First Day of My Life

February 16, 2012 1 Comment

January is, by definition, a month of firsts, but for me, February has been much the same.  Here are some firsts that I’ve experienced in the past six weeks.

My First Sick Day  I’ve avoided taking sick days for three reasons.  First, my Korean co-workers never take them.  My supervisor had a car accident, while pregnant and she didn’t take a full sick day.  She came in and worked a half day.  Granted, it was a fender bender, but still.  In North America you’d go home just to mellow out after that.  Not ’round these parts.

Secondly, it’s a pain in the ass for my co-workers.  There are no extra bodies to cover the work load when someone is off sick or on vacation.  We all just have more work to do.  This means either teaching more classes, having groups of kids combined into totally unmanageable super-size classes, or both.  Usually both.  I’ve hated doing it so I avoid putting my colleagues through it if I can help it.

Lastly, we’re supposed to bring a doctor’s note.  Besides the fact that when you’re feeling sick enough to stay home, the last thing you want to do is haul your ass out of bed to go to a doctor, the language barrier is also a potential issue.  Fortunately, for the most part, doctors here speak some English because many medical text books use English terminology.  Also it’s very competitive in med school so most of them try to stand out in other ways, like being impeccable English speakers.  However, before you get to a doctor you have to run the gauntlet that is dealing with the nursing and admin staff.

Till now all my doctor’s appointments here have been in Seoul at the International Clinic where everyone (admin staff included) speaks English. But that’s a 4-hour round trip trek (by transit) and not feasible on a sick day.  So last week I took myself to the doctor’s office on the fourth floor of the building where I work and made enough hand signals and grunts at the receptionist that she was able to figure out that I had a cold and I wanted to see a doctor.  Once that was figured out, she got me to the blood pressure machine and then was horrified when I almost took off my jacket in the waiting room to reveal…a tank top.

It’s a funny thing, Korean women will wear booty shorts and skirts that are scandalously short, but they will never show off their chests.  I don’t think of a tank top as showy, but I have a much bigger rack than the average Korean woman so it sort of immediately looks scandalous if I’m not dressed pretty conservatively.  In any case, it was amusing how many times the nurses sought to cover me up during my visit.  Eventually I managed to leave with my doctor’s note in hand.  Surprisingly, it was not as stressful as I had imagined it would be.

Club Hopping  I have never been one for clubbing.  I have long refused to contend with coat checks in the winter so that nixed clubbing from about October to May in Toronto.  And in the summer months I just sort of found other reasons not to go.  Not wanting to feel like a slab of meat on sale, being the main one.  But something about being in Korea has changed all that.  Maybe it’s that all my friends here are younger than I am, but I doubt it.  Some of them have told me that they refused to club at home too.  I think it’s just this thing all we expats get caught up in where we feel free and so we do stuff we just didn’t do at home.  Like taking up a martial art, visiting art galleries, cutting our hair in weird styles, wearing things we’d never wear at home, and, apparently, clubbing.

Not only have I been willing to club in the dead of winter (though admittedly the dead of winter hasn’t been that cold here), I have worn scandalously short skirts and dresses while doing so and I have let a strange man grind up against me and just kind of laughed it off rather than being mortified. In a total change of form I decided that for my 29th birthday (version 7.0) I wanted to go dancing.

Let me back up here.  I need to tell the next story, in part, because it will explain how I met my new friend Kim, but mostly because I think it’s an awesome story.  There are few places to get plus size clothing in Seoul and one of the most popular ones is called OK BT.  OK BT has a communal dressing room.  Actually, to call it a dressing room is to overstate matters tremendously.  It’s a stock room that doubles as a communal dressing room.  Necessarily, you bond pretty quickly with the other women in the dressing room if you speak the same language.  I’ve met a lot of really lovely women in that dressing room but often they live nowhere nearby.  Foreign women come from far and wide to shop there.  A couple weeks ago, however, I hit the jackpot in that I met a really cool girl and she lives in Seoul, which, while not super close, is close enough.  And we hit it off.  She said to me:  “Can we keep in touch, because you’re the first woman I’ve met in a long time who isn’t bitchy.  That’s rare here.” I love her to death.

