Last Night

May 4, 2012 2 Comments

Last night while walking home, I realized how similar laughter and crying sound. We all thought that the woman in the car, sitting next to the man, that she was laughing. And then it dawned on us one by one, sort of at different times, like a wave rippling over a group of people, that she was crying. And crying loudly. He was beating her. He was punching her. He had her hunched over in the front seat and was punching the back of her head and body.

We all just stood there in shock for a moment. It was me and three of my coworkers and another new girl we’ve met in the neighbourhood recently. And then a Korean guy walking a few feet behind us. It was late so the streets were pretty deserted.  By this time we’d all had a few drinks. We’d been out for dinner earlier. I don’t know how compromised everybody was. I know one girl had been unable to finish her beer at the last location because she was already tipsy and I was definitely feeling a good buzz. I don’t know where everyone else was at and so maybe that’s part of what slowed our reaction. But eventually it became very clear that this was a man beating a woman in a car. While driving. They were stopped at a red light and that’s why we saw them.

Eventually I yelled “hey” really loud to try and get him to stop. Or at least feel some embarrassment that he was being watched. I don’t think he even heard me. Then the light changed and they drove off. And as they drove off he was holding her by hair on the back of her head.

Later, it came up in conversation again.  Just the shock we were feeling about it.  It’s kind of weird to go off and sit and have drinks in front of the 7/11 (which you can do here), and try to pretend that what happened didn’t just happen.  As it was brought up later, one of my coworkers mentioned that he couldn’t tell what was going in the car initially because his eyesight is so bad and he really is supposed to be wearing glasses all the time, but he doesn’t.  He had actually waved to the couple in the car because he thought they were laughing and couldn’t see what was happening.  Somehow that just devolved into a conversation about bad eyesight and not how piss poor our reaction was overall.  That’s the funny thing about these situations–how quickly you bury them.  There was an implicit group decision to not talk about it again after a point.

I felt some ridiculous, ridiculous pride in the fact that I had tried something.  At least I yelled when nobody else around me did anything.  Not the four other foreigners I was with, not the Korean man walking behind us looking vaguely shame faced on behalf of his fellow countryman.  The most that happened with all of us was me yelling “hey” and I took some comfort in that, but it’s ridiculous to take any comfort in that because what I did was completely ineffectual.  It was probably more than I would have done if I had actually been completely sober, to be honest.  It was was probably more than I would have done if I had been alone and not felt some sort strange maternal need around all these people younger than me to take charge of the situation in some way.  But it still wasn’t nearly enough.  It wasn’t close to enough.

I don’t know if I could have done more, but I immediately felt guilty. I immediately felt like I should thrown down my shit and run over to that intersection, run into the street and pulled her out of the car. I should have gone over and at least yelled at him enough that he felt something. I should have written down the license plate number, which I started to think about doing and then I realized that I couldn’t read the Korean characters fast enough to note them as the car drove away.

Unfortunately I can imagine what happened to that woman when they got home last night.  I’m sure it’s not the first time it’s happened.   But it’s sick that that five people stood there and it happened again.

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Big Girl

January 19, 2012 8 Comments

It’s been a long time since I wrote about anything relating to the actual name of this blog, but a couple incidents in class this week begged to be retold.

Korea is so different from North America in so many ways, it’s impossible to talk about all of them, but I’ll talk about one.  People go out of their way to avoid confronting you directly about issues that could bear some conversation, but will hasten to say things to you that just don’t need saying.  Like the time one of my students intoned that I needed to go on a diet, or the time a random lady walking by me in a subway station looked over at me and made a gesture to indicate the largeness of my belly or all the other entirely un-subtle indicators I’ve been given that I am waaaay larger than the Korean idea of normal.  And I’ve lost weight since I’ve been here.  It’s just always open season here on letting you know that you could stand to drop a few.  Younger, hipper Koreans won’t tend to do it, but the sorta old and the very young will.  With my elementary students, the youngest ones will say things utterly guilelessly.  The ones old enough to know better won’t dare say it to me, but I’ll tell you what they do.

