Category: Banalities & Journaling

We had a 회식 (work dinner) last night. This was no ordinary hweh-shik, however. It was, arguably, my first hweh-shik where I was the initiator. I’d proposed sometime back, to Curt, that I’d like to give a “thank-you dinner” to the hagwon staff because it was the first anniversary of my cancer surgery, despite the hard times and difficulties, overall the staff has been hugely supportive.
Curt said he’d take it under consideration. I’d even offered to pay for the dinner, which I’m pretty sure he didn’t think I meant seriously, because last night, when it finally happened and we went to a buffet near LaFesta and had our hweh-shik, I took out my card to pay at the end, and everyone was dumbfounded. In Korean custom, it’s almost always the boss who pays for these things, but in fact there is one situation where another might pay – which is if the person paying is “senior” (i.e. older) than the boss. And that, unfortunately, is the case – I’m the old man at KarmaPlus, by about 10 months.
I was congratuleted, therefore, not just for surviving my cancer, but also for behaving truly “korean.”
Several commented that they’d never even heard of, much less witnessed, a “foreigner” buying hweh-shik for Korean coworkers.
저는 미국 아저씨인데요, I said, half-jokingly. [“I am an American ajeossi.” – ajeossi is a difficult-to-translate term that means a typical Korean man of middle age and indeterminate social status, maybe something like “average joe” but also used as term of address toward people with unknown names… it could be compared to the way mid-20th-century Americans would deploy names like “Mack” or “Joe”].
[daily log: walking, 6.5 km]

My friend Bob wrote me a long email recently in which he discussed feeling trapped in his job. I, too, have struggled with that feeling, although perhaps in different ways or for different reasons.

I certainly have days of deep, deep dissatisfaction with my "life as it is" these days. The last few days have been in that category – I feel like a failure at work and that permeates all the other aspects of my life, since I have let work become so central to my current sense of self and identity. This is, of course, a dubious move from a mental health standpoint, but it seems almost unavoidable, for when I dwell on other aspects of my life, I find myself even more disappointed.

I won't say that I feel that I am a bad teacher. I don't actually think that. What I will say, however, is that I may be a bad teacher for this environment – what Koreans need and want, in a teacher, isn't necessarily where my strengths lie. Nevertheless, I remain, and keep trying.

Recently, our middle-school TOEFL-based program has been dying. Students have been dropping out of it in a steady attrition, either migrating to the so-called "TEPS" cohort or leaving KarmaPlus altogether. The reasons are obvious: being in the supposedly "premium" TOEFL cohort isn't getting them the high scores they want and need on their school tests. 

The reason for this, in turn, is because TOEFL and a Korean middle school English test are quite different animals. TOEFL is a fairly well-designed test, intended for university level, that seeks to determine a student's communicative competence in English. TEPS (Korea's special home-grown English test) and the middle school tests that seem to follow the TEPS lead are not tests of English communicative competence. Instead, what they most resemble is perhaps the types of tests in Greek and Latin that high-schoolers did around a century ago. With frozen idioms and artificial texts, they quiz you on minutiae of grammar and vocabulary and are brutally unforgiving of small mistakes that the TOEFL, by design, essentially ignores. 

If a student forgets to write -s on the word "drive" because it happens to be in the third person singular, the TOEFL scorer may take note, but the impact on the final score is minimal as long as the writer's ideas are clear. In the tests my students take, however, a missed -s can mean a hit to the final score that fails to get one into one of the elite high schools.

I have students who have gotten 80 or 90 points on practice TOEFL tests (a level that could get them into an American University, provided they meet other admission criteria of course), but who blow the naesin (school test). These are the students who are dropping out.

OK… this is a digression. My TOEFL2 cohort has died – there weren't enough students left to keep it running. We only have one TOEFL cohort left in middle school, and it's a mediocre collection of students at best – the English stars are all gone. 

As their teacher, I feel like a failure. I can't help them prepare for naesin by teaching TOEFL, it seems – knowing English isn't enough. What they need is meticulous attention to grammatical detail and the capacity to memorize obscure English vocabulary. I guess I'm willing to try to teach this, but I need to "train myself." Additionally, ironic though it is, I will have to further master Korean to be able to teach anything for naesin at all: the test is in Korean, after all (not the texts or words, which are English, but the questions – i.e. the parts that say e.g. "Underline the noun phrases in the below sentences" or "Which sentence below contains no grammatical error?").

I started out intending to write about feeling trapped. I guess my answer is… sometimes I feel trapped, but I'm kind of just accepting that I feel that way sometimes, and not fighiting it. I'm here for the long haul, it seems – both because I'm tired of quitting things (my life has been that of a "serial quitter," as my former coworker and friend Tyler once said with huge impact on my psyche), but also because I'm now a cancer patient who can't easily get insurance and inexpensive healthcare in my own country (I don't trust that obamacare actually solves the preