Posts tagged with "teaching"
Thursday, 22. October 2009, 03:44:06
living, foreigner, Korea, public school
...
Previously, I have mentioned the mixture of feelings which swing around each year as the celebration of my birth arrives. This year, someone said something which really made me think . . .
Readers of this blog will recall my observation that the Koreans have a tendency to only seek out and retain a relatively small circle of good friends; socially they may have many networks and acquaintances but the number of people they would consider dependable in a crisis situation is usually a very small nucleus, which may represent an important lesson for the rest of us.
Despite what people may say about me, I actually think of myself as a modest person. Here in Korea, where I have now been working for over six years, I keep a low profile and try not to cause offence, irrespective of whether I agree with people. As a result, I rarely experience conflicts with them and like to think that I am myself well thought of; remarks made by a number of people recently seem to confirm that I am Doing the Right Thing.
When I arrived here in 2003, I knew absolutely no-one except through previous chat sessions; I also tended to stay at home rather a lot because I had not yet been introduced to the local scene and after the debacle in Taiwan beforehand, wanted to make sure that my cash flow was OK (it does help to pay the bills, after all). So the arrival in my life of people here whom I would consider "friends" was relatively late in the proceedings and actually centres around a venerable institution, Lee Soonyoung's International Pub in Jungang-dong in Changwon, where I lived for five and a half years before moving out to Miryang for a new job. *
Miryang is actually a perfectly good place to live and work, but again, I have tended to stay at home, especially as the new job has become more familiar and the requirements clearer. I have arranged my belongings, and particularly my computers, so that they are indispensable tools for preparing my lessons - document and graphic processing, printing, photography and video. The one regret I have in this regard is that I never seem to have enough time to do it all. I have always thought that it is important to render the best possible quality in the execution of any job, and since arriving here I have invested heavily in this, both in financial terms and in terms of investing time and effort. Everything else is secondary.
Socially, therefore, I am not terribly interactive here. To be blunt, nice though it is, Miryang does not seem to have anything like even the meagre foreigner-style entertainments to be found just down the iron rails in sinful Changwon. Now that's not a totally bad thing because it's better to go home and not be disturbed when you are working things out, but on occasion neither TV nor Internet offer anything new or entertaining and you do feel lonely. And that's where the "family" comes in.
Because you do meet people on your travels; some you remain in contact with one way or another, whereas others you know for a while and then lose contact with entirely. In this line of business, in a country where work contracts are uniformly for one year and not everyone actually renews at the end, the crowd tends to be transitory, so that every so often someone who has been here for a while decides to go to another country or just go home. Those involved with the various branches of engineering in particular may even only be here for a few days before returning whence they came.
While this usually offers a fascinating glimpse of social interaction and crowd dynamics, it is also sad. People whom you have known, possibly for quite a long time, and with whom you may have become very good friends, decide that enough is enough and they want a change; or perhaps they are just homesick. Those of us left behind discover then another hole in our lives which cannot be filled, because each of us is unique, and it's the unique nature of each friend that gives your own small crowd its particular kind of dynamic. When they leave, that dynamic has to change, and in the end, our frail little networks fall apart and regroup.
The long-term foreigner in a place like South Korea finds eventually that people band together to help each other. What makes this so much more interesting and enlightening than it would be back home is that it involves bonding to a greater or lesser extent with not just the Koreans with whom we live, but also a range of people of other nationalities who, like ourselves, find themselves here and in need primarily of advice and guidance. Personally, I feel that I have been privileged to help many of those who came after me in this way. For this single reason, I have felt much more needed and appreciated here than I ever did back home.
Respect is also something that you earn out here. I have been so surprised by so many things I have encountered that sometimes it is difficult to know where to begin, but let me say this first: to stay out here and work and live for any length of time requires a different kind of personal strength from that which is helpful at home. In the domestic situation we all have the advantage of a common language which allows us to communicate freely and easily with virtually anyone around us; in the expat situation this is not often the case, and especially in places like Korea where - despite the intentions of various parties both home-grown and foreign - the English language is not as widespread (or as desirably verbose) as it would be in the native-speaker environment, and we depend to a greater or lesser extent upon the tolerance of the locals, as well as their willingness to go the extra mile and learn our language. Those who can do this well - and I now know many - are greatly to be admired.
Surprising also as to the people who actually give the respect; for example, there is a group of Americans (with the odd Canadian) working for a certain company in Changwon, and I usually see them there. Talking to them, it slowly emerged that the older members of the group had seen action in Vietnam in their younger days; one, who at the time of writing is soon to retire, is an Englishman who joined the US Navy. Now, it's hard for someone like myself to judge what kind of person these guys would choose to respect; indeed, it's hard to imagine a man respecting anyone much after having to spend a tour of duty battling with the devious Viet Cong!
The Canadian contingent told me many stories of his past, but essentially it sort of fell like this: his parents were always travelling around Canada, and the children of the family went with them. The outcome was that they were never in one town long enough to really make friends, and were often together in fights with the locals, among whom they remained transitory strangers. Later, he would often be involved in bare-knuckle street fighting (and his account of this really made the K-1 etc. on the TV seem rather lame), and also had strange jobs such as humping rock sulphur around in a processing factory - and suffering frequent ignition events which left him walking home each day smelling not unlike something hellish.
But here's the surprise: their experiences have not left them twisted or maladjusted - unlike too many of their unfortunate compatriots, they were able to dust themselves down psychologically and get on with their lives. And this is something which, in turn, forces me to admire them in a way that is so difficult with their younger co-workers: hard to define, yet a different kind of generosity, perhaps the result of seeing too many horrors themselves, and perhaps the result of asking themselves whether all the bombs and bullets ever achieved anything that wasn't cheaper than just talking and getting along with people. Plus, I suppose, the kind of experiences which remind a man of his own mortality, but at a much earlier age than most of us would usually desire.
And it was precisely this question of mortality which led me to write this today. A new friend from my own country, who has shown me such incredible generosity over the past couple of months and though working, is now looking forward to his retirement (and never ceases to remind me about my own), came into the IP with a big bruise around his right eye and a small sticking plaster on his forehead. It turned out that at some point previously, he had passed out and collapsed; the doctor apparently found little or nothing wrong with him that was not already known. Anyway, I was talking my usual pile of crap with him over a salad and barbecued chicken when the conversation strayed into how difficult it has been for me to be away from a group of people who have taken such good care of me, and he said: "That's because they are family. They are your family here, now."
That was an idea I had never had before but it was easy to see where he was coming from. From the day I first met her, Soonyoung (the landlady at the IP) had been looking after me maternally, as she does with everyone who enters her door; I made friends with her staff; she introduced me to people and I met so many more myself by just being the kind of person who can walk up to a stranger and say "hi", or by being - as always - a "good listener". And by this time, I have become so much a part of the furniture that people always seem to expect me to be there; gradually, I have become something of a "fixture", not necessarily in the sense of the beer taps but in the sense that my presence is dependable and that in general terms, I am a reliable person whose opinion and advice can be sought out as and when it is required.
So the people who know me at the IP are like my "family": they support me emotionally and practically, and when there is some minor problem I need help with, there they are.
Perhaps I should have realised how true the idea of "family" really was when some of the other long-termers actually had children of their own and I started meeting them and getting along with them, in a sense, I suppose, being rather like an uncle to them - something many people in the past (and not just here in Korea) have described me as being. But the family is now indispensable, and it's hard to escape the idea that this makes moving to another country less appealing, because that would mean having to go through this process all over again. Some of these people are very dear to me, and I would really miss them terribly - it's almost unthinkable. And I think they should know that.