In one of my classes on Monday, we finished the lesson a little early so I let them play Hang Man while I finished some marking.  Usually I control such games in a pretty draconian manner but I decided to relax and let the kids run the game.  One of the boys asked if he could write a whole sentence instead of just a word and I said sure, as long as he could keep track of the spelling.  As the sentence started to materialize on the board behind me, I saw one of the girls’ names, Dina, was part of the solution.  I realized blessedly quickly that it was going to be a disparaging comment about her weight, so I shut the game down and gave the boy who’d started the puzzle a bit of a verbal lashing.

The boys in that class constantly go for the jugular with Dina, calling her pig or just otherwise making comments on her size.  In addition to being a little heavy (not much, mind you) she’s one of the tallest people in the class and is very likely to just lengthen out someday–assuming she doesn’t fall into some death spiral of eating her emotions and actually end up with a real weight problem.  But for the moment, she’s significantly bigger than everyone in that class, male or female.

In another class that same day, I had the kids working on a series of chain stories.  Each student wrote a sentence to begin a story and then left their notebook open on a desk.  All the students then wandered the room adding sentences to every book to create a story.  It’s one of the few times that the kids have an opportunity to be creative so I was letting them write down just about anything that popped into their heads.  I participated as well and, incidentally, a lot of stories centered around my dying, going to hell, farting or otherwise coming off less than positively.  As I wandered over to one book the boy writing clamped down his hands so I couldn’t see what was on the page.  When he finally left, I took a look and it was a long sentence about one of the girls in class and how she is so big, with her proposed weight in kg and some indication that she’s a bad person as well.

This particular girl, Jenny, is one I actually worry about a little.  I’ve had her in at least one of my classes for as long as I’ve been working at the school.  She’s a bigger girl who’s a bit boyish.  She’s got a sweet core but she’s a bit hapless and her way of coping with that is to be overly aggressive.  In an essay about her best friends, she wrote repeatedly that her friends were all pretty and thin and that she was fat and ugly.  Now every girl may feel this way in 5th grade but I get the impression she feels a bit more keenly because she gets that direct feedback from the other kids.  In a bid to be “the teacher who changes her life” I wrote in the comments of that essay that I thought she was pretty.  I’m fairly sure it had zero effect.

When I saw the sentence I erased it and told the boy it wasn’t appropriate.  Even when the sentence was erased though, two of the girls hovered over the paper trying to make out what had been there before and as they were deciphering it, read it loudly enough for Jenny to overhear.  She is usually hard to control in a classroom but that knocked the wind out of her sails for a while.  Which just hurt my heart.

In both cases, the boys doing the teasing are not ones I consider to be the worst of the pack by any means.  In fact, the boy in the writing class is one of the brightest, hardest working, most well-behaved, and nicest students I have.  Also in both of these classes, there are boys who are a little fluffy around the edges as well but they don’t catch flack for it  at all–maybe because they lack the height to stand out.

While I didn’t have a full on flashback in the classroom or anything, all this did remind me of the unpleasantness of my teenaged years being around a mother who had me terrified that I might get fat and convinced that nothing in life could be worse.  I was actually a perfectly reasonable size for my age if incredibly buxom, but I managed to think I was fat for all the years that I wasn’t, until I actually got fat.  Now as a fat adult, I deal with North Americans who have a purely aesthetic problem with fatness attempting to render their dislike righteous with a pretense at caring about the health of random fat folks and concerns about the beleaguered health care system that they suddenly have so much concern about, or Koreans who just don’t have any filter.  I know what mental gymnastics I have to do to try to not eat my emotions, to focus on being healthy at my current weight (and not go on crash diets to become “acceptable”) and to like myself as I am.  But I wasn’t equipped to do those mental gymnastics as a teenager, and as 11 and 12-year-olds, I highly doubt these girls in my classes are equipped to do so either.  I have no idea how they’ll be affected by the taunts they’re dealing with right now.  I hope they’ll fare better than I did.  But whose to say?  They are both beautiful girls and I really hope they figure that out if they don’t know that now.

