, as his parents gave me an open invitation a few weeks ago. Danny and his friend Michelle have been getting private lessons with me every Tuesday for a year, since the other three students in their class go to other hagwons on Tuesdays. Recently, Michelle stopped coming to the private lesson for some reason, and Danny's parents requested an extra private class on Thursdays, so now Danny and I have a lot of quality time together. I imagine he says good things to his parents, as they have been pretty nice to me in the past. They've only met me in passing at school or when we crossed paths near the movie theatre, but they're very generous. On several occasions, Danny's mother has sent him in with coffee, snacks, and once even a full supper for me, and his dad bought a birthday cake for our class when I had my birthday party at school. They also got me quite a nice gift for Teachers' Day last year.

Their place is like a palace. It's a huge apartment, and my impression when I walked in was that the whole place was made of marble. Everything is all smooth and shiny and clean and spacious. They have a living room with a couch and an entertainment center with a huge flat screen TV, and no other furniture. The apartment has a veranda alongside the whole outer wall, with a chair to match the couch (leather), as well as plants and Danny's toybox, table, game cupboard, etc. Danny has a bedroom with I think just a bed and dresser in it, and a small library of his own. It's crazy. The room is only 8 by 8 feet, but one whole wall is recessed shelving, filled with books--mostly textbooks and workbooks, I imagine. I didn't see the whole apartment, but it seems like there are two or three more rooms that could be bedrooms, in addition to the standard kitchen, dining room, laundry room, and at least two bathrooms.

I was surprised to find that Danny's parents speak English pretty well. Danny's dad has traveled all over the world, and I assume he has to speak a lot of English in foreign countries. He's not fluent, but he gets by well enough--he called it "survival English." I had assumed his mother spoke better English because Danny forced me onto the phone with her to plan, but once I got there, she seemed more reserved and didn't speak much. Michelle's parents also spoke pretty good English. The fathers want me to come back and have a drinking party with them sometime. Danny's dad asked if I wanted to drink today, but I said not on a school night. These Koreans can get pretty outrageous with the drinking, so I didn't want to have to keep up and regret it tomorrow.

Despite meeting me a couple times and inviting me over, Danny's parents followed the peculiar Korean habit of not telling me their names. They obviously know my name from Danny, but I don't know what to call them. Michelle and her parents came over for dinner, as well, and they did the same thing. I don't get it.

Beyond that, it was a pretty interesting time. Danny was very excited to have me, because he likes to play with me during our lessons, and I think he was really into just being able to play, without having to study. Before Michelle got there, Danny showed me all his photo albums. Then we all played badminton and street hockey with the racquets and a plastic bottle outside, I taught them how to throw cards into a hat (sort of), we played with an erector set, and started to play a war game. Danny and Michelle gathered bags full of weapons and Danny donned his bicycle helmet. When I went to get my camera to take pictures of them, the war game was abandoned in favor of making videos, of course.

We're reading a story called "Respectfully Yours, Eve Bunting," which is an interview with an Irish-American writer, and they wanted to act it out. Danny's dad is a producer at UBC, a major station in Korea, so Danny loves to play TV reporter. Danny mostly did his intros in Korean, so I don't know exactly what he's saying. The couple takes we did in English are boring, so I won't put them up.

After the first couple videos we did, the zoom got pushed in, and Danny was continuing regardless, which is pretty funny. Half the time he didn't even turn the viewscreen to see himself, so he leaves frame or does extreme closeups a lot:

Here he starts talking about Ulsan Grand Park, which you can see from his window. I don't know how that relates to what we were doing before, but he was still being a reporter. I got worried he would drop my camera 13 stories when he opened the screen on the balcony and jammed the camera between the security bars, but he held onto it.


After we made those videos, Danny and Michelle made a special video while I had a snack with the parents. They brought it back and told me to watch it at home, but the adults wanted to see, so we watched while the kids hid. This was their first take:

This was their second take. The zoom is still tight. I'm not sure if they left it recording on purpose, or forgot to stop while they prepared. I feel like it's the former, though, since they keep saying "wait a minute" and kind of talking to me even while they're not in the frame.

It makes me feel pretty bad leaving, especially now that work's gotten so bad that I'm probably not coming back to the same job. But I gotta look out for Number One.

Sexism and Homework

A few months ago I gave an assignment to some of my classes to write a paragraph about a boy and one about a girl. I think the purpose was to get them to use the pronouns "he" and "she." Koreans not getting the subtle distinction that "a" creates, almost all of them wrote about boys' and girls' stereotypes. Here is one example that is a fair representation of what the kids wrote. This is by Jack, who is a fifth-grader and a total dickhead, even beyond what he wrote here. You can read my snide comments in blue (which were not limited to his homework, btw. I'm an equal opportunity sarcastic remarker):



Here are closeups for those who can't read it that small:

This homework also shows something that a lot of the kids do that drives me insane, which is to use a dictionary while doing homework. I really stress to the kids to "use the words you know" and if you don't know the right word, describe it, but they're too lazy. Korean-English dictionaries seem wildly incorrect in terms of part of speech and citing common-use words instead of arcane or obsolete words, so I get kids using words both in writing and speech that even American kids their age don't know, often wrongly.