Another thing that many of these people should do is recognise the strength in themselves. I think that they often fail to see just how strong they are, particularly when some adverse event happens and they suddenly find life difficult, albeit temporarily. Some people find living in a place like Korea difficult for many reasons - it's very different from what they knew at home before, navigating around may be a problem, or perhaps events back home take a turn for the worse and suddenly they feel very, very alone in a place that feels very alien. There is only one solution: open up to people a little more, because when you do this, people finally see you as a real person and are more willing to help. If there is one single important lesson I will take with me when I leave Korea, this is it.
Because we are all strong if we can stay here for an extended period; nice though it undoubtedly is, South Korea is not a place for weaklings. If you can stay here, you're tough and you can take it, and if you can't, that's what your friends are there for. Nobody is perfect, and no-one here expects perfection of anyone else; they only expect you to get on with the job and get on with others as well as you can. This is all that any reasonable person can expect.
In the end, I return to one thought I mentioned above - that living and surviving away from home, and in particular outside of your own country and linguistic and cultural context, does take a different kind of strength from that which is required domestically. And while we may survive for a while as islands in the wide blue ocean, occasionally there will be a storm, and we need bridges for communication and lifeboats for survival.
And that's where the family comes in.
Andrew. ^_^
* By which I mean: "I lived in Changwon for five and a half years.", not: "I lived in the International Pub for five and a half years."
Ohh, I don't know, though . . .
Edited 24-10-2009.
Edited 27-10-2009.
Edited 12-10-2009.
Sunday, 30. August 2009, 09:50:28
English, South Korea, hagwon, school
...
As my first "substantial" vacation in seven years slithers to a screeching halt and a new semester beckons (not entirely welcomingly, I have to admit), something has come back to haunt me, and unfortunately this was to be expected . . .
As the UK economy began to crumble in the 1970s, we entered into an era in which it was more evident than before that - every few years - you had to have some kind of change of career. This was not actually a great change in reality; it was just that it became more obvious to see (or alternatively, harder to deny) rather than being something of an elephant in the living room, one of those things that had always happened for a lot of people but they never really admitted it. The era in which (for example) a man could join a large organisation like British Rail (or British anything, for that matter) and reasonably expect to stay there from the first day until retirement and a nice comfortable pension were gone, never to return, and we were slowly being thrust into a new age where everything was being "outsourced" to places where labour was cheaper and the kinds of industries that used to employ large numbers of people were declining at an alarming rate; the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and their successors.
We were being conned into thinking that "competition" was good when we should really have been looking at standards and thinking about how to maintain employment for a couple of generations more. We should also have been adapting to the fact that raw materials were no longer going to be as cheap as they had been previously when we were able to pretty much just steal them, as the countries which produced them became democratised and self-reliant and needed the capital. And the established capital began to chase its own tail as never before, abandoning those who had helped it in the past to an increasingly bleak future where work and income was hard to come by even as things became more expensive.
But I will say one thing about that era: it convinced me more than ever before that a person should be as independent as possible. As I often say to people, as an individual, I do not like to be a small cog in a large machine; in my experience, the kinds of jobs I have tended to do (as one who finds himself accidentally and repeatedly shunted sideways into chemical analysis) were actually pivotal, in that often there was no-one else with the patience and application to do them, and besides, usually no-one else had had the necessary experience or had acquired the perspective to do those things. Applications where disparate areas of knowledge had to be somehow melded together into some kind of coherence, where things were never written down but kept in the head as lore; and so whenever the bearer of the lore moved on to pastures new, the lore went with them, never to return.
So instead of doing what I was actually trained for - things like biomedical or genetic research, or something microbiological or ecological, say - I was required to do things where really, I felt something of a fish out of water. A fraud. Why? Because I was not specifically trained for what I was doing, and often had to struggle to get my head around it. In those days, these things were to do with analysis or alloys or cleaning methods; nowadays it is more likely to be how to be effective in keeping the attention of eight-year-olds. Plus ca change, mon ami.
And every time I changed jobs - this little fish was out of the frying pan and into the fire, or rather finding himself in another, uncomfortable frying pan - the whole thing repeated itself. I had to break my head understanding what was necessary, time after time, because of all the lost lore that someone had to rediscover. Yet people criticise me for this. What, exactly, is wrong with not just being appointed the "expert", but actually working hard to acquire the knowledge to walk the talk? One gets the impression that there are an awful lot of people out there who just want a well-paid job and the more they can hide any inadequacies they may have and get well paid for it, the happier they are.
Anyway . . . fast forward to 2009, and the summer vacation from the school job (such as it is), in fact my first truly reasonable vacation, period, since leaving England in September 2002, found me back at "the centre of the universe" (as our dear Hendrik* calls it), Lee Soonyoung's "International Pub" (IP) in Changwon. Discussing various matters with fellow Englishmen. And them trying to persuade me that "going back into industry" was Really A Good Fing - and Yours Truly not being really convinced, for the reasons stated above. And this a couple of weeks after a previous foray thereto, when big Tim from NZ actually brought both of his little girls out to the pub, of all places, together for the first time, so he could look after them and watch the Rugby International on Australia Channel at the same time. Rebecca, the younger of the two, at the time of writing, is only a couple of years old, but she seemed very happy to have a plump, middle-aged Englishman to play with, and actually sat next to me on a bar stool kissing my left hand. Err, do you think she liked me? 
And I started to wonder - as I am sure so many others have - whether the lifestyle I have led was the right one; whether I should have had kids of my own too. Too much time and money wasted sitting in smoky bars - admittedly often with interesting engineering types to talk with - when I should have been thinking, perhaps, about losing weight, smartening up, earning more qualifications and contributing to a pension plan as well as a new health insurance policy and, well, savings and investments.
This place has been a stream of consciousness in which I have allowed myself to become somewhat distracted, and yet . . . and yet, as I sit here writing this, the realisation comes upon me that it has not all been bad . . . the people I've met, the lives I have touched, the knowledge and experience which has come my way, I would never have had if I had not arrived here in South Korea essentially by accident rather than design, been asked to stay and developed things from there. Bizarre and amusing - yet priceless - moments such as when I had four little girls in my afternoon class, all happy and smiling in a row, all having dropped some milk teeth at the same time . . . times when you really wish you had had a camera with you.
So I should not have much reason to complain.
But . . .
I actually feel quite uncomfortable here. This is simply because I am a foreigner. In a place like Miryang, where people like myself are less prevalent, I actually feel quite exposed, whereas in Changwon you could walk down the street unnoticed.
Then there is the apartment where I live. It's absolutely fine for a single person, but . . . it's not quite comfortable enough for my liking. One thing often remarked upon by foreigners here is that the owners of the accommodation seem not to understand that perhaps their definition of "comfortable" is rather different from that of their tenants; personally, as I have grown older, my joints (and various other parts of my body) have noticed the hardness of everything, like when everything is made of wood or plastic or metal, and often with no cushioning, it can be very difficult to relax; likewise, I have found it hard to sleep because East Asian bedsprings seem to be a lot tougher than in England, where in fact I used to have two very comfortable British-style futon beds; and when those were new, you would simply lie down on them and be out like a light.
Likewise with cooking and eating - normally the foreigner is given a simple gas range, which is actually fine in itself, but the kind of cooking you can do this way is limited and rather likely to pile on the pounds, when what I would really prefer would be an oven. So I seldom do any cooking at home now; it's not my personal style. Granted, the school has an arrangement whereby I pay a monthly fee and eat with the students, so I'm not exactly going to starve, but not all Korean food is to my personal taste . . . and so it goes on.
Another complaint the foreigners seem to have is that no-one seems to "get" the idea that perhaps the place where you live is not just somewhere to sleep - as well as doing things like reading books and listening to music or watching TV, for many people the "place to live" is also often at least partially a "place to work", in the sense that there are tasks relevant to your income which also often require you to take work home with you, and to which you might even adapt - as I certainly have - to the extent that the equipment you have is demonstrably superior to what your employer has provided, and so you prefer to get certain tasks completed to a greater or lesser extent at home, because you have provided yourself with a better (and more comfortable) environment in which to do some things which need to be done. If we were talking about the students and their motivation for studying, we would be talking about keeping their affective filter low and I personally think that what is true for the students is also true for the teacher - the easier the job can be made to be by the use of something like appropriate technology, the better the motivation becomes.
Alas, but here is where it all comes "unstuck". Where I do find myself agreeing with older foreigner friends here is with regard to the reasons why you might want to leave a job. All of the other jobs I had back in England and Wales all had some kind of "irritation factor" built in so that after a while, the accumulated "irritations" became unbearable and forced me out. It is saddening to discover, after all this time, that it is really no different here in Korea. The job is actually fine but perhaps the Koreans here are just as gauche in dealing with this particular foreigner as this foreigner is in dealing with them; the teaching method requires more application and dedication than any of the involved parties are really willing or able to put into it; and they really never discuss very much with me that could be classed as important or relevant in anything like a timely manner. So my patience is limited; and besides, at the ripe age of almost 47, I have started to realise that perhaps my days are numbered. I hardly need to add that this is all deeply unsettling . . . and rather demotivating.
My reservations with regard to teaching English in Korea pretty much stem from the same sources of dissatisfaction that I have experienced everywhere else - namely, that the difficulty I encounter in trying to bring all of my knowledge and experience to the job frustrates me tremendously, and as with everything else that I have done elsewhere, there is only so much of this that I can take before the grass looks greener elsewhere and my feet become loose again. But this time, it is really so much more difficult - the job situation (actually the whole situation, never mind just the job) back in the UK is dire for someone on the wrong side of forty, and besides, I have been here for so long now that it's almost like I've put down roots, at least insofar as this might be possible for a rather solitary, bachelor type male to do.
So here I am on a Sunday evening, the sun is setting on Miryang and the magic words: "strawberry yoghurt" are at the back of my mind. The new semester is almost upon me and tomorrow, the last day of this all-too-brief vacation (and probably tonight) will be spent at least partially in printing out materials and planning how the coming weeks should be laid out. And with this big new printer, laying all of that out in a comprehensive fashion should be so much easier than before. But I also have some personal decisions to make which will probably not be too easy.
Welcome to the future, Andrew.
* See http://books.trafford.com/08-0568.
Monday, 20. July 2009, 11:34:38
school, South Korea, Korea, hagwon
...
My comments about various things like the availability of other OSes in a place like Korea (i.e. the apparent lack of choice) plus the need for better communication between organisations and individuals seems to have ruffled a few feathers in various places (for example, at http://www.osnews.com/ as well as at work).
It has been said by a number of people (including my co-worker) that I must hate Korea, but this is not so; in fact, I am extremely sympathetic to the Koreans and their situation. To not be sympathetic (and ultimately friendly) towards these people, when one considers the history of this country, would be greatly unfair.
Let me say one thing at the outset: I do not hate Korea; this place and its people have been (and continue to be) very kind to me.
When you read these blogs, remember that these are a few of my private thoughts which I am sharing with you, and they are not intended to be offensive or rude, but they are intended to be honest. If my relationships with the people with whom I spend my time were really as bad as some want to suggest, I would surely have been kicked out of here ages ago, and in fact, there are plenty of foreigners whose unsettled nature has caused them to career hither and thither before the storm, until finally finding the right place to drop their anchors. This is something to bear in mind before responding to an advertisement, for example, for a job teaching here: it takes some tenacity to stay here, not to mention an awful lot of good and helpful friends, both Korean and foreign. I have known many of the locals here now for years and can (and have) counted on them often for assistance. People here are not friendly towards foreigners they consider offensive, usually.
But I hope that my regular readers will understand me when I say that I realise that my presence here is expensive, and that I genuinely want to render as much value for my time here as I possibly can. But this is definitely hard; not just for the fact that communication of important information (as mentioned previously) tends to be tardy or nonexistent, but also because I have often found myself so busy that there seems little time for learning to speak Korean between working, sleeping and eating. This was certainly the case while I was working at the hagwon, and has been true to some extent whilst beginning the new job, although I am starting to feel this easing now.
Today I want to share another little discovery which came my way recently when I finally ordered a copy of the University of Hawaii's KLEAR "Integrated Korean: Beginning 1". I realised from the outset that for people coming from a number of linguistic backgrounds, learning English can be extremely difficult simply because it is so very different from their own languages, but this point was made crystal clear by the new book's authors:
"Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean are among the most difficult languages for native English speakers to learn because of the vast differences between English and these languages in vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, and writing system, as well as in the underlying tradition, culture, and society. English speakers require three times as much time to learn these "difficult" languages than to learn "easy" languages, such as French or Spanish, to attain a comparable level of proficiency. Indeed, English-speaking students who study Korean deserve praise for undertaking such a difficult but invaluable language, which has enormous cultural, academic, economic, and strategic significance." [My emphasis]
Perhaps we need to reverse the logic here slightly to arrive at some kind of perspective, not of how hard it is for foreigners to learn Korean, but of how hard it is for Koreans to learn foreign languages. Basically, the authors are suggesting that if you were learning a language like French and needed (say) some four or five years to become really proficient and fluent speaking it, then an East Asian language, or Arabic, will take you between twelve and fifteen years to achieve the same level of fluency and competence.
True though this may no doubt be, it is nevertheless hinting also at how hard it is for native speakers of those languages to become competent and fluent in English. Many foreigners stay only for one or a few years, and perhaps only learn what Korean they need to survive before departing (although many also study intensely), and probably do not see just how many years the students here are expected to study English before leaving university - and they may not stop studying the language even then.
While some students are better than others at learning the language, this means that before they leave university, their study of English alone will have continued for about fifteen years, from the official beginning in third grade through to when they finally graduate. How effective that study proves varies, but as my readers have probably guessed on the basis of what I have written previously, I do not think that all of the fault for ineffective learning lies with the students themselves. Not only are the materials of variable quality, but an unfair burden is imposed upon the Korean teachers, especially (I would suggest) at elementary level because in addition to being the homeroom teacher for most of the other subjects, they are also expected to be able to teach English according to the book provided, and often at least partially in tandem with a foreigner whom they may find very difficult to understand and keep up with; and whereas some of us would like to think that the arrival of the foreigner is something of an opportunity for the Korean teachers to put their feet up for a bit and relax, in practice it no doubt adds to their stress levels, as the point of having the foreigner there is to avoid the opportunity to use Korean and focus upon English as far as is practicable.
Actually, how far is not very far at all, and as the foreigner often has no Korean to speak of (if you'll pardon the obvious pun), it falls to the Korean teacher to interpret and explain to the children as and when necessary - which can be quite often. As the Korean teachers' own proficiency at English naturally varies between individuals as much as it does with the children, this can prove a very difficult job for them. The foreigners who come here really need to appreciate this; but when you yourself are trying to be understood by the same students and this is probably the fourth or fifth lesson of the day, you are also becoming stressed and start to jabber - instead of slowing down, you speed up through nervousness.
In conversations with a number of Koreans, I have tried to make the point that if they want people to come here with little more than a first (undergraduate) Degree and help students to learn English, then they must understand that the foreigners need as much "conditioning" as possible before they begin, and that this "conditioning" needs to involve teaching techniques, cultural awareness, classroom behaviour and - yes - being intentionally taught Korean so that both students and Korean teachers can converse with them properly, to enhance mutual understanding and avoid the frustration, anger and misunderstandings that can result from what is often a rather basic lack of communication. Many young people apply for the job before they even know where Korea is, which says a lot for their own education systems (and see my early posts for another perspective on this), so this "conditioning" is crucial.
The whole "foreigner" situation often seems very one-sided; in fact, the foreigners often talk like only their opinions matter, that only their complaints are important. The Koreans have plenty of complaints about us, and we have a duty to try our best to mitigate these in our behaviour and our work; we voluntarily enter into a situation in which we are part of a relationship which can be tense and fragile. The fact that we are foreigners in a foreign land, and thus often feel tense and fragile ourselves, is perhaps something that our co-workers also need to understand.
I would add one other thing to this: folks, let's get away from the situation in which foreigners arrive here on one-year contracts, many of which are never renewed. If Koreans are going to waste their hard-earned money bringing expensive foreigners here for any extended period, especially in a time of economic difficulty, they should rearrange things so that people are encouraged to stay rather than leave (because of associated travel, arrival and leaving costs), help them become comfortable (including teaching them Korean to an acceptably competent level) and generally take fair advantage of peoples' willingness to stay in terms of having a group of Korea-based non-natives who are adapted and experienced and have a more even emotional environment as a result of having become better aligned with both the society in which they are living and their knowledge and understanding of what that society requires of them; simply bringing them into the country and throwing them into a classroom, expecting them to know everything that is required of them because you have given them the title "teacher", is just no help to anyone.
In short, there is no sense in the Korean education system committing itself to foreigners if the foreigners' only commitment is to be there for a year before hopping off to another country. The simple fact that the foreigners are known to find learning Korean difficult and very time consuming tells us that only committed people who stay here for a long time - and yes, who also have allotted time to study - will give the country as a whole the return on its money that it requires. Everything else is mere frippery, and a waste of money.
I would finish by recalling a young American lady who gave a lecture at a recent Kyoungnam Education Board In-Service Training session in Changwon. One thing she mentioned was the fact - confirmed many times by my own experience - that far from being a parasite upon the education system in financial terms, committed foreign English teachers often spend large amounts of their own time and earnings ensuring that their materials and presentation are as good as they can possibly be. I myself have been spending a small fortune this summer buying books and materials intended just for the summer school, and which may not even be used, at least this year. But they are all part of the foreign teacher's "armoury", tools of the trade waiting like some forgotten chisel to sculpt some future work of art.
I measure my own commitment by the amount of myself that I put into all tasks, not just teaching; and I might not be the best in the world at this job, but that commitment has kept me here now for over six years.
I'd just like to feel that it's appreciated . . . that's all.
Andrew.
Monday, 22. June 2009, 07:26:45
foreigner, school, South Korea, Korea
...
In among all of the questions surrounding those who come to a country like Korea to teach, there is one which is rarely mentioned: the underlying independence of attitude and spirit which separates Euro-American foreigners from those with whom they must work, and how it affects their relationships with them.
Anyone reading here regularly will know that I have been out of the UK for a long time. As I sit here writing this, actually at my work desk at the elementary school, I am just coming up to the renewal of my E-2 (teaching) visa for the sixth consecutive year - an event which will mark the beginning of my seventh year here in South Korea. But how much longer I might stay here is always an academic question; there often seem to be many things which threaten to make you throw a huff and storm out. Between less-than-perfect relationships with Korean co-workers and a generally tenuous foreigner foothold in a land where traditionally they were rather isolationist and inward-looking, it's always hard to predict whether you'll just lose your cool one day and get a job somewhere else, or get thrown out because you lost your rag completely and let fly.
Generally, East Asians value harmony at a social level, and so try not to cause each other offence; the way they address each other reflects the way in which this desire has long since seeped into and infused the very languages themselves. But this stands often in stark contrast to the rugged (and perhaps ultimately fatalistic) attitude of the Westerner, and there is something about this which has to be said, which perhaps the local people here don't realise . . .
. . . and it goes something like this: If I were an engineer, for example, I would be here on an essentially temporary basis, working for a company which sponsors me and basically doing what they want and pay me to do; there is little or no volition of my own which would bring me here. I would probably have to come here because refusing to do so might lose me my job rather sharpish - and generally speaking, engineers who are sent out here are quite well paid. I would come out here because I had to, expecting to leave again maybe sooner rather than later, but with no requirement or intention for long-term stay.
This stands in contrast with someone like myself, who essentially took a gamble that paid off. I left the UK not knowing how anything would work out, in fact (when I flew out to Taiwan) not even knowing if there was a job there at all. But behind it all was my determination to make a decision and keep it. Nobody forced me to leave home and nobody is (or has been) forcing me to stay here; I am free to go anywhere I want within reason, but it's my choice. This means, however, that there has to be a certain toughness of attitude, you must be determined to be an individual, and this attitude sets you apart from those with whom you must work here, something which (in more senses than one) they have difficulty understanding and appreciating - to them, it's all part of the "foreigner nuisance".
This is especially problematic in Korea because of the lamentable tendency to look inwards and consider all of the country's ills as deriving ultimately from the acts of foreigners. While this cannot be denied in some cases - for example, the Japanese occupation which only ended with World War II, and then the involvement of China and Russia in the Korean War, and much earlier, conflicts with Japan such as the Imjin War - it is ultimately misguided because it prevents the Koreans from accepting the necessary blameworthiness for their own errors, and from taking a more mature historical and geopolitical attitude in their daily affairs. This attitude towards foreigners prevents them from taking proper responsibility for a range of actions and decisions, but it also sours relationships because it absolves them from forming realistic relationships based upon understanding.
What makes me think about this at this precise moment in time is a series of experiences which have been taking place since I arrived here. One tends to get nagged for social faux pas such as the over-use of the word "crazy" in daily conversation, despite repeatedly pointing out that where I come from, the word seems almost meaningless, so I just got chewed out for this again. Then there is the tendency to just expect the foreigners to "magically" know things that they are "supposed" to know, despite the fact that such information really needs to be passed on within a reasonable time frame, and ideally in the right surroundings (i.e. not when we are dashing about between lessons, when we are one hundred per cent. guaranteed to forget anything we are told). There seems to be no acknowledgement of the simple fact that the foreigners are not Koreans, arrive here perhaps with no knowledge whatsoever of the language, social rules etc. and actually need to be educated in these things - not to mention being trained for doing any job in a Korean social environment. For some reason, these things are not considered important, until something bad happens and the "blame game" begins.