Kim is a fellow Canadian who has taught in Korea for years.  She is older than me but is wonderfully young at heart.  And she’s really social which is great.  She turned out to be game to go dancing with me for my birthday, so she and I and another friend, Tracy, headed to Hongdae (the club district) this past weekend, in search of some places Kim had been to before.  As it turned out, it’s been a while since she went dancing in Hongdae so most of the places she’d been to were gone.  We ended up trying out a few places to find one that wasn’t a complete let down.  Hence, my first time club hopping.

One of our stops was a place called Ska 2 which featured stripper poles that you could dance on if you felt led.

The actual picture of desperation?

Tracy and I commented that we found it odd/horrifying.  Kim said “Am I weird, I don’t find it odd at all.”  She’s been in Korea for nine years.  Enough said.

At the beginning of the night we asked a couple foreign guys for directions to a club called Hodge Podge (which turned out to now be a bar rather than a club) and they told us they were heading to another club if we wanted to join them. The fella who told us this had an accent so we all thought he’d said a few different things:  fiat, Kia, fear, among others.  We opted to keep searching for Hodge Podge though.  Later that night we strolled past a place called Via and finally cottoned on that it was the same joint.  We checked it out and I liked it.   I only regret that we didn’t join them in the first place.  They were cute.

Sexual Misadventure  No I’m not pretending that I was a virgin before I got here, but when I arrived, sex just wasn’t initially a priority.  Also I have turned avoiding eye contact with strange men into an Olympic event, so it’s really hard for me to get picked up.  Not that men in Incheon are trying to pick me up anyway.  I have to go to Seoul for that.

Eventually, however, I decided a little sexual healing might be nice.  I will not get into the gory details, but I will tell you about the most hilarious road block to having sex here:  condoms, or rather the lack thereof.

While men who want to get down have been plentiful once I started looking, men who come equipped with their own birth control/sexual safety devices are strangely hard to find.  I have yet to see a penis that belongs to a Korean man, but rumor has it that foreign men here have a hard time fitting into Korean-made condoms.  In my attempts to break my celibacy streak, I have met two men with this very issue.  Unfortunately one of them did not bother to procure American-made condoms from the air force base where he works.  Epic stupidity.  The second managed to scrounge up some Japanese-made condoms at the convenience store, but let’s just say it was a tight fit.

Apparently, American-made condoms can be had at sex shops in the foreign district (Itaewon) and at some locations of major supermarkets like Home Plus and EMart, but no one I’ve met has bothered to make sure they had them on hand.  What I’ve found amusing and horrifying is that in both cases the dudes asked me if I had any better condoms on hand.  As if I’m the one with the penis in the room.

Joining Everything  After months of fighting the flow, I finally conceded that a reasonable social life is only to be had by being prepared to go to Seoul regularly.  And that’s not necessarily easy.  Even when I’m willing to do the 4-hour round trip commute, the subway system stops running around midnight and it’s about a $35-45 cab ride to get home from Seoul.  But it dawned on me that being in Seoul makes me happy in a way that hanging out in Incheon just never does.  In Incheon you can eat, get shitfaced and go to norebang.  That’s about it.  In Seoul you can do everything else.  So I started joining things.

I’ve been to a book club meeting and really enjoyed the group, even if I hated our first read (1Q84 by Haruki Murakami).  I bumped into one of the girls from the club when I was out for my birthday and we hugged like we’d been friends for years.  It was so neat.  It was incredibly refreshing to have an intellectually stimulating and challenging conversation with a table of people.  And the club is called Books and Booze–you can’t really go wrong there.

I also joined a writing collective but so far it seems like it’s defunct as the organizer is no longer able to organize.  I contacted him a couple times about taking over duties for the next six months but haven’t heard from him.  In the meantime some of us in the group are trying to connect and form smaller location-based groups so we’ll see if anything comes of that.  However, one great thing that has come of joining this group is that I also joined their facebook page where I saw an announcement for a regular open mic night in Seoul.  I went to it a couple weeks ago, read a short fiction piece and got a good reception.  I’ll be going again this Sunday.  While there, I also met a guy who might be able to network me into a good job for next year.  So, win.

As I’ve thrown down about a zillion dollars on cameras since I got here, I’ve also been looking to find a photography club where I could improve my skills.  So far, no luck, but there’s a dude who lives in my neighbourhood who’s agreed to go on some photography walks with me and teach me a thing or two.  Also a win.