A couple things are for damn sure:  kids are cruel no matter where they’re born and it still isn’t safe to be a big girl.

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24-Hour Store

November 15, 2011 Leave a comment

Many posts ago I mentioned the place where I do my groceries.  The store is called Home Plus, a UK-based chain that offers groceries and housewares in one handy location.  While the pricing isn’t as good as its domestic competition, the Korean-based E-Mart (E-Mart purchased Wal-Mart Korea in 2006 to boot), the local Home Plus is a 10-minute walk from my apartment while the E-Mart is a bus ride away.  Convenience wins with me every time so I shop at Home Plus.

In that same post I also mentioned that I can only tolerate shopping at the Home Plus during certain hours.  When I wrote that post I would only set foot in the Home Plus after about 11:00pm.  It’s open 24 hours a day, six days a week (only till midnight on Sundays) which, thankfully, makes that possible.  The reason behind this is that during regular shopping hours–weeknights and weekends–the Home Plus is a madhouse.

Large scale discount retailers like Home Plus and E-Mart are still a relatively new phenom here.  From what I’ve read E-Mart is the oldest discount chain and it was only established in 1993.  While shopping at a Home Plus is only impressive to me in that I can find a few foreign food items, for Koreans it still has a certain amount of newness to it.  I don’t know if that’s the reason that Koreans make going to the Home Plus a freaking family outing but that’s how they roll.  So in addition to women who think it entirely reasonable to block the entire aisle so that no one can get by, there are wandering husbands, and toddlers underfoot.  Add to that the enormous number of do-nothing staff.  These are folks paid to stand at the entrances of various aisles to greet you, help you find stuff and generally try to get you to buy more things that you don’t need.  Do not make the mistake of thinking these are people who replace stock.  That’s a whole other group of people.  But we’re not done yet.  Then there are the sample slingers.  They take up all the spots not filled by the aisle greeters.  While they might be politely ignored in a lot of North American grocery stores, no such thing happens here.  Everyone stops for a sample constantly clogging the entrances to the aisles.  I assume because meat is so expensive here, people *line up* for the meat samples.  And there’s usually a guy or gal bellowing into a microphone to attract people to the meat sample as well.  In addition to all of this there’s a small eatery right next to the meat section and pizza stand next to that.

I don’t like grocery shopping at the best of times, but when the grocery store is a full-on circus I risk resorting to violence while I’m there.  So I have generally done my groceries well after 11:00pm at night.  Today, though, I stumbled onto a new strategy.

I don’t start work until 2:30pm so I have shopped at Home Plus in the morning or early afternoon here and there.  However I’m a pretty intense night owl so I’m usually not awake much before I have to be at work.  I’ve been trying to change that though, since I have the distinct impression that not getting enough daylight was causing some mild depression.  Also I’m a hell of a lot more productive in the morning than I am at night, despite the fact that I like staying up.  So I’ve been trying to get to bed by 1:00 or 2:00am in hopes of being awake by 9:30 or 10:00am.  So far it’s been working with stops and starts.

This morning though, my eyes flew open at 7:00am and refused to close again.  I had no desire to be up so early since I didn’t get to sleep until 2:00am last night but I figured I’d better get on with the day.  If I needed a cat nap before work around 1:00pm, so be it.  So I went off for a morning stomp to the boardwalk (pictures below) and then decided to stop in and do my groceries on the way home.  When I entered the Home Plus it was about 9:00am.  I didn’t think it could get more dead in there than it is at 1:00 or 2:00am but I was wrong.  This was a new kind of quiet.  Hardly any staff on the ground, some parts of the store still unlit and no more than five patrons in the entire place.  I even caught the staff doing some creepy morning Wal-Mart thing.  Each staff member stood at the entrance to an aisle and they all greeted one another in response to a recorded message playing on the sound system.  Then they clapped in time to some pretty funky house music.  It was bizarre.

Crazy staff doings aside, it was by far the most relaxing time I’ve ever spent at Home Plus and here’s a little ditty for your listening enjoyment.

In other news, I finally found the water.  There’s been a boardwalk a mere 20-minutes from my apartment all this time and I had no idea despite the fact that I can see water from my office at work and kids would mention it in their essays.  Yeah, sometimes I’m all kinds of oblivious.

Walking path left, bike path right

The body of water near my home

Uhm, not that it's stopping anyone

In addition to not fishing, you're pretty much not allowed to do anything but walk or bike here

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Headline News

November 10, 2011 4 Comments

My dear and beloved readers, I apologize for my hiatus from the blogosphere.  I’ve been all kinds of busy about all kinds of things, but it’s high time you got an update.  The last few posts before my long silence seemed to be all about one crisis or another.   Well here’s what happened with all those crises.

First up, the neighbours.  It took a month, but things have almost normalized.  When I went to work the Monday after that fateful night, one of the guys who had been at that rocking party, Rick, went out of his way to make sure we were on speaking terms.  It wasn’t the apology I had hoped for but it was something, so I accepted the olive branch.  Mike, the neighbour that I work with, though, well he wasn’t speaking to me.  A couple days later I realized I had been suffering from raging PMS the night that the whole thing went down, so I hoped that maybe the absence of crazy-making hormones would help relations improve.  (I’ve since downloaded a period tracking app on my iPhone–it warns me when the PMS is coming!)  Just as I was starting to think things might be okay, a week later these signs appeared on my neighbours’ door:

WTF??

Assuming this was directed at me, I was horrified.  I stopped making any effort to speak with Mike at work after that.  Then I eventually found out the signs were directed at someone else entirely.  While I still think the signs are pretty awful (and a month later they’re still up), it was a relief to know they weren’t for me.  With stops and starts Mike and I  managed to get back to being friendly with one another at work–helpful since he sits right next to me.  As I still haven’t been in their place since all of this went down, I haven’t actually seen the other neighbour, Sam (who no longer works with us), but we’ve communicated by text once and it seems the waters have calmed.  I’m still treading lightly and I doubt things will ever be quite like they were before–but I kinda think that might be a good thing anyway.  And they certainly haven’t woken me up since then.

In unqualified foreign teacher news, Mona is supposedly out of a job as of December 1st.  While it sucks for her, it’s good for the kids and the rest of us teachers.  In the last week or so I’ve gone from assuming that most of the trouble she was having on the job was about her lack of English skills, to realizing she just isn’t terribly bright. We had to do testing on all the kids this past week so we foreign teachers had a meeting just to ensure that we were all grading by the same standards to keep it fair.  Since there is some pressure to maintain enrollment we discussed the fact that we really need to grade on a bit of a curve.  This idea could not–COULD NOT–be understood by Mona.  It was mind boggling that we couldn’t get her to see the shade of gray we were going for on this–she kept seeing the black and white of “pass all the kids,”  or “fail every kid who could possibly be failed.”  No in between.  It was baffling.  So no, she will not be missed.

Having said all that, I’m happy to report that this did not become my problem because Mona and I had a frank talk about a month ago.  I finally told her that she needed to stop acting like I was some sort of human job/life handbook.  She wasn’t too thrilled to hear that from me and seemed genuinely shocked and hurt which made me feel like a total shit for waiting so long to tell her this.  It was tense for about 24 hours, but then we bumped into each other on the elevator to the office a couple days later and all seemed well.  She even claimed that I looked like I’d lost weight.  She clearly knows the way to my heart.

While she can still manage to get under my skin, she doesn’t ask me nearly as many questions.  She spreads the pain around a bit more too.  It also seems like my not being so angry with her all the time has caused everyone else to kind shift a bit in their attitude towards her.  I’m not really sure of why that is–maybe they know that I won’t Hulk out if she’s around so it’s not such a big deal to have her around?  In any case, this shift was good because the night she found out she wasn’t long for this job, we all felt enough compassion to go out for drinks with her and stay out until 3:00am.  I think if I hadn’t been honest with her before that, I wouldn’t have felt enough compassion to even be civil let alone social.   In addition to all of this I’m not walking around in a vein-busting rage all day at work which is a nice change of pace.