You would think that in an ideal world, people would discuss things regularly to foster mutual understanding and to make sure that things are - as much as possible - all done properly and on time. But no. Discussions of any kind with foreigners are shunned. Lack of linguistic ability (i.e. speaking English) undoubtedly makes it difficult for many of those involved, but socially, most foreigners in Korea are not members of the "group" and even within a company which employs them, they are not trusted. So they are usually slow to find out important information relating to what they have to do and often anything important never reaches them until it is too late.
Foreigners will tend to find themselves in conflict with Koreans because of their ingrained independence, yet it is precisely this quality which makes them desirable as employees in contexts such as teaching, where they may often be in complete isolation and require more than a little fortitude and resolution to see them through. On the other hand, this means that they may (like myself) end up being rather taciturn, and so communication is blunted yet again, as the Koreans take offence at the perceived unsociability of the newcomer (and this is precisely what has happened to me since I arrived here), and thereafter refuse to talk themselves.
Worse, some foreigners will find themselves in situations in which there is almost no discussion of anything and they are repeatedly expected to just "do as they are told" by Koreans who actually do not want or desire any contact with them at all. It has transpired that quite a number of the local foreigners have to be peripatetic teachers, i.e. rather like a glorified mobile tutor, they have to travel between a number of places each week and interact with large numbers of Korean staff who tend to be rather brusque and curt with them, which hardly helps them to understand what they have to do. So they become rather dispirited and after a while, when the question inevitably comes up in casual conversation: "Do you think you would stay for a second year if they asked you to?" - the answer increasingly seems to be "no".
In my own case, having spent all of my previous time in the private environment, I am finding that working in a state school is not as relaxed or as free as working in a hagwon, where I actually was able to choose my own textbooks, make my own plans etc., and this is constantly rankling against my natural sensibilities. Individuality infuses everything that I do and gives me the psychological power to continue in circumstances where - at an earlier time - I would otherwise have simply given up and gone home. But this brings me constantly into conflict with others who do not see things in the same way, and so my existence here can be a tense one. I think it is this which will ultimately determine how long I can or should stay here, as I also have sensibilities which can be offended, often for reasons which the Koreans might find unusual or bizarre.
But I am an individual, a product of an education system which (in stated intent, at least) is designed precisely to foster independent, self-starting individuals and not people whose prime aim in life is harmony and consensus at the expense of what might be termed personal progress; in the mind of someone like myself, the desire to find oneself a comfortable long-term job in a large company could only lead to effeteness and stagnation, but this is what many people out here want in life. So these are the kinds of people who surround me (the Koreans, that is), whereas I would go to the IP and meet many foreigners - primarily the engineers rather than the teachers - who are much more self-starting and mobile, and looking forward to challenges, and it is indeed a great contrast to behold.
So I am sitting here now, realising perhaps that this is essentially another civil service job (when I had sworn that the previous two were quite enough), and feeling that this environment is rather stagnant and that I probably will not be able to do the kind of heroic, go-out-and-get-it stuff that the hagwon environment allowed me to do which stretched me and led me to acquire new skills and meet people I admired and whose opinions I respected.
And I am wondering how long it will last . . .
Andrew.
Sunday, 14. June 2009, 02:28:24
South Korea, Korea, public school, hagwon
...
Just some random scribblings before departing for Miryang after another weekend in Changwon . . .
Much to my surprise, after actually consuming most of the International Pub's new supply of Smirnoff Mule (a vodka, ginger ale and lime combination which is refreshing and tasty, and actually leads to less consumption of alcohol), and finishing with a bizarre encounter with a young Korean woman who insisted on not only draining my large vodka and tonic but also the large red wine I had just bought for the landlady, I went back to the motel, had a shower, hit the sack and slept quite well until about 9:00 a.m. Now it's just after ten and before packing to begin the journey back to Miryang, I thought it was time for another blog.
The new job at the public elementary school has not exactly been going as well or as smoothly as I had hoped. While it is true that there remain communication difficulties and just a plain old vacuum of information so typical of this part of the world, there is one thing which may turn out to be a show-stopper in the end: when a new foreigner comes to work in a South Korean public school, they are supposed to have a four-day "orientation session" to ensure that they are more familiar with both the cultural milieu and the tasks they are expected to perform at their new school for their new employer. Alas, this is where so many of us are coming unstuck, and Korean work colleagues fail utterly to understand what a Big Deal it is missing it, simply because of the amount of important information we lose by not attending.
Now here's the crunch: according to one paragraph of my contract, EPIK are required to provide me with an orientation session before transitioning to the new post, and there appears to be no ambiguity in the terms used; the text actually says "shall" in this context, implying that this is a condition, and from which I impute that failure to provide orientation is actually a breach of contract. We will have to wait and see just how this pans out.
Anyway, another contractual condition is that most of my long summer and winter vacations (which I would actually prefer to be completely free, especially after five and a half years slogging away in a hagwon) will be occupied in "summer school" and "winter school". Apart from a desire to see friends back here in Changwon (and yet again there is a dastardly plot to lure me back to a next job perhaps in a public school here), what brought me here this weekend was the need for practical (and almost entirely job-related) shopping; firstly at the Kidari English Bookstore, where I picked up several books related to teaching technique and others which I thought would be useful for source materials, and secondly to the Alpha Mart, where I was able to get hold of other things like split pins and eyelets (for putting hands on clocks) and a couple of cheap glove puppets - a lion and a monkey, if you must know - plus a cheap clock for practicing time and surprise, surprise, met yet again a couple of my old girl students from the hagwon.
The good thing about the books - including Jeremy Harmer's "How to Teach English" [1], which came with a double-sided (PAL and NTSC) video DVD, and Ong and Murugesan's "Teaching English to Young Learners" [2], which came with an audio CD - is that digital media are more easy to manipulate in the emerging digital environment. The bad news was twofold: firstly, although some books come with disks, many still do not - too many publishers are insisting on sticking with tapes even though tapes are supposed to be on the way out. Secondly, ripping the DVD and CD to my laptop's hard drive proved to be difficult, although I could do the audio using RealPlayer under XP (ptui!), and the DVD could be viewed using Kplayer under Mandriva Linux (my preferred computing environment). Bizarrely, however, the DVD could not be played using Windoze Media Player.
It has to be said that good books about teaching the younger students seem to be few and far between; most seem to be written almost entirely with adult EFL/ESL learners in mind. Stuck in the middle of my third teaching course for some time now, the realisation had long since struck me that children have also rarely figured prominently in courses, even though most teaching jobs in a place like Korea will be either at a public elementary, middle or high school or at a hagwon. Similarly, it had struck me again and again recently that since teaching younger children involves keeping their affective threshold as low as possible, you want a hard core of five or six or so activities or games that you can just say the name of and the children know what's about to happen and what they have to do, in much the same way that they would with each section of the textbook; I'm sure lessons would be much less disjointed as a result.
With this kind of idea in mind, I found several books, mainly written in Korean (and which I therefore actually did not buy) but with lots of "classroom English" which clarified them, at the bookstore and bought them. One was "101 Games & Activities for Primary English" by Procter and Procter [3]; another was Carter and Amy's "Alphabet Starters" [4] which is highly graphical and entirely monochrome - perfect for copying - and has lots of songs, colouring exercises and some built-in dice games, all grist for the mill especially of the first/second grader classes, as I will have them for four consecutive hours each day for a week! But this is probably where more kinaesthetic work will come to the fore, whereas the older kids need more "conversation".
