It was bound to happen eventually: Military Friends

Anna's going-away barbeque was really fun.  There were a bunch of Koreans from English group like Erica, Rachel, Heather, Kim, and Ashley, Bobby and Tony, who I'd never met before, and a bunch of the teachers from my school, everyone except Shannon and Tara.  Shannon had plans to be in Seoul with her friends and Tara wasn't invited because the other teachers don’t like her.  Bobby brought out a legit barbeque, with a tiny grill, and he made gkalbi.  The pork was really good.  We ate directly off the grill, and everything was delicious.  Everyone was talking and laughing and drinking and having a great time in general.  Then the food went away but the drinks kept flowing, so everyone got a little drunk.  I stopped drinking pretty early on in the night, but everyone else kept going.  Still, everyone had a great time, and I get along really well with everyone.  

Then Anna was gone, and this week I was in charge of her old classes, like I will be for the rest of the time I'm here.  I really like her classes.  She's got some great kids.  The highlights of her kindergarten:

Steve is by far the best kid in that class because he's smart, creative, and completely goofy.  Every time he makes a mistake he puts his hands on the side of his head and shakes his head back and forth really fast and yells "Aaaarrhhhh!"  He has really floppy hair in a bowl cut and so it looks hilarious when he does this.  He also looks a little bit like a monkey, with the bowl cut and his sticking-out ears.  He's really difficult to control sometimes, but he never does anything too crazy, mostly just moves around a lot and talks a bit too much.

Julie is beautiful and sweet and innocent, with this high pitched voice that's somehow not at all annoying.  She LOVES me.  She might be the most beautiful kid I've seen since I came here. I've thought so ever since the first time I saw her in the hallway.  She's also pretty smart (at some things, sometimes) but mostly what I love about her is that she always tries, and that she isn't afraid to make mistakes sometimes.

Sally bugs the crap out of me sometimes.  She's hands-down the smartest kid in the class, but she can't sit still to save her life.  The best thing about her is that every time she finishes her work, while she waits for me to finish checking it she gets bored and spins around until she tips over.  Which is pretty funny to watch.  I think she's fallen over while spinning in circles at least twice every class I've taught her in.  While I love it when she falls (because she doesn't care, or realize that it happens every time she spins, so she just gets up and starts spinning again) I can't stand it when I'm trying to tell her something and she keeps running away.  Every time she finishes her work she puts her pencil away, but when I have her fix mistakes she goes back to get it and then puts it away after every mistake and runs off.  So when she has lots of mistakes it takes forever to get through because I have to call her from halfway across the room and then she has to run to the other end to get her pencil and come back and then do it all over again.  For every mistake.

Anna only has eight kids in her kindergarten, and most of them are really quiet.  Cherry (no joke, that's her name) is really quiet, as is Cindy, though Cindy's been absent all week.  Junsung is pretty quiet too and so is Andrew.  The only other kid who is loud is Ryan, but I haven't decided about him yet.  So far he doesn't seem to have much individuality.  He mostly just makes general noise.  It's not enough to be annoying, or enough to set him apart at all.  He is Steve’s best friend though, so maybe there is some latent awesome in there that I’m just not noticing yet.

Tonight Holly took everyone to Songtan, where the American Air Force Base is.  Her husband is in the Air Force, so she spends a lot of time there visiting him.  She actually originally came to Korea to teach because he’d been stationed here and she didn’t want to be away from him for a whole year.  We went to this really good (for Korea) Mexican restaurant, where a guy named Chuey sang Latino music all night with his guitar.  The food was delicious, particularly because I’ve been missing Mexican food lately.  I have never been so appreciative of an enchilada.  Holly, her husband Chris, and his friends were going out afterward too but everyone else was going home because tomorrow is Jeremy and Allison's going-away party and that night is looking like it's going to be more than a little bit crazy.  We all wanted to rest up.  Besides, three new teachers showed up just this week so they're pretty exhausted.  I’m sure we’ll hang out with these guys a lot more in the future.

Speaking of the three new teachers, they are Cally, Tween, and Kristin.  Kristin and Tween are from Canada, and Cally is from New Jersey.  Seriously, what do I have to do to escape New Jersey?  Ever since I left Fordham... I’m kidding.  Cally is really cool, and it seems like she and I will get along pretty well.  Kristin is pretty cool too.  Tween seems cool, but she didn't come out tonight because she has taught in Korea before, so she has friends in Seoul that she went to visit for the weekend.  Still, I think that more than anyone else I'm going to get along with Shannon and Tonya.  Not that the other girls aren't cool, but it's just that over the past three weeks the three of us have bonded a lot.

Anyway, it's late and I want to read before bed for a while.  People should get on Skype more often, and if I've sent you a friend request, you should accept it.  DO IT.  You'll like it, I promise.  I'm a good Skype friend.  I buy you Skype presents, and come to all your Skype games.  I wear Skype foam fingers and cheer for you and everything.  Seriously, it's good times.

A Crazy Work Week and an Interesting Cultural Difference

This week has been extremely crazy.  I've now taught almost half of the kids that attend this school.  I'm constantly getting shuffled around and thrown into new classes without being trained or told what to do, and I've essentially been working between eight and ten hours every day this week, constantly on my feet, and by the time I'm done I'm too tired to do anything else.

Still, I finally started getting to know the kids that I will be teaching for the rest of the year.  They're pretty great kids and a lot of them are really funny.  Anna kept better control of them than any other teacher in the school, so they're well-behaved also, which is good.  I teach ACI Grade 2, which is math, language arts, and science with the high-level eight year-olds, and also ACI Grade 1, which is math, and language arts with high-level seven year-olds.  I still teach seven year-old kindergarten every morning, which is actually with six year-olds because Korean age is measured differently.  

Quick tangential explanation of Korean age: you are born one.  There is no “How old is he?”  “Oh he’s four months.”  The kid is one, instantly.  Then, on January first, every person born within a given year turns one year older.  So a child born on December 31^st will be considered two years old on his second day of life.  That means that when I’m talking about seven year-olds, they are five or six in American age, and six year-olds are four and five, etc.  It can make for a pretty interesting difference in physical and mental abilities when you’ve got students born in January and students born in December.  Though I suppose that happens in schools everywhere in the world.

Back to our regularly scheduled program…

This week I've mostly been with Polar Bear class, which is Thor's old kindergarten.  Some of the kids in there are seriously annoying, but a few of them are some of my favorite kids in the school.  

One kid, Andy, is by far the most obnoxious child I've ever met.  He insists on being on top of me all the time.  If I sit down, I barely have ten seconds before he'll climb in my lap and twine his arms around my neck so that I can't get free.  If I'm walking around, he'll throw his arms around my waist and wrap his legs around my legs so I'm wearing him as a sort of fannypack/ skirt combo.  If I try to get away, he wraps his arms and legs around my ankles so that I have to peel him off.  He climbs on my back, straddles my knees, and just treats me in general as if I am a jungle gym.  Just to clarify for those of you who don’t know me very well, I am not a jungle gym.

Andy is actually a pretty interesting demonstration of a major difference between American schools and Korean ones.  In America, you are taught to never, never, NEVER touch children if it can be avoided.  At Peace Games we were told that we should avoid it, and although we gave them hugs sometimes, it was only if they initiated contact, it was always brief, and there wasn't much actual body contact.  You don't touch kids in order to stave off any sort of accusations.  In Korea, everyone touches children.  Teachers hug them, pick them up and spin them around, and play with them in a more hands-on way.  Students give teachers hugs and kisses, sit in their lap, and say I love you.  That level of affection is not only acceptable, but encouraged. The kids become so instantly comfortable with people that they all climb in my lap all the time, and give me big bear hugs, or tickle me, or hold my hand, even though they don't know me.  It's interesting.  It almost makes me uncomfortable at times because living and teaching in the U.S. has taught me to be so careful, but it isn't seen as a bad thing here at all to be affectionate with children.  It's a really nice change of pace from the American climate of fear and cynicism surrounding adult/child relationships.

At the same time, if you are walking down the street and you see a cute kid and they're staring at you, the parents usually encourage them to start talking to you, and try to get them to wave and say hello or goodbye.  If you want to touch a kid, or take a picture of a random kid on the street, it's totally fine and normal to do so.  Some parents even take it as a compliment, because it means you think their child is good-looking.  At restaurants, kids are allowed to run around and everyone just sort of keeps an eye on them as they play.  Parents keep a slightly sharper eye than others, but everyone looks out for them.  At a staff dinner dinner recently Kelly, one of the teaching partners, brought her son, and he was almost never in the back room with us.  She knew what part of the restaurant he was in, but he ran around alone, playing with his toys.  He's about three.  He wasn't the only kid running around either.  In the U.S. they would kick you out of a restaurant for that.  

Other kids I love:

Robin, who is really smart and funny, but has horrible behavior.  I really do always like the bad boys.  Robin is really quick to understand things and he makes the funniest faces.  He was one that when they were all really bored at their field trip started playing with me until all the kids were engaged and having a great time.  He seriously saved the mood of that day.  He's got big, wide eyes (for a Korean kid) and for some reason this makes him look perpetually quizzical.  His grin is pretty sweet also.  His grasp of English is on the higher level for his class.  

Bin is a lot like Robin in that he is smart and playful, but has a hard time following instructions or listening. Bin is just hilarious.  He has this thick mop of wavy hair that he's always tossing out of his eyes, and he always has lots of energy.  He never listens to anything I say, but he's so fun that I don't really care.  His work always gets done, so it doesn't really matter all that much.  

Ivy is HILARIOUS.  She's this tiny little girl with unbelievable amounts of personality, energy, and moxy.  She loves me back.  It's nice.  Ivy, on the first day I taught their class, was the only one who could remember my name, which is fairly normal for five year olds, but she kept calling me Miss Bibimbap, which is a kind of Korean food.  Then she started calling me Miss Yummy for short.  She is also hilarious because at silent reading time (which is kind of a joke as none of them can read) she always holds up her book facing out, as if she were a teacher reading a story to her class, and makes up a story based on the pictures.  Every so often she looks out at her invisible students to make sure they are listening and understanding the story.  Adorable.  

One teacher, Anna is having a going-away barbeque with the English group tonight.  This week has been work-work-work followed by party-party-party because so much is happening.  Last night was Tonya's birthday, which was pretty fun.  We went to a foreigner/Korean bar and played darts all night, and then the bartenders put on a bottle juggling show, after which they lit the bottles on fire and did the same show again.  It was pretty sweet.  I'm hoping tonight will be just as fun.  I think it will be.

So I thought today couldn't get much worse...

and then it did.  They held a meeting after work.  All the administrators were late and the meeting ran long, meaning I was at work from 9am to 8pm, an 11 hour shift for which I will not be paid overtime. 

The gist of the meeting was this: Thor is gone, which means there is no one to cover his classes for the next two weeks.  As a result, rather than spending this week learning about the class I will be teaching for the next year, I am spending more than half of it taking on his schedule.  Almost the entire thing fell to my lot.  I was not asked if this was okay even though it is outside my job description and it is only my third week at work.  I was not thanked for taking on the burden.  I was not given any choice.   When one of the other teachers (Tara, who I had filled in for previously) offered to take on one of the classes that I've never taught before and give me one of hers that I had taught the last two weeks, the school director almost didn't let us, for no discernable reason.

Some research and simply asking questions of other teachers I know has revealed that this sort of thing can be pretty standard for teaching in Korea.  Koreans view your obligation to your company differently, so that anything you are asked to do is a necessity, not a request, and complaining or refusing is not done.  If your job wants you to work ten extra hours per week, you work those hours for no extra pay.  If they hand over extra projects that are impossible to finish during work hours, it has to be done at home.  People in a variety of industries are routinely asked to step outside their job descriptions and do work that is not covered by their contract.  And you’re just supposed to do it, no questions asked.

The most annoying part of the meeting for me was that a lot of the other teachers, including those who are leaving soon, starting bringing up other issues, which the administration just brushed aside, regardless of the fact that the issues were all extremely important.  For example, one of the teachers who recently left had gone to the Korean pension office to pick up his pension, only to be informed that the school hadn't paid four months worth of it, which is not only a breach of contract, but straight up illegal.  On top of this, I found out that we do not receive the full number of vacation days that the contract led me to believe, and that there are extra complications for sick days as well.  The owner is completely unapproachable, and spoke Korean the entire meeting, with the director as translator, in spite of the fact that the owner is fluent in English and could have done the whole thing himself.  