So remember that book club I talked about starting?  Well I did it, but it’s not quite what I had hoped for thus far.  At the moment there are three of us, with a possibility of a fourth.  I met the first two members, let’s call them Jack and Diane, a couple weeks ago and we chose a book.  Jack and I both thought it best to meet in a couple weeks to give us all time to read the book, but Diane insisted that we meet in a week, citing boredom.  I reluctantly agreed and so we met this past Saturday with the plan to do a review of the first two chapters of the book.  I had a bit of a rough week so I had to wake up early Saturday morning to read those chapters.  I realized they were quite short and assumed everyone else would have gotten farther in, so I hurried through the first 50 pages…only to find that Jack had read nothing and Diane–oh she of boredom–had read *two* pages.  Then we spent four hours waiting for Jack’s friend, who might join the club, to meet up with us.  While socializing is nice I was a little annoyed and to be deadly honest, I’m not sure I enjoy spending time with these folks enough to do it without a book to discuss!  And the point of all this was to meet kindred spirits.  I can read books all on my own really.  I figure I’ll give this a couple books to come together and turn into either a good, solid book discussion group or a good, solid social group.  If one of those things doesn’t take place, I may choose to spend my Saturdays otherwise engaged.

You may recall my griping and whining about not knowing the language.  Well I enlisted the help of a Korean teacher and she has turned out to be batshit crazy.  Alright highly, highly eccentric.  Initially I thought I had scored with someone who was fluent in both English and Korean but she is proper nuts as a friend puts it.  And she’s also not very good at this gig.  She just sort of sits next to me in a cafe and rushes me through a text book at the speed of light.  At first I thought, “well at least she’ll be like a warm body to keep me accountable,” but she doesn’t even achieve that, and I haven’t the energy to tell her how to do her job.  And you know, she’s batshit crazy.

Also, strangely, I’ve felt a lot less urgent about learning the language in the last few weeks.  I’d still like to pick up enough to function with ease, but I realized that suddenly it’s not my main priority anymore.   I think I realized how well I could function once I stopped being so anxious and got more confident in my ability to make myself somewhat understood.  I’d like to do more traveling and sightseeing and writing and picture-taking and friend-making, but I’m not sure I’m that interested in spending a lot of time on language study at the moment.  I’m gonna give my teacher the heave ho this weekend after my lesson tomorrow.  Yeah, I’m too much of a wimp to do it in person–she’ll get a nicely worded e-mail or phone call.

Lastly, there is another thing I do need to be a lot more focused on which has taken up a bunch of my head space, and that’s my health.  I went to the doctor with one symptom–painfully, chronically (well since June) swollen feet.  He did a bevy of tests and found that I am borderline anemic, on the edge of osteoporosis, deficient in vitamin D and suffering from mild arteriosclerosis.  The first three are not so bad; I take iron and A LOT of vitamin D and a fair bit of calcium.  The last one though, that’s a doozy.  Apparently I have stiff arteries and that causes poor circulation which causes my feet to swell.  My weight and standing on my feet for work exacerbates this.  The swelling has put some of my shoes off limits–I simply can’t fit into them.  A friend went to the trouble of shipping me my favorite heels only to discover when I tried to put them on for a party, that I can’t get into them.  The doctor had me on diuretics to begin with but you can’t take those forever, so the long term remedy is to exercise, drink lots of water and lose weight.  Yeah, cause exercising and losing weight are easy.

This turn of events has been overwhelming to say the least and I can’t describe how frustrating/annoying/disheartening it is to see my feet constantly look loaves of bread.  I actually used to think of my feet as two of my most attractive physical features and now they have utterly failed me.  The exercise is up and down but coming.  However my feet have not responded quickly at all.  I go back and see the doctor again in about a month and hopefully there will have been some improvement by then.  For now I grit my teeth and keep working at it.

This post is getting lengthy so I’ll end it here for the moment.  But don’t fret, I’m just brimming with things to say so you won’t have to wait long for another one.  And in case you thought “Headline News” was made up song title, think again.

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Need to Know – #3 Learn the Language

October 1, 2011 3 Comments

Everyone will tell you that you don’t need to learn the language before you get here.  And you don’t have to.  But trust me, your life will be immensely easier if you start learning Korean before you get here.  Some great resources I’ve stumbled across:  the iSpeak Korean cd set and, the Talk to me in Korean and Learn Korean-Korean Class 101 podcasts.  This site, which is like a flashcard site for Hangul characters, has also been helpful. If nothing else, learn some basics that will allow you to function day-to-day.  You’ll be grateful when you get here.

While plenty of people speak English here, it’s still not something you can count on.  You’ll appreciate being able to:  give your cab driver directions, ask how to find something,  find out how much an item costs or have any clue what’s being said when someone tells you that your bus pass didn’t work and that you need to pay the fare.  This will leave you far less dependent on the kindness–and patience–of strangers.  And of course you’ll be far more independent.  Something really important to me. Right now I still feel like an infant because I really can only say ‘hello,’ ‘good-bye,’ ‘thank you,’ ‘sorry,’ and ‘rice.’  Oh and I can say ‘straight’ and ‘right’ in order to get a cab home from the grocery store.  At this point though, this is not a language barrier but a language Berlin Wall.

What I also didn’t anticipate was losing the motivation to learn while I was here.  You don’t think about how things like fatigue, homesickness, illness or even mild depression–all pretty common when you move to a new country–might make you want to do a lot of things besides learn a new language.  I’m a perfectionist who likes to be good at everything before I ever even start, so the process of learning a language outside of a classroom setting is like a form of torture for me.  I’ve really struggled with just wanting to cocoon and not leave my apartment (now that I have crazy fast internet) rather than deal with the pain and frustration of learning in a way that I don’t prefer.  At the moment I’m looking for lessons but nothing has turned up.  I may well have to get out of my comfort zone and just learn Korean in a much more trial-and-error fashion, but it will be an uphill battle.  If you prefer less battle and more fun, learn some Korean before your plane lands.

Because life is easier when you can read the signs.

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Need to Know – #2 Recruiters

October 1, 2011 Leave a comment

A good number of foreign teachers will use a recruiter for at least their first stint here and I’m no different.  Unfortunately, I have never had a great feeling about my recruiters and I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone (e-mail me if you want the name).  One of my colleagues, who is in her second year of teaching here and was hired from within the country, used the same firm.  She didn’t need a lot of hand holding because she’s been here a year but she asked for exactly two very simple things–and got neither.  They simply aren’t that invested in delivering on what you want.  My impression, and this is from other teachers as well, is that, recruiter or not, you really are fending for yourself once you get here.  The recruiter has been paid their cut once you get started at your job, and while you can badger them into helping you with big conflicts with the school, you will probably get the most help on day-to-day things from other foreign teachers and Koreans that you befriend.  Get to know the other foreign teachers as quickly as you can when you arrive and if you’re lucky you’ll have ones like my neighbours who really took me under their wing when I arrived.  It’s the fastest way to get the lay of the land.

Your recruiters, if they’re anything like mine, will resurface to take you to baseball games or send you information three weeks after you needed it and have already found it.  But for the most part, it’s best not to rely too much on them.  I relied on my recruiters to find out the dress code of my school.  They told me it was casual and that jeans were okay.  That was not true.  It was business casual and jeans were not preferred.  I made the recruiters go to bat for me on that with the school and it turned out to not be a big deal at all.  Other teachers have turned up wearing jeans and now I realize I had no reason to panic.  However, it’s the kind of thing that caused me a lot of stress in my first days here and it just didn’t need to be an issue

Now having said all this, I stumbled across a recruiting firm based in Toronto just before I left, that seemed to be really top notch.  I’ve also heard from some people here and there who have had really good experiences with their recruiters.  I guess I’d say that good recruiters are out there.  They just don’t seem to be the norm.

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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!

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