Alas, Carter and Amy only comes with tapes, although the other book, "Magic Chodong Youngeo Phonics" [5], actually states that the corresponding tracks on the tapes can be downloaded from a web site [6], so I shall be rather busy putting all of this together over the next couple of weeks. What emerges, however, is an additional need for a scanner (to render the pictures from the books) and a printer which can do A3 sheets (for laminated, reusable dice games and the like). The cost of those two alone will be equivalent to about US$500.00 - 600.00, but there y'go; I suppose it's a sign of how one dedicates oneself to both the place and the job that you develop enough confidence to invest in things like these.
Anyway, with these things firmly in mind (if still rather nebulous therein right now), it's time to post this latest blog and pack and depart for sunny Miryang.
See you shortly,
Andrew. 
[1] Harmer, Jeremy: "How to Teach English". Pearson Longman, Harlow, Essex, England. Second Edition, 2007. ISBN 978-1-405-85309-5.
[2] Ong, Marcia Fisk and Murugesan, Vinodini: "Teaching English to Young Learners: An Illustrated Guide for EFL Teacher Development". Compass Publishing, 2007. ISBN 978-1-59966-096-7.
[3] Procter, Melanie and Procter, Stanton: "101 Games and Activities for Primary English". Moonjinmedia, 2009 (10th impression). ISBN 978-89-7260-340-5.
[4] Carmen, W. and Amy, L.: "Alphabet Starters". CENGAGE Learning, Singapore, 1999. ISBN 978-0-534-83635-1.
[5] Moon, Ho-jun, and Hwang, Ui-gwon: "Magic Chodong Youngeo Phonics". Joh Eun-geul. Third impression, 2006. ISBN 89-5911-029-9.
[6] http://www.bookcamp.co.kr/
Friday, 10. April 2009, 13:17:41
English, Korea, public school, hagwon
...
A blog which poses the question: Why does changing jobs in a place like South Korea have to be so stressful???
In a nutcase: lack of communication. You may have noticed that the agency expected me to "do" things on a minimal informational basis, and then wondered why I wasn't available as they expected when they had set up a contract signing session with Mr. Jeong, the Big Man from the KEB. Why was that? Because they couldn't be bothered to tell me. Perhaps if they'd told me earlier that the contract signing was at 1:00pm, I could have been there on time?
And again: they told me that they were sending my Degree certificate back by express mail. It had been sent last Friday - now a week past - but I only got it back yesterday (the following Thursday). The person who signed for it when it was delivered didn't bother to pass it on . . . it just goes on forever. Astuteness and timeliness seem not to matter to the Korean mindset; conformism and procrastination are often the order of the day.
But (as they used to say in some old Guinness commercials) life's too short to be bitter . . . I am here now and though things are going in fits and starts, progress is being made. I have invested considerable time this week seeking out a free virtual disk manager for Windoze and installing it on both my systems here. And it works beautifully! Google for "Magic Disk", you'll find it on Download.com, ZDNet and Softpedia.
This was to allow me to prepare as fully as possible for lessons by being able to see the multimedia materials - some of it rather entertaining, I must admit - and together with electronic teacher manuals, I am slowly becoming able to compensate for the fact that unlike with EPIK, there is no real "orientation", something which is really Pissing Me Off Big Time about working in Korea. No-one here seems to understand that foreigners cannot simply walk in and suddenly and magically "know" everything that they are required to know - even the most experienced ones have to be taught first, especially if they have not been to Korea previously. Yet you encounter this all the time.
Even worse, every time one foreigner is replaced, the new incumbent is at Square One; there is no information, because no-one has thought to collect it; the excuse is always that they are "too busy", but this is because Koreans work "hard" but not "clever". This is one respect in which I have to "educate" my (actually quite beautiful) coworker, as I don't want her to end up overworked. And I don't want too much work myself if I want to get into a position where the quality of what I am doing is really good. But the reality is that every job you walk into here is not properly thought out; the fact that it is not all the Koreans' fault (like one foreigner might have the decency to WRITE THINGS DOWN and KEEP ACCURATE RECORDS before they depart) is a motivating factor; and you would really like to leave things better after you leave (whenever that may be) than they were when you arrived.
Having said all of this . . . what confronts me now is much better than my previous hagwon life. I get up early in the morning (and the buses are often a pain), but I can go home early and actually get a good night's sleep. Normal classes number five maximum and I will have four "after school" classes (plus two teachers' English classes) to teach each week, but even so, I still get to travel home early (i.e. before 5:00pm), so once I am fully conversant with the teaching method and in the swing of things, I am finally free to catch up with all the things I had to drop because working for a hagwon prevented it. Like my teaching course - stuck in the middle - and my language studies - Chinese (Traditional), Japanese and Korean. How can someone like myself be here for so long and not speak enough of the local lingo? It's ridiculous, but I know others who are worse. And then there's a resumption of computer programming (Linux is great for this, and it's FREE!!!), which I really want to do, especially C. Some people (I mean you, Joerg!) can combine hagwon work with these things, but in the end, I couldn't and that's why I am where I am now.
I hate to ramble, but Asia generally is a place of disorientation for the foreigner, and it takes a long time to find your feet, to find the "right path", as the Buddha might have said, and perhaps to cast off what we might call the essential self-centredness of the Western habituation and settle into the swing of the place to which fortune has taken us. And each path is deeply personal, every experience unique, but for the self-critical person, deeply enlightening.
But it can be deeply maddening at times, too. 
Andrew. =^-^=
Friday, 27. March 2009, 06:28:31
Korea, school, English, hagwon
...
No matter where I go some things never change . . . things that make me mad . . .
People who meet me have a bizarre obsession, an obsession which rears its ugly head so often it drives me insane. It is the obsession with being normal, with being afraid of being seen to be not normal, with being afraid of anyone else who somehow deviates from an accepted path of normality.
And it drives me mad.
Now, I like to go to a certain famous place here in Changwon, a place which is a known hangout for foreigners. Alas, one drawback of this is that my solitariness is regarded as an 'abnormality' which can only be cured by trying persistently to persuade me that being a bachelor is deviant behaviour and getting close female company is required.
I hate this.
I cannot imagine myself being anything but dead within a week if forced to exist or cohabit with another person. I like my solitude; it allows me to think clearly and to do the things I like to do, which often require concentration, without continually being interrupted and distracted; there is and has never been anything that I desire greater than to be as far away from crowds as possible. Yet this desire to see me 'partnered up' seems to be becoming pathological on the parts of those around me.
And it drives me MAD.
As I have been getting older, the notion has become deeply implanted within me that I do not need the constant attention of others; I keep out of other peoples' faces as much as possible nowadays. Contrariwise, I expect others to respect me and my personal space, and when they start wheedling and whining at me about this, I actually regard this as an invasion of my privacy, and indeed, expressive of some deep fear on their part. Fear of the unusual. The "abnormal". Fear of those for whom solitude and the benefits it brings in terms of focus and direction are important, benefits which their lives seem to lack because they keep each other distracted all the time.
Reading this, some critic might claim that by taking a solitary path, I am refusing myself all of the social interactions which most people consider essential and 'life-confirming'. Man, I beg to differ. Most people live their lives and die without ever having had any idea what they wanted or how to improve their lot; they live and die as slaves to a system whose basic tenet is that ordinary people are stupid and need to be controlled. And when people start whining at me, all that I can see is how they are controlled; that the controlled masses must conform to certain types of behaviour and if they do not, they are considered 'abnormal'.