Thor left because the administration was picking fights with him, and he wanted to screw them over.  However, they are laying everything on the teachers, which just means Thor only screwed us over.  I also found out that the school owners don't pay our Korean teaching partners overtime even though they constantly work over their hours, and they have neglected to pay their pensions for longer than they've neglected to pay ours.  I was not welcomed to the school in any way, and only met the other teachers and knew their names because they came and knocked on my apartment door to introduce themselves.  Without them I wouldn't have known how to get to work, what I was supposed to be doing, or what I was supposed to be teaching.  I was not trained, but thrown into a classroom with a vague lesson guide that hadn't been explained and told to teach.  

This, apparently, is not the way English teachers are supposed to be treated, though I’ve heard that it happens unfortunately often.  There are stories of teachers being fired in the eleventh month of their contract so the school won’t have to pay severance, of teachers who routinely teach for three or four extra hours per week for no extra pay, and people whose schools don’t put them in the pension program at all, illegally filing them as “private contractors.”  I like teaching so far, and working with the kids is great, but a lot of the business practices of the hagwons (private English academies) in this country are questionable at best.

A Runner, Pulled

Yesterday afternoon Tonya texted me and asked if I wanted to go to dinner with her and Anna and Kim, who is a Korean guy that Anna and Adeel are friends with, and who Tonya has now befriended. It was his (and Anna's) friend Heather's birthday dinner and they were going to make a huge spread. I went and it was really fun. It was at Heather's parent's apartment, but we all met at the grocery store and they bought lots of food to make dinner. We had fried and roasted chicken, salad, Korean salad (which was a bit too spicy for me), kiwi, roasted potatoes, and lots of wine. It was Anna, Tonya, Heather, Kim, Leah, and Erica, all of whom are Korean. The only person I had met before was Kim, but it was okay because Heather and Leah were really friendly, and Erica agreed to teach Tonya and I how to speak Korean, which is exciting. Tonya also agreed to teach me French, which could be cool. In exchange, I will go on Tuesdays to meet with them (they meet on both Tuesdays and Thursdays) for dinner and English language exchange. Their English is already excellent, but they want to perfect it and become completely fluent, and the only way to do that is to sit and talk with a native speaker. So Tonya and I agreed to meet with them and plan out topics and fun activities. They all seemed really nice, and Tonya and I agreed to make dinner for them next time. Something Western.

The big drama this morning is that Thor (one of the six year-old Kindergarten teachers here), who has two weeks left on his contract, didn't come in today or call in sick. He had to combine classes with Holly, which left her with about 25 kids, so I jumped downstairs to help out. This week I was supposed to shadow Anna, who I'm replacing, because it's her last week, and I need to get trained before picking her class up on Monday. It wouldn't be a big deal at all, except that Thor usually calls in sick and today he didn't. So everyone was a bit worried, and David, the school's owner, went over to Thor's apartment to make sure everything was okay.

Thor was gone. Not like, not there, he'll be back later, but like, all his stuff packed up, nothing left but the furniture and the trash, moved out of the country GONE. So for the next two weeks we are a teacher short. This means that today and tomorrow I have to pick up his classes rather than getting trained, which is annoying. This afternoon we all have to stay late today for a meeting to schedule out who is picking up the rest of his classes for the next two weeks until the new teachers get here. Like seriously, how the hell do you just pick up and leave? And technically, because he didn't complete his six months, they don't have to pay for his flight in, contractually, which means that he owes the school money that he isn't going to pay them. It's just really inconvenient for everyone who's left. I was supposed to get off early today and now I have to stay late.

Apparently, this is actually a pretty common thing to happen in Korea, and is commonly referred to among teachers as “pulling a runner.”  In order to avoid unnecessary drama and paying back the school money you owe them for not completing your contract, some teachers just pick up and leave.  Most often they have already arranged to leave the country, but sometimes they just move in with a friend for a little while before planning their next move.  The common thought with Thor is that he left and went to Taiwan, where he had been talking about teaching next. 

It’s kind of worrisome that something like that is common enough to have its own phrase.  It makes me wonder if teaching here is harder than it seems like it will be, or too difficult to deal with at all.  Am I in over my head?  I don’t think so, but who knows how I’ll feel in a few months.  A lot can happen and a lot can go wrong.  Hopefully things will go pretty smoothly here and I won’t even consider doing something that irresponsible and drastic.  But who knows.