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.