I used to have a student who is one of the many, many students at our hagwon who, because of her age, was put into a class at a much higher level than she was capable of. She had no idea how to put together an English sentence and her vocabulary was quite limited, so I think she used the dictionary for almost every word in every sentence she ever wrote. Consequently, everything she wrote was utter nonsense. It's sad. Then she got moved up. I want to shake Heather and slap her around, Airplane! style, for doing that so often to kids, simply because their parents want the kids to be "leveled up"--for status reasons only.

On another note, don't judge my teaching abilities on this one piece of homework! This kid was in a level C (2nd grade level) class at the time (he's since been moved with the whole class to level D--another example of the above), but was making the same mistakes as kids in much lower levels. You can see that beyond his ridiculous vocabulary, syntax, and grammar errors, he didn't capitalize sentences or write in paragraph form. Gr. I'm really good about grinding things like that into my students' brains, but some kids just don't learn or are too lazy or forgetful to actually practice it. Some of my kids' writing homework is really quite good. I've even had some cases where I didn't even have to make any corrections. I love it when that happens.

Change, Decisions

In my last post I mentioned a meeting of some of the teachers with Mingyu regarding our work schedules. This subject has been causing me and the other teachers a lot of mental anguish the last few weeks.

When I was looking into coming to Korea, I read about how teachers tend to only have to work about 30 hours a week. Koreans work about twice that amount, but presumably teachers don't have to, a) because schools just aren't open that long in a week, b) being away from one's home country causes stress, and having fewer hours helps alleviate this stress, and c) the idea of working less attracts more foreigners to Korea. My contract states that I am supposed to work seven contiguous hours a day, including one hour for preparation. This didn't exactly turn out to be the case.

As I may have mentioned over a year ago, my class schedule started out quite light. I had only 3-5 classes a day for the first six weeks of my contract. Then in March the schedule changed, and I had 6-7 classes a day, stretching from 1:30 to 9:00, with me arriving at about 12:30-12:45. I didn't complain about it or think much of it, because even though it was more than seven contiguous hours a day, I was still technically at work less than I would be in the States. I wasn't too keen on having to take homework home with me for the first couple months before I got more efficient, but it was all new and not too hard, so I didn't make a big deal. I was also getting overtime pay each month for a private class and for two classes that were 60 minutes instead of 50 (equal to an hour of extra work a week).

When the two branches of the school merged in October, because the original one became too small, my two longer classes got reduced to 50 minutes. I lost that hour a week of overtime, AND my classes were rearranged so I got out at 9:20, instead of 9:00. That was kind of shitty--working longer hours and getting paid less. But there was nothing I could do, since I was getting a longer "break" between my afternoon and night classes. Of course the breaks I get aren't really breaks, since I spend most of the time correcting, photocopying, or planning. Each day I really only take a 15 minute break to eat supper and a 10 minute break for a snack.

In January, another private lesson was added onto my schedule, and I now have to critique speaking responses online for students preparing for the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). I can only do this on the weekends, because I'm too busy at work and too tired after work to do it on weekdays. Leon has it worse. He teaches eight classes a day most days, and is at work from 1:00 to as late as 10:10, and when he leaves at 9:20, he only gets one short break a day, so he has trouble keeping up with correcting.

We recently learned that this is not normal; that in fact, most teachers DO only teach for 30 hours a week. Some of Leon's friends, as well as some people I've spoken to online recently, have all said they go to work, teach, correct, have a break, and leave, all within six hours. When they hear we're at work for 8 1/2 or 9 1/2 hours a day, their jaws drop. Finding this out has made every day more and more grueling.

I have been going back and forth on the decision to make my return to Korea easier and staying with the same company or trying out a new city near Seoul and being able to meet people more easily. I had been leaning towards returning to Kate LA, but when I heard about how screwed we're getting, I started leaning the other way. As great a boss as Heather is, she can't make up for me being exhausted all the time, and bitter that others have it easier.

However, things are starting to look up. We had the meeting with Mingyu, who understands our problem, but can't do anything about it right now. Both Leon and I emailed Heather about our situations. I had been hinting to Heather at the possibility of coming back next year, but I told her I wouldn't be able to stand another year of seven classes a day. They decided to hire another teacher to relieve us each of one class, and to give them an opportunity to create a few more classes. Leon suggested staggering shifts once the new teacher arrives, so we don't all have to be at work for so long. I came up with a template to show Mingyu (who rejected it) and Heather, when she's back from the US, that gives each teacher six classes and one 50-minute break. Shifts are completed in six hours, three teachers start their days during each of the first three periods, and there are more options for class times for students. It's a work of art. I'm hoping Heather will be more open to it than her brother was.

Neither of these things, the new teacher or the staggered shifts, of course will come to fruition until I'm probably on my way out, but I may get some relief before I go, and I'll at least be able to be more sure that I will have a reasonable schedule next year if I come back.

And now, just 13 weeks to go before leaving Korea...