Hey, I LIKE being this way. It makes me HAPPY.
Why do people have some kind of problem with that?
This topic is not open to discussion or negotiation. This is my life, and it is PRIVATE. I do not have any interest in the lives of others and in turn, I expect to be left alone.
And as to the question of 'getting a girlfriend' or 'getting married', my only real response is that I am not now, nor have I ever been, psychologically or physically suited to it. And I no longer care what other people think. I have my own life to lead and I want to do so as I (and only I) feel is correct. Only I can decide this. No-one else has any business in this area.
Got it???
Wednesday, 25. March 2009, 05:55:41
job, Korea, elementary, hagwon
...
Nothin' much to say in italics this time around . . .
At the time of writing, I am sitting here in a small motel room in Changwon, having been dragged from an afternoon of repose on Monday, quietly watching the solitary wooden duck floating aimlessly around on the Yongji Park Lake in the centre of town (and with no real idea what it was supposed to be doing there). I had just been talking to erstwhile newbie workmate Charlie a mere twenty minutes before when my cell phone buzzed; it turned out to be the man from the recruiter, with news about my visa authorisation, which they had just received from the Kyoungnam Education Board, and we had to proceed post-haste to the Busan Immigration Office.
Now, for the last five (and another inconvenient bit) years, there would be an annual swing back to nearby Masan - a place blessed with many things, like an extensive harbour, a huge underground shopping mall, its very own university and no fewer than three, yes three, immigration offices - and a renewal of the existing visa. This time, however, with an impending shift up north to nearby Miryang, jurisdiction shifted likewise to Busan, in whose administrative sway I will now spend at least another year after the transition from a hagwon to a state elementary school. However, I'm not complaining.
So he picked me up outside the City Hall, which is situated on the big circle known here as the Changwon Rotary. He had more documents for the man at the Office; the cost would be sixty thousand won.
"But I only have fifty!" I said. What a surprise; they didn't bother to tell me about it beforehand, now where have I heard that before?
He lent me another twenty . . .
As it turned out, the visa application took a while, but once we got to the man's desk, he (Mr. Park) turned out to be very civil and helpful. The only real drag was that it would take EIGHT DAYS to process the application, I was flabbergasted; as the late Frankie Howerd (a famous English comic actor of non-straight gender preference) used to say: "My gast has never been so flabbered!"
Worse, if I wanted it delivered, that would add two days plus a delivery fee, and at that point I was still waiting for my previous employer to make good with the outstanding salary, so my financial pips were close to squeaking. So next week (March 31st) I will have to drag myself at an unearthly hour to the bus station here and travel once more to deepest Busan to pick the thing up. Then back to Changwon to pick up some gear and thereafter to my new repose in Miryang.
Who says I don't get enough exercise?
The immigration office was packed when we arrived. We had to battle through the afternoon pre-rush hour traffic, struggle to find anywhere for him to park his SUV, and we were then forty tickets behind the person currently being attended to at the desk; Westerners were few in number. However, we got there in the end; I filled in the visa application form (something usually performed by my previous Boss), and in the end it took some fifteen or twenty minutes for the essential processing to be completed. We then had to battle our way back to Changwon as the rush hour was in full swing . . .
The necessary prelude to all of this, unfortunately, was having to get everything out of my previous domicile (I had to vacate the apartment, which would then be inherited by my other English workmate, Phil), and this turned out to be awful. There seems to be agreement - at least among the English-speaking foreigners I know here - that removal staff are always a pain. My experience of these people - and I have now come across two of them in the last year - is that they are in too much of a hurry and are careless (read: don't trust them with your breakables!!!). Worse, an offer to store my books and gear in a friend's spare room evaporated and we had to prevail upon another in rather a hurry. But the result has been a mess; he couldn't get my desk out through the main door and actually removed the legs and then pulled it sideways along the floor, ruining one edge of the top surface; I went there to get some stuff today (because he also scruffed up my suit, which I had only picked up from the cleaner's the previous day), which I had to drop off for a dry-clean AGAIN; before that I discovered that he had also put a gouge into the top of the desk as well. Aaaaaarrrrgghhhh!!!!!!!
The story of how I came to have a job offer for Miryang is a curious one. I had applied for (and had a successful interview with) the EPIK programme back in December. Alas, however, I dithered about it and when I finally made up my mind, it turned out to be too late. I called the recruiter last Tuesday and asked what was happening, and she gave me the Bad News; EPIK had dropped me.
"Oh, great!" I said: "What do I do now?" (bearing in mind that this was three days before my hagwon job was due to end).
"Well, it might turn out to be a blessing in disguise," she said. They had already forwarded my visa portfolio to the Kyoungnam Education Board, and it seemed that they wanted to interview me, which they did the following afternoon; this was also successful, and resulted in the aforementioned trip to Busan. I am now less than a week away from the final move to Miryang, and everything looks to be proceeding well.
So I have another week of limbo before I get a trip to Miryang; another week of retiring to a small space of an evening, possibly after visiting the pub, doing things on my laptop here and waiting for a hectic Tuesday.
But I'm free right now, and the freedom is good.
Andrew. ^_^
Sunday, 8. March 2009, 04:45:03
living, teaching, student, hagwon
...
Time to consider the upsides rather than the downsides. . .
Normally, when I sit down and cobble together one of my blogs, I have an idea in mind. This is one of the main reasons why there tends to be so little activity here: I take a long time to mull things over, to chew the fat before finding my own particular way of expressing myself. All of this is especially true now that I am on the cusp of what is (for me at least) a radical departure - leaving the relative security of a five-and-a-half-year hagwon job and exchanging it for something corresponding in the state sector.
The last few posts might make my reader think that pressures had got to the point at which I could take no more, and in a sense this is true, as the new materials being brought in by the franchise are illogical, badly explained and (as I could tell from the beginning) actually only partly finished. More care should have been taken to "polish" them before they hit the market, and especially they should have checked their spelling for consistency (one unit in US English, the next in British, with not a word of explanation). And true to form, JC have continued their eccentric choice of materials . . . two units involved trying (and failing) to discuss and summarise the storylines of Aesop's Fables. What possible relevance could an understanding of Aesop have to young teenagers in modern South Korea? Why is there so much insistence upon the likes of opera and classical composers? It's almost as if the whole thing was slapped together in a mad rush, and frankly, I think it was. None of these things will help the kids be more competent with computers, understand why they picked up a nasty rash the other night, or communicate effectively with speakers of other tongues. It's only thorough in the way it is impractical, and unlike the older materials, hardly encourages the students to actually, er, talk.
However, there are other reasons why I felt compelled to leave. Five and a half years is a long time in one position, and the fact is that there is no promotion in the hagwon environment; it is a dead-end job. In a real school (or at any rate, in a larger institution), a person might expect to progress within a department and maybe, after a number of years of service, be considered for things like a DoS (Director of Studies, not Denial of Service, I hasten to add), departmental head or even principal or vice-principal post. But hagwons are generally rather small and in truth, a foreigner seems unlikely to be considered in that kind of way, all of which makes you start to think after a while.
Hagwons can be stressful and cosy at the same time, as things like housing are thrown in as part of the contract (meaning that you only pay for utilities, cable, Internet etc.), whereas many of the kids who attend your classes are in fact in the lower quartile of learning ability and often have difficulty concentrating on anything for any length of time; the disparity between what you are trying to achieve (academic essay writing, for example) and the kids' existing abilities is often sufficient to make you want to give up. As we say back in Blighty: "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear", and brother do we have a lot of sow's ears out here . . .
