When you teach in the Seoul public school system you will always have a co-teacher in the classroom with you.  That’s a Korean English teacher.  They run the gamet.  You may have a teacher who is unable to control their own classroom, let alone assist you while you are teaching, who struggles with English, the language in which you communicate, and spends your entire lesson with their backside in a chair.  Or you may have an experienced, delightful co-worker whose control of the students make them a joy to teach and the teacher a joy to teach with.  I’m lucky because I have mostly had excellent co-teachers who I’ve learned (am learning) a lot from.

But I have had to also learn to control my anger toward the impotent teachers.  I am not saying I have mastered that yet.  When a teacher fails to control the students the brief time I have with them and spend reprimanding them is frustrating and probably ineffectual.  When I am calling for everyone to wake up, pay attention, and the Korean English teacher’s mouth is agape and does not follow my lead, I get pissed.  When, from across the room, she watches me try to quiet chattering students who are right in front of her and she doesn’t contribute and pointedly looks the other way, I get super pissed.  Limp fools!  Where is your backbone? Where is your sense of duty?  Tee hee, duty.

One of my favorite English teachers is also one of the teachers who I’ve had problems with in the classroom.  Poor thing.  She seems totally beat this semester.   Our first class this Monday was a low level boys class.  All of her classes are low level, no wonder she looks unhappier.  There are three or four boys who muck it up for the rest of the kids.  I can’t teach until these handful of boys sit down and shut up, and I don’t think anything but an act of God could do that.  I see the bored faces of the potentially good students and feel bad for them all.  Well, the ringleader of the annoying boys lit some paper on fire in the classroom while I was teaching.  Then his pal turned on a fan on the wall to disperse the smell of smoke and the ringleader tossed the singed paper out of the window.

At least this isn’t the US.  It would be so much worse.

The ban on corporeal punishment, which was to begin in October, already seems to be wildly failing.  The older, male gym teacher in my office still regularly whacks the boys with a stick.  Not to say that I don’t see the benefit to myself if I was allowed to wail on the little fucks who won’t shut up and who light fires in the back of the classroom.  Stress relief!

My friend Amanda who has taught in Korea and in the US told me that yes, it is much worse in the US.  Especially because they can talk back to you.  Maybe there are some benefits to speaking a language most of your students can’t understand.  She also said that the favorite topic of the teachers at her school is the kind of mood lifting drugs each takes to deal with the stress.  Damn.

It’s fun to talk about the outrageous stuff that happens at my school, but mostly my students are really good kids that I really enjoy interacting with.  And I really enjoy my job.  Also, to people unfamiliar with corporeal punishment, it seems like the halls would be filled with wailing and fear, but that isn’t how it is at all. My objection to it is that it legitimizes a kind of violence that I think is bad for a society and for individuals, and also that it isn’t an effectual form of punishment.  Teenagers value their time way more, and if you took that from them it would be a much better punishment I think.

Unhappy Campers

Teaching the English summer camp is more tedious this time around.  There are seventeen students, and many of them don’t understand me.  I feel so awful that they don’t understand me.  How alienating for them!  Their lack of comprehension isn’t doing any wonders on my personal appraisal of my teaching ability either.

Ms. Choi has been lamenting the students’ obvious boredom with the reading material I’ve given them.  I agree!  They are bored, and four of them are totally lost.  I thought it appropriate to reminded her that I wanted to choose a comic book (pictures are enlightening and engaging for ESL learners) or a small novel which had annotations in Korean.  I was overruled, however.

I still miss the elementary school kids.  They were such a sunny spot in these English camps.

The pinatas we’ve been making haven’t suffered any disaster so far, like the balloon popping prematurely or someone knocking one off of the table.  Unless a student decides to brutalize theirs before they’ve been decorated I think we’re in the clear.

I’ve been spending my ample free time after camp doing nothing of use.  (Oh, only a month ago I was dying for direction and ready to pursue something.  And what now?  I’ve been watching all of the Joseph Gordon-Levitt movies that I can.  Mysterious Skin was awesome.  Watch it.)  Consuming is much easier than creating anything of my own, but I know which one would be more engaging and fulfilling.

I’ll have my summer vacation in a week a half.  I don’t know if it will be possible to go to Shanghai.  I’ll need to renew my Korean visa, which probably won’t give me time to get a Chinese visa.

Office Jobs Should Come with a Drug Prescription

There are only five more days until the spring semester ends.  My English summer camp will start the next day.  It will last for three weeks.  This is my first English camp without another foreign teacher.  I’ll see the students from 9 until a little after noon.  That means more work and more lessons for me.

At work today I watched movies and clips on youtube.  It was pretty much a waste of time.  Though at one point I remembered that I still need to think about what I will do when my contract is up.  I don’t want to take the GRE in Seoul because the essay portion is done on paper.  Paper?  I suppose I’ll have to write in runes by candlelight as well.  I haven’t written anything on paper in years.  I type, for goodness’s sake.  This is enough to discourage me from taking the GRE in Seoul.

I think I’d like to become a surfer.  That’s a job, right? I don’t want no stinking office job.  I envy the P.E teachers.  They get to be outside a lot of the day and get some good sunshine.  Their job helps them get in shape too.  I had to stop taking my walks during my planning period.  Fuck work.  They steal the best hours of the day from me, for what?

Finally found and emailed this dive club down in Suwon.  Maybe I can get my scuba license from them.

My Open Class

My open class was today.  The verdict?  They didn’t like my lesson plan, but they liked my visuals and the way I interacted with the class.  My language was clear and appropriate for the student’s level, but that I should have let them speak more.  Apparently I talked to much at the beginning.

I was being reviewed by an official from Seongbuk district office who I’ve met on several occasions, and another English teacher (I assume) whom I’ve never met, both women.  The English teacher said my lesson plan was “not kind.”  (A lesson plan not being the actual lesson itself, but a form you fill out that details how the lesson will proceed, etc.)  I totally take offense that they expect me to be a professional at writing a lesson plan, a thing which they’ve never trained me to do.  I took offense, but decided then was not the time to inform this English teacher (whose English seeemed really strong) that an inanimate object (like paper) cannot be describe as kind or unkind.

The English teacher also was very surprised at the high level of participation from the kids.  I guess that is a good thing?  Or maybe she was suggesting that I bribed them?  Pshaw.

I don’t feel like I’ll get the position.  Is my contract only being considered based on the score that two people have given me who I’ve never worked with and have only seen one class I’ve taught?  I don’t know.

I won’t find out the district’s verdict for another three or so weeks.  So, if I’ll be going home, I won’t have even a full two months notice.  Seems kinda shitty.  Oh, my old vice principal Mr. Yoon was there too.  It was nice to see him again.  He was a funny guy.

Bad Teacher Day

I had a confrontation with a student today and I totally lost my head afterward.  He spoke English very well; he obviously lived in another country.  I’ve never had a kid who spoke English so well and was such a little shit.  I took him out in the hall intending to talk to him and punish him, but I couldn’t tell if he was a Westerner in culture or not, which matters because if I ask a Western kid to get on the ground and, who knows, do pushups or whatever, that would be bad news.  He was bad news anyway…I asked him where he was from and he refused to tell me.  What a fucker.  He absolutely got the better of me.  I pretty much couldn’t interact with the class after that because I was so high-strung, and then in the office I started crying, mostly because I’m tense as I don’t know whether I should be spending my afternoons and weekends studying for the GRE here, whether I should open a savings account in Korea, or if I should be hustling to find a job back in NC and start the major project of packing.

I took the rest of the day off because I was in no shape to be at work.  Nothing, of course, would recommend me more for another contract than my emotional freak out, huh?  The head teacher let me go, but I was given word that I can’t do this again because there are worse students.  First of all, I want to know how they measure that.    Anyway, I replied that I understand this in an inconvenience (though I had no more classes for that day), but that if they want me to be able to better handle these situations that I should be informed of the system to handle the punishment of students.  (Or, though I didn’t mention this part, that they leave me with that kid in a room for ten minutes to see how many times I can hit him in the head.)

I accidentally cussed at the kid too.  I may or may not have suggest that he was a fucker.  I said this, idiotically, because of the aforementioned stress, plus I’ve had a foul mouth since I was a teenager, and I’ve never made an effort to change it.  I don’t think I did something morally reprehensible, though I definitely played the game the wrong way and I lost.  Boy did I lose.

Basically the way I’ve been acting in the last two weeks, you’ve got to wonder if I really want to keep my job.  So many big blunders.

I love my ESL job, I hate my ESL job

The job has been really busy recently.  I have to do a butt load of preparation for the morning English broadcast-so much so that I should be paid overtime for this work.  (My contract requires me to teach 22 hours a week.  Anything above that is time and a half, anything below has to be made up with extra curricular activities. I have three different weekly schedules.  During Week B and C I work 22 hours, but  during Week A I work 21 hours.  Therefore I need to do some extra work that meets this 1/3 of a class I don’t teach.) But this morning English broadcast work is too much-this should count toward overtime pay.  I really feel like I’m getting fucked.  I have to find a relevant article, rewrite that article so my Korean counterparts can understand it, make a script for myself and a student to read on air (they’re bat shit crazy if they think I’m going to practice and memorize this crap), prepare a powerpoint with pictures, and choose two words or phrases to teach them that will appear on their writing test in their English classes.  And they’re trying to pressure me to practice the morning broadcast before we do it.  Once again, they’re bat shit crazy if they think I’m going to do that without being paid for this work.  The Korean English teachers overhauled the broadcast- it’s different from last year.  It’s always been fairly informal.  They had a meeting about this broadcast while I had a class to teach.  When I found out about it I protested.  But they went ahead and had the meeting without me!  I’m the one responsible for the damn thing, and they have a meeting that I can’t attend to discuss it and have my opinions considered.  Fuck yeah I feel fucked.