Lastly I’ve joined a music appreciation group that just goes and sees live music together.  I’m going to a traditional Korean music concert on the 25th of this month that I think will be really cool.  I’m looking forward to meeting people in that group as well.

As if to repay me for taking this leap of faith, the universe has provided me with two people (Kim being one of them) who are cool with me crashing at their places here and there if I stay in Seoul.  So even more winning.

It’s taken longer than I would have liked but I feel like I’m finally starting to find “my people.”  And frankly, maybe I would have been less grateful for them if I’d found them any earlier.  Should I stay another year here, I feel like I’ll have a good network in Seoul already in place, which is fantastic.

This is not to say that everything is perfect right now.

Cutting My Losses  One thing that’s been a real first for me is to make a decision about cutting my losses a lot more quickly.  The last couple months have seen my job satisfaction take a serious dip.  This was never a dream job, but the shenanigans of management have really gone into overdrive since the beginning of December.

What makes the situation harder is that this is not isolated.  It’s not just one bad hagwon–it’s the hagwon system.  It’s a set-up that is systemically flawed by making parents customers with almost unlimited bargaining power.  Parents get mad if their kids don’t advance to the next level at the appropriate speed, even if advancing is the worst thing possible for their kid.  If they feel like you’re the reason their child is not advancing they just move their kid to another hagwon.  So the management is always at least as concerned with retaining the customer as they are with teaching the child–if not more so.

All that aside, it is simply not a given that your contract will be respected.  In addition, all kinds of shit gets thrown at you last minute with no regard for how it affects the teacher, and thus the students.

I have vacillated between trying even harder to make this work and just phoning it in.  It’s difficult though, in that, if I half-ass this, it’s not my inane managers who suffer, it’s the innocent kid in the middle who does.  I’ve felt enough discouragement about the issue to prompt me to enter a short  non-fiction piece in a contest about feeling like I can’t call myself a teacher at all.  And then today, after having a discussion with a friend about just not giving a shit, I had some of the most engaged and successful classes I’ve had in weeks.  Maybe because I didn’t give a shit?  It’s hard to say.  At this point I just try to take it one day at a time.

One thing I am clear on, however, is that I do not want to live in Incheon for another year and I do not want to work for a typical hagwon.  I’m now starting to pound the pavement in search of a hagwon with 1) low turnover (indicating happy foreigners) that is 2) in Seoul.  If I can’t find a hagwon that meets those two requirements, I won’t stay here another year. That may sound simple and reasonable to you.  That’s a huge change of head space for me.

The version of me from 2010 would have given this three more years of discomfort to play out.  Maybe more.  Until finally conceding that continued stability wasn’t worth being miserable.  The new me says “fuck that noise” and realizes that if it’s not making me happy it’s not really worth continuing to do long term.  I’m not saying there isn’t a time and a place for sticking it out.  This just isn’t that time or that place.

As I said, I feel like I’ve finally started to find my people and the things I enjoy about Korea, so I would like to be able to stay.  I’d like to pay down more debt and have more of a chance to travel.  But whether I leave here after a year or I stay for five, I will do it with no regrets.  To be thinking that way is an enormous first for me.

As I said, things are not perfect, but for now, it’s really cool to be having so many firsts.

 

Filed under The ESL Adventure Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Need to Know – #4 This Contract is Not Binding

January 4, 2012 4 Comments

I was told by a fellow who had taught in Korea for about 10 years, that Koreans consider the employment contract the “beginning of negotiations, not the end.”  I didn’t believe him.  I was an idiot.

I’ve heard horror stories of people not being paid on time or at all, unlivable accommodations or a work load that bore only a vague resemblance to their contracted workload.  I know two teachers who are treated shamefully by the Korean staff at their school because they agitated about getting *half* of their contracted lunch break.  I have suffered nothing like that.  The company I work for has a chain of schools and is a multimillion dollar enterprise, so getting paid has never been a problem.  My initial accommodations were fine but then I was moved a few weeks ago (albeit incredibly inconveniently–I was told Thursday at 9:45pm to be ready to move by Friday at 1:00pm) to a much better, newer, cleaner apartment with an eat-in kitchen and heat that works properly.  Definitely a win.  My workload hasn’t ever been out of control (though I can’t say the same for all the teachers here–there’s one middle school teacher, Mike, who teaches a third more classes than almost anyone on staff).  Mostly I don’t have any contract issues but a couple things have come up:  working hours and vacation time.

According to my contract I work Monday to Friday 2:30-10:30.  In real life I now work some Saturdays as well.  The middle school department doesn’t have enough foreign teachers (or teachers period, it seems) and so instead of being allowed to hire another teacher, the director is trying to cut costs by using the manpower he has on the ground.  At first they (I say “they” because our director doesn’t speak any English so it’s never clear who’s making decisions) tried to wrangle one of us foreign teachers into working every Saturday for three months and we all balked at that.  We don’t have much of a social life apart from the weekends and working every Saturday would effectively cut all of us off from most of the other people we’ve met in Korea.  So we managed to push back a bit and say we would rotate the schedule so each of us worked one or two Saturdays a month.  The $15 an hour (or something like that) we’ll be paid really doesn’t compensate for the hole that’s blown into prime weekend time though.

Vacation time is another weird issue.  Contractually we all get 10 vacation days with 3 of those being during the time when the school is closed for summer break.  So essentially you’re left with 7.  But you can’t take any more than 3 days at a time.  So unless you can combine them with a holiday it really doesn’t give you a lot of time to go anywhere far.  One of my colleagues asked to take off her 3 days in conjunction with the Lunar New Year only to have the director say no, based on the fact that the kids would be doing term testing.  I don’t know if he’s been paying attention but that’s actually the easiest time to have a teacher away because we don’t need all of the staff on duty to do the testing.  We actually all got a free day off during the last testing period.  Eventually he reversed his decision and said yes but that took three weeks while the cost of her plane ticket increased steadily.  Watching that craziness unfold I’m not sure if I should bother trying to book vacation time or just avoid the debacle and make sure that I get paid out for it at the end of my contract.

These aren’t massive encroachments but I do fear that the fact that we’ve kind of “taken it” on these issues means it’s going to get worse in the next seven months.  At just under five months in we’ve already been pushed on this stuff and I wonder how much more we’ll let them push on.  It doesn’t feel like we have much leverage though.  If we want to work elsewhere and we break our contracts we do need the school to sign a release to move our visa to another employer.  It doesn’t seem like breaking one’s contract is a great idea unless you plan to leave the country.  At the end of the day threatening to quit does seem to be one’s only recourse and that would be pretty financially risky for me (read: disastrous) so there’s not much point in my making a threat on which I can’t or won’t follow through.

I’m not up nights worrying about how things will go for the next seven months.  But maybe some nights I fall asleep more slowly wondering what things will be like by the time I leave this place…

That last sentence was actually written about a week ago.  I started drafting this post around December 15th and I still felt the same way on December 27th, even after the text-book writing insanity (producing multiple 25-page texts in a week during Christmas).  But I’m adding to this post because today they managed to finally push enough to piss me off.  Not just annoy me or irritate me, but royally piss me off.

As of this week we start a month of classes during which the kids are on vacation from school.  We start earlier in the day and offer extra classes (the ones we had to write the texts for–oh and the Korean staff just photocopied their pages out of existing books–nice job).  Our schedule for this month is 1:00-9:00pm which I actually prefer.  I find it easier to get to bed at a reasonable hour even if I have less time in the morning to get things done.  I was here for this type of work load and schedule in the summer so I know what’s coming and I’m ready for it.

When I came in today I saw the lead (Korean) middle school teacher, James, talking extensively to the lead (Korean) elementary teacher, Cathy (to whom I generally report).  As soon as I saw that I thought “that’s not a good thing.”  And I say that because James is a manager of the worst type.  He teaches fewer classes than any of his staff but doesn’t seem to make up the extra time doing anything to support his staff.  The one foreign teacher who works full time in middle school, Mike, teaches about 28 classes a week compared to about 20 for all the other–read Korean–middle school staff.  Two of us elementary foreign teachers have had to cover some middle school classes during the week and all of us are pitching in on Saturdays and still, James sees no reason to increase his own workload.  He’s the guy who yells at teachers for letting out students five minutes early when he’s the one who gave you a schedule with incorrect times.  He’s the guy who seems to genuinely enjoy meting out corporal punishment with the kids.  While most Koreans avoid conflict like the plague as a cultural thing, this guy is just kind of a two-faced asshole.  He’s worked for years outside of Korea so he gets foreigners better than most, but he certainly doesn’t act like it.

Anyway, I saw them conversing at 1:00pm and heard nothing so I forgot about it.  At 9:00pm, as we’re all getting on the elevator to leave, Mike tells the rest of us foreign staff that we’re now expected to come in from 12:30-9:00 for the month, as of tomorrow.  This is what that conversation between Cathy and James was about.  Already seething, I asked why.  The reasoning:  we need more prep time.

Really?  See that’s funny because no one asked me about my prep time needs.  I came in early on Monday, of my own volition, to prep because we weren’t given our new class schedule until 9:30 Thursday night last week (we weren’t in on Friday) so there was no time to plan for Monday’s classes.  But I haven’t come in early for the past two days because I haven’t needed to.  For James to suddenly start deciding my prep time needs when it means I have to now work more hours, makes no bloody sense to me.  And the fact that Cathy knew all this at 1:00pm this afternoon but avoided the conflict all day, telling Mike to tell us as we’re walking out the door, utterly chaps my ass.

I think when I wrote the first part of this post, part of my fear was that that I’d never push back on anything; that I’d walk away from this experience feeling as pushed around as I have felt my entire life.  I think I feared that I’d end this year feeling as powerless as I’ve always felt in every conflict situation.  And the first couple times that they pushed on the contract and I didn’t come out swinging, made me feel a little freaked out inside.  I wondered if I wasn’t so much “picking my battles” as much as just avoiding a scary conflict.  But what I’d forgotten was that I have a deep, deep well of rage that tells me when I need to push back.  A rage that sometimes comes in very, very handy.  And one of those times is now.

So my plan is to talk to James and Cathy tomorrow and sort this shit out.  Because that half hour is worth more than $7.50 to me.  One of my foreign colleagues has kind of backed away from the whole thing–ironic, since she’s the one staff member who has commitments every day before work and if the schedule starts any earlier she’s screwed.  But I’ve started to get the impression she likes conflict even less than Koreans do.  The other foreign elementary teacher was screaming bloody murder with me all the way home tonight about this issue and then texted me later to say he didn’t think this was a battle we should pick.  I think his sudden fear comes from the fact that, even though he thinks he led the charge to make sure we didn’t have to work every Saturday, he didn’t, and this would really be the first battle that we’ve picked (though amusingly, he was gung ho about my talking to the Korean lead teachers solo).  I texted back that I’d be certain to mention that I was only speaking for myself.

I’m not sure what I’ll do tomorrow.  Maybe I’ll wimp out or maybe I’ll go in guns blazing.  Ideally I’ll calmly draw a line in the sand and they’ll respect it even if they don’t respect me.  One thing I think I can say with sad certainty, I’m sure this won’t be the last attempt at a breach of contract.

Filed under The ESL Adventure Tagged with , , , ,

Do The Right Thing

September 29, 2011 10 Comments

This blog post has been on my brain, waiting to be written for a while now.  Today has been a bit bleak, so it seemed the time to write it.

You may remember a teacher I mentioned a few posts back–the one who is seemingly ill-equipped to be living alone in a foreign country.  Well the plot surrounding her has thickened.  In addition to not being very independent, Mona–her name for the purposes of this blog–is also a pretty piss poor English teacher.  Apparently she has a masters in electrical engineering and was a TA in some prestigious schools (I’ve heard Oxford mentioned in the rumor mill), but this has not translated into teaching English or children well.

To begin with, Mona’s first language is not English.  She speaks English relatively fluently but I believe, from the blank stare she sometimes gives me after I’ve explained something, that her English comprehension could use some work.  She also has a pretty strong accent from her native language, so it is not in any way, possible for her to teach someone how to speak English like a native English speaker.   There are plenty of people who come to Korea to teach English who don’t have any great love for kids and who will never teach children again.  But for a year or two they fake it.  They’ve got the native English speaker thing nailed down already.  For Mona she’s got a two fold issue in that the kids find her hard to understand and her classes are apparently mind numbingly boring.  The material we teach can be pretty soul destroying without massaging, so it is up to the teacher to make it halfway interesting for the kids.  Mona doesn’t seem to be able to pull this off.

Here’s the kicker–Mona was never interviewed for this job.  I had a phone interview like every other foreign teacher at my work place.  But Mona’s recruiter got her a contract on his word that she was suitable.  Because she was already in the country and the school had several positions they needed to fill in a hurry, they let it slide.  To be fair, this isn’t entirely uncommon.  I had to insist upon an interview.  My recruiter was going to get me in on his word as well.  The former director of the school–who quit at the end of August–seemed to play things a little fast and loose.  She also only showed up at the office about twice a week.  The new guy is much more hands on and he wants Mona out. The problem is that Mona’s got a one year contract with the school.  So I think his plan is to drive her out.

At the moment, Mona’s just getting hammered with criticisms of her classes and admonishments to make them better.  Her classes being boring is a valid criticism and something she can work on.  The other major criticism though–her pronunciation–is asinine.  That’s like asking one of our students to attain the pronunciation of a native English speaker within a week.  There’s a reason I give my kids consistent feedback on pronunciation–because it has to be learned and it’s not learned all at once.  Mona can no more improve her pronunciation in any meaningful way with any speed than any of our students can.

You might wonder how I know all this.  Well that’s another part of this shit sandwich–everyone on staff knows that Mona’s under scrutiny–except Mona.  Meetings of all the foreign teachers are held without her and information about her situation is divulged.  Then we all get caught in the crossfire of trying to cover when she asks if there was a meeting held without her.  When the school was involved in a fair to promote English academies, all of us foreign teachers attended except her.  She’s required to perform a mock class in a meeting that the director will attend.  So far no one else has had to do that.  Oddly, Mona has more classes than any of the other foreign teachers.  My impression is that the director is trying to set up a situation in which she is bound to fail so he can fire her without too much hooplah.  But I also think he wants to cover his ass because they tried really hard once she arrived (and they figured out what they had on their hands) not to give her a copy of her contract and she would not let it lie.  And frankly who would?

I don’t actually disagree that Mona needs to go.  But the way the school is going about it is awful.  The fair way to deal with this would be to sit her down, tell her that her English isn’t good enough to be teaching here and that they made an error in not interviewing her, pay her for the month and give her airfare home.  The situation would be done and she probably wouldn’t try to sue (not common but it happens).  Instead, because they want to save face and hold on to the mere $3000 it would take to get rid of this problem (I guess the $2200/month they’re paying her doesn’t matter), they’ve created this situation where she’s becoming more and more settled in Korea and the kids who are stuck with her as a teacher are not getting anything out of it.

So this is bad right?  But it’s not all of it.

I can’t stand Mona and no one else likes her much either.  I’ll cop to it, she’s one of those people I didn’t feel great about from the moment I first met her (five-hour shopping experience notwithstanding).  When she first arrived, the guys in the office looked at her face first and surmised she was older (she is a year older than I am).  When we girls first took a gander, we looked at her clothes and decided she must be in her early twenties.  She enjoys sporting what I like to think of as stripper heels, lace-bottomed, way too sheer leggings with wee skirts that barely cover her ass, and bodice hugging shirts.  One day she came to school in a get-up so work-unfriendly that even the guys commented–and that’s saying a lot because our Korean co-teachers can really bat it out of the park for inappropriate work wear (clear heels anyone).

I think Mona’s wardrobe alone, seemed to indicate such bad judgment that I was already put off.  Then she started with the questions.  I didn’t get hit with it right away.  At first she directed all her questions at Mike and Sam but then Sam quit and Mike moved to a different department.  He also gave her a bit of a talking to one day when he got frustrated with her.  Now I’m her target.  One day I actually realized that between her questions and those of other teachers, I’d been at work for 90 minutes and hadn’t touched any of my own work yet.  I managed to get the other teachers to back off, but she doesn’t take the hint despite my telling her that she needs to figure things out on her own in case I get hit by a truck.  For most people, that would sink in.  Not Mona.

And it’s not just work related questions.  It’s questions about every possible thing that she needs to know about living in Korea.  From what she can do without her alien registration number (nothing) to if she can use her iPhone from Canada here (not without great difficulty and expense–as she realized when she left her phone with some shady dude in Seoul, was frightened that he was going to hawk it, and he still didn’t crack it for her).  She almost never asks a question just once, but asks it over and over again.  I assume she’s looking for a specific answer and she figures if she just keeps asking, she’ll get that answer.  By the time we’ve arrived at the third or fourth permutation of the same question, I’m usually well into rude asshole mode and then I put in my earbuds and don’t talk to anyone until I have classes to teach.  It’s like this almost every day.  She’s actually tried to stop me within the 5-minute window that I have between classes when I literally have time to drop off one stack of books, pee and pick up another, to try to ask some involved totally not urgent thing.  It’s just relentless.

In general she’s annoying enough to everyone that she’s been frozen out socially by all of us.  I’m so done with her by the end of a work day that I have zero desire to be around her after work.  It’s gotten so bad that, since we all leave work at the same time, we’ve devised these elaborate ways to ditch her in order to not have to include her in after work plans.  There’s actually a rule about this sort of behaviour among kids at school because there’s an expression in Korean for completely ostracizing someone:  wahng ddah.  We got a major case of wahng ddah on our hands.

I know how awful this sounds and I’m not proud of it.  Two of the other teachers (the ones who tend to make me do the dirty work of the ditching her frankly) have started saying they feel bad now.  And we all should.  Because Mona’s not a bad person–that would make this easy.  She’s just unbelievably annoying.  But I still have to admit, none of us would want to be in this position–maybe about to get fired from a job to which your visa is attached, in a foreign country, with no friends and family and no one at work willing to be honest with you or even friendly towards you.  It’s an awful position.  Having said that, those same compassionate souls made sure to leave me with her tonight on the walk home–because I guess a five minute walk is too much for them after answering exactly none of her questions all day.  Admittedly I’m feeling like a bit of a martyr right now.

It’s an awful situation and there’s a part of me that feels like someone, if not me, needs to do the right thing:  tell her frankly that her job is on the line and there’s even a chance there’s nothing she can do to save that job and let her know if she doesn’t tone down the questions at work she will have a very hard time making any friends.  And then there’s part of me that kinda feels like her job situation is something no one should touch with a ten-foot pole despite the fact that we all know about it and that maybe this is one of those hard lessons she’s going to learn about being a workplace pariah.

What I do know is that I don’t like the person I am when it comes to her and I feel like I need to figure out how to change that for my own good.  But as to her situation overall, I’m at a loss.  What do you think?  Watch this while you think about the answer to that question.

Filed under The ESL Adventure Tagged with , , , , ,

High School Confidential

August 11, 2011 7 Comments

For the past week the administrative staff at my school have been slowly and methodically bringing a new trainee up to speed.  I’ve seen her sitting next to various staff members being shown the computer system and the minutia of what they do everyday.  This is abundantly more training than any of the foreign teachers at the school will ever get.

My training consisted of watching two teachers run three classes while I was insanely jet lagged.  One of the three classes I viewed consisted almost entirely of the students playing Simon Says and Hangman because it was the teacher’s last day and he didn’t give a shit.  It’s my understanding that most foreign teachers in most schools here in Korea don’t get any more training than I did, but I find it kind of laughable that admin staff get more training than we do.

Before I get any deeper into this, I should explain the structure of the school a little bit.  There are three of us foreign teachers at the moment (more coming I’ve heard) and eleven Korean teachers, including two department heads.  While we foreign teachers do our classes entirely in English, the Korean staff teach English, but almost entirely in Korean.  Also, the Korean teachers really only have passable English.   And the divide between the Korean and foreign teachers in the office is so great that they don’t get any better from practicing with us.  They barely speak to me and tend to only speak to my colleagues in Korean.  At some point I may try to bridge the gap, but for now, I’m just getting through the day.

I have to start giving people pseudonyms now, for the sake of keeping the stories easy.  So the cast of characters in this vignette:  Mike, the lead foreign teacher, who is also one of my kindly neighbours; Sam, Mike’s roommate and the other foreign teacher at school; and Debbie, my department head.

As of yesterday I finished teaching a full week of my schedule. In about 85% of my classes, I’ve prepared for what the curriculum says I should be doing, only to walk in and have the kids tell me they’re on a completely different unit. I’m taking over for Mike who is moving to the other department.  In some cases he’s let me know what the kids are doing, but in other cases he hasn’t.  I’m loathe to bug him because I know he’s been recently “blessed” with a lot more responsibility sans the commensurate bump in pay.  I’ve just sort of considered this week the time I need to figure out what in hell I’m doing, and I sort of assumed everyone else would treat it as such.  It’s not like they didn’t know this was my first time teaching when they hired me.

Yesterday afternoon, Debbie, my department head, came and told me that the parents like how I’m teaching the kids (unclear how they’ve determined this) but some of the kids in the two lower proficiency levels of the three I teach, are finding me hard to understand and feel that I speak too quickly.  The feedback seemed reasonable to me and I pledged to slow it down.  Then an hour later, Mike caught up with me between classes needing to speak with me.  He hemmed and hawed a bit before saying, “So this happens with all the the new teachers, but the kids are complaining that you’re going too fast and they aren’t understanding the material.  So I have to sit in on some of your classes and critique.”  Besides the fact that this news was a bit of a surprise, given the way my conversation with Debbie had ended, it was also a bit ouchy for the ego.  But I sucked it up and told him that he should probably plan to sit in on a class in one of my two lower proficiency levels, since that’s likely where the problem lay.

I figured the issue was done with for the moment and kind of started to think that having someone sit in on a class and give me some pointers wouldn’t be all bad.  There are definitely classes where I feel like I’m having a very hard time assimilating the material into a coherent lesson.  I had managed to kind of stop worrying about it when, an hour later,  I sat down at my desk and Sam, who has no say in any of this, turned to me and said “Hey did the Mike talk to you?”  I almost lost it and snarked at him “Wow, so it takes three people to tell me one piece of information?!”

At that point, I headed to the bathroom to have a wee cry only to find the bathroom door completely stuck in some bizarre half closed position, making it impossible for me to get in.  By the time I jimmied it open I realized I didn’t want some other Korean teacher finding me in the common bathroom crying.  I had a break between classes so I headed to a nearby restaurant where I cried into my spicy pork and rice instead.

We’ll get to my neuroses in a moment, but seriously, there are at least three things wrong with that situation.  Firstly, instead of Debbie, to whom I directly report, just telling me “I’m going to have the Mike sit in on some of your classes to give you some pointers” she sees the fact that I’m doing something wrong in my first week as this big issue, avoids the conflict and passes the buck.   Secondly, though there’s no reason for him to have this information, Sam also knows that Mike needs to sit in on my classes.  That information may have come from Mike (bad), but it may also have come from Debbie telling the other Korean teachers, who repeated it to Sam (not implausible and also bad).   Lastly, the fact that I’m not a perfect teacher in a week should not surprise anyone.  But everyone reacts like it’s a surprise and then it becomes talk of the office for some reason.  In my humble opinion, I think it’d be much more encouraging and empowering if someone just sat in on a new teacher’s first week of classes and made suggestions rather than having it come up in this way that feels completely punitive.  It’s like being critiqued on something you never learned.

Admittedly Mike and Sam warned me about this, but  you know how it is with warnings–you don’t really heed them until you get hit in the face with them.  They warned me that the Korean teachers (especially Debbie, not so much the other department head) would avoid having any kind of conflict with me directly and instead tell one of the foreign teachers to come and tell me something, thereby immediately blowing it out of proportion.

I’m a total perfectionist, so even though I know it’s not logical to think I was going to do it all right in the first week of teaching, I still felt like a total loser for not doing it all right in the first week of teaching.  Thankfully I was able to parse that out pretty quickly and ended up having a very pleasant evening with Mike and Sam.  As for Debbie, I didn’t think particularly highly of her before this and, really, she’s not winning any points with me (more on her shenanigans in another post).

As fate would have it though, I was reminded today that this sort of foolishness is par for the course.  On our way home tonight, I realized Sam was pretty pissed off.  After a lot of mumbling, it came to light that something really insignificant that he’d done two weeks ago finally came up today, but not even from the horse’s mouth (that’d be Debbie’s mouth…again).  It’s something that should have been addressed and resolved immediately, but instead, much like I’ve experienced, it’s being treated like some enormous, shameful secret.  It seems to me that I’m getting a very quick education in the politics of this office.  And I’m realizing they are much like the ones you find most everywhere.

And so it was, my first week of teaching.  Next time I post about teaching, the kids might even get more than an honourable mention!

Filed under The ESL Adventure Tagged with , , , ,

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.