At the end of all of this, and despite all of the benefits you undoubtedly reap as a foreigner here, you do become disillusioned. You have to pause for a moment and take stock, and try to steer a path towards where you think you ought to be. Notionally at least, the process of "education" should be one in which there is an end product which is better-trained and more capable than it was when it fell into your care; but it just doesn't seem to work. Everything is screwed up; not only can we not get the kids to break out of the repetitious, rote-learning frame of mind enough to show some real individuality, many of us actually throw in the towel when confronted with learning to speak Korean, despite the fact that we need it desperately for work, navigation and general daily living. As work starts to build up, the time you had at the beginning which was available for things like this diminishes and you feel that the situation is hopeless. Never mind the fact that Korean learning materials are often of poor quality, you cannot find either the time to use them or a comfortable space in which to do it.
I guess you could say that it's a bit too easy to become jaded and pessimistic, and you start to forget that, hey, Korea is actually a very nice place with often very friendly people, who really want to help you and communicate their ideas to you, the living here is not bad at all, it's just that the Korean way of doing things often strikes the foreigner as strange. And this brings us back to what I said previously about "orientation" - half of the troubles the foreigners have here stem from lack of care on the part of the hagwons themselves. They don't go the full nine yards with anything, and the consequences of this constantly return to bite them up the bum (as we might say in England). The Boss has to go to a meeting somewhere, let's say, and because you have a spare set of keys, you are effectively in charge of the place at least until a Korean member of staff arrives. You can't take important calls because, well, you can't speak enough telephone Korean; then one or more of the parents comes in and you struggle to explain that maybe the Boss might be back by two o'clock, so they have to go away feeling less than "gruntled". Each day is punctuated by "happenings" which a better-organised and more professional institution would be able to avoid, and encouraging the foreigners to learn some effective Korean by having regular lessons with feedback, while undoubtedly welcome, seems to be something only a minority of hagwons feel inclined to lay on for people.
So for the record, let me forget the inconveniences of being a foreigner here and lay some stress on the positives. Although it's cold in the winter (and the winter of 2003, for example, was very cold), rain and snow are infrequent (at least here in the extreme south) and for most days of the year, the sun is always shining. Typhoons happen but they are rarer than in Japan or Taiwan/China, for example. Summers can be very hot, but this is not always a bad thing.
Your job is usually stable both practically and financially, and the hagwon scene these days shows much more legal rectitude than, say, ten years ago; you would understand this if you were like myself, an old lag often chewing the fat with even older lags. Shopping is easy and your bank will issue you with a debit card so that if you are short, you can use this to pay for things; transferring funds between banks is likewise a complete doddle, although when you want to send funds back home to pay your bills, it becomes more involved (in my case, from Korean won to US dollars to UK pounds via Wachovia in New York, urrrghhh). Prices are generally low and it's therefore not unreasonable to assume that a careful person could save money while they are here (unlike myself, ahem).
Accommodation is often not perfect for hagwon workers but it is generally OK; cable Internet can be arranged and for more adventurous bods like myself, you can actually approach people to order the parts and then build a computer yourself, as I did four (and a bit) years ago. The overall situation is better than in places like Japan and Taiwan, where the cost of accommodation etc. can be quite limiting; Taiwan extracts much more income tax from foreigners as well.
Maybe the killer, however, is the lack of substantial time off from work. Generally, the hagwon's "summer break" amounts to three week days and the closest weekend back-to-back; this year (and last), national celebrations like Chuseok and even Christmas fall at bad times, and we lose out; due to a small chorus of complaints, the Boss gave us an extra day for the Lunar New Year this time. The state schools' situation is, of course, radically different, but then, they don't have to worry so much about their bottom line.
I would always return to the topic of a previous blog and suggest to people that if they get accepted for a post here, they should stay here as long as they can, nowadays of course because of the lamentable situation in the global economy, from which they will be largely buffered, but also because, for those approaching their "mid-life crisis" especially, living and working here allows you more time to take stock. Arrive here with the definite intention of formulating a plan for the future, and as you achieve each step of your plan, your confidence will grow. I am nowhere near as pessimistic now as I was only five years ago - disillusioned, yes; downhearted, hell, no!
I left England with one specific goal in mind: to learn as much as I could and return wiser. Korea in particular has enabled this more than other places, and the learning process continues. But you have to be focused and get the right tools. Maybe I'll blog about that soon . . .
Andrew. ^_^
Sunday, 8. February 2009, 04:29:55
job, employment, Korea, teaching
After five and a half years in Korea, it's time for a change . . .
Regular readers (and there do seem to be some of you) of this blog will know by now that while living here in Korea may often be nice, it's also often frustrating. Nowhere is this more obvious than when a foreigner decides it's time to up sticks and walk, in this case from one job to the next, for whatever reason.
I first encountered this in a previous employ in Taiwan. Once you leave (or make it known that you have decided to leave), you are almost persona non grata: the Boss won't talk to you or even (in some cases) allow you onto the premises just to say "hello" to the people you used to work with. When I decided that I was fed up with the last place in Taiwan, I had amassed a huge load of toys (plus flashcards) that I used to use in the lessons with the kids (and spending otherwise boring free time at the weekends making a fresh batch of your own flashcards can be highly therapeutic, by the way), so I thought: "Ah! I can give them to Miss Woo (the Boss at the time), and the kids can still play with them when I'm gone!"
Errr . . . no. Miss Woo was cordial but declined the offer, which I found hard to understand. She also seemed to make it clear that my presence was no longer wanted! So I gave the whole lot to the lady who owned the University Hall of Residence where I had been staying, who had a little daughter whom she wanted to learn English, and she was amazed. But the people there were always very kind to me, so why shouldn't I be kind to them, too?
This is an unfortunate trait among East Asian employers that anyone intending to come here for an extended period should be aware of: once you signal to them that you intend to leave, your usefulness to them has ended. They also now have the expense of getting someone new in to replace you, the cost and effort of which is perennially unwelcome, especially as they now have to go through a recruiter (because they often do not have the linguistic ability to interview people, for example), and this costs them an arm and a leg. And then there's immigration . . .
I will write more about this shortly, but the potted version is that I have come to another of those sad times in my life where I have to say some kind of "goodbye" to my little friends, just at a time when I have started new classes with fresh elementary kids (and just at a time when they have made it perfectly clear that they prefer me to one of the other guys here). This time I am determined to do things that I never thought of before. I have to pop up to the local E-Mart today for a new printer cartridge, and I intend to get a wad of business cards (the cheap perforated type you print yourself) and give one to each of the kids. Hey, cheap's my middle name, didn't you know that???
I also have my own Yahoo Group, to which they will be invited, so they need never lose contact with me again. It has been rather idle for the last few years because I have been so busy, so it will be good to dust it down and make better use of it.
So I am now making plans for the new future. Unfortunately it may not be possible to stay here in Kyungnam (South Kyungsangnam Province), where I have been living all this time, because I dithered about making the decision and missed the opportunity; my new recruiter tells me that I will probably have to accept a new post in North Kyungsang, but that's only a short train or bus ride, so I can still show my face here sometimes. I have a number of "projects" which will also keep me involved in this area.
And now . . . time for a long walk. But the exercise is good for me!
WIDGETIZE