I mentioned before that my extra after school class isn’t paying me the proper overtime.  I found out last week that if I’m to get supplies for the kids it has to come out of my pocket.  No budget!  Today we made (on my dime) peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  The kids liked it (and I love giving them a break.  These kids are in school 12 hours a day.  Jesus.)  My class wasn’t advertised to the students like it should have been-someone somewhere neglected to do something so I’m losing money on the whole thing.

I do love teaching.  I fucking do.  I love the people I work with.  Even the ones that drive me a bit nuts sometimes, I love them too.  I want to join the Peace Corps and volunteer and teach someplace where I might be lucky to find crayons for the students.  But here, in Seoul, I signed up for a paying job, and I’d like to get paid for the work I do thank you very much.   And I fucking insist, impotent as my insistence seems to be, on being included in decisions about my work.

Third grade has leveled classes.  The highest level is A, the lowest level is called C, but we might as call it F for FuckifIcanteachthem.  These are kids that need to learn the alphabet, or go to military school for a semester, or both.  Having a teacher who does not speak their language teach an entire class-I might as well herd cats.  It’s pissing into the god damned wind.  They don’t understand anything I’m saying.  It’s god damned bad for them.  It throws them in deep water.  It discourages them from learning English.   A native speaker should be for kids of a higher level who can benefit.  Instead of having me teach these low level third graders the second graders (whom I don’t have any classes with – and don’t mind too much because they are always the worst students) anyway, these second graders who are A level should have classes with me instead.  It is hands down the best use of me as a teacher.  The only reason I teach these lowest level classes is because the parents would think its unfair if their kids didn’t see me.  As if you can learn a language through osmosis.  Touch me and speak!  And then this goes back to being an objectified foreigner-always on display.  Somedays I get it and am culturally sensitive, and other days I’d like to pluck their eyeballs out and I lash out at the teacher who once again is photographing me and my classes and no, I’ve asked, the other teachers aren’t photographed.  Look at our school!  We have a foreigner here!  Wow.  Maybe the constant photography and display are for reports they send to another organization (say the one that funds the foreign teacher program)- but it’s hard to get a straight answer when the woman I’m asking doesn’t have the strongest grasp of the English language.

I love teaching, but fuck.  Fuck.  I’ve tried to address some of these complaints several times to my English teachers, but I’m shit at it.  I have two buttons- on and off.  I’m either bellicose (dubiously, not exactly directed at them personally) or I squelch it and put on a happy face, no, not just a happy face, I am happy.  I vow that I can work a little bit harder and then see who is really at fault.  My Korean English teachers, afterall and sadly, always do a shit ton of work.  It is pretty touchy to complain to them about my work.  See, Americans and Koreans have very different ideas here.   I’m trying to learn diplomacy and better tactics.  I’m a would be artist!  How do I have a rational discussion?  I failed logic in university.

The Student’s Fault

I’ve started to settle in to teaching, and I’ve found a wonderful balance between strict and fun.   It’s been emotionally exhausting, sometimes humiliating, but god damn, I’m fucking gold now, baby.  The alchemy surely isn’t over yet, but Wednesday was payday, my apartment is (for me leastways) meticulously clean, and holy hell people, I kick ass.

The students are a mixed bag of nuts.  Here, they hit and run and wrestle in the halls, a veritable stampede of wacked out Korean hormones once the bell rings.  They rough each other up constantly, and while it’s more like the way puppies play, it’s startling to see as an American and someone who doesn’t want to clean up blood.  They don’t make it easy for a foreigner either, not some of them.  They will try to run away, hide their cell phones, pretend they don’t understand (when their actions, our student-teacher relationship, and tone of voice are all glaringly obvious no matter what language we all speak), and some of them just generally be little shits that, back home, would quickly end up at the school counselor.

There are some gems too.  Bright little faces who pay attention and have fun, and even some who understand English so well they react to my jokes and explanations in a heartbeat.  They understand.  What a joy it is to have them in your class now and then.

It was the second to last class today, and I said “I am jealous,” which made the students crack up because jealous sounds like some word in Korean that I understand has some sort of naughty meaning, but I’m not clear on the details.  Well, this sent them into rolling laughter.  So I had some fun with them.

I wrote “Fault” on the white board, and asked them if anyone knew what it meant.  I explained in English, the Korean teacher translated, and then I made them repeat it after me.

“Fault,” I said.  ”Fart,” they said.  I’m doubled up laughing.  ”Fault.” “Fart.”  Then I explain to them what fart means, some understand, then the Korean teacher translates, and they all understand, some laugh, some look totally bewildered.

“Fault.”  ”Fart.”

“Okay class, repeat after me: It was my fault.”

“It was my fart.”

Fuck yeah, I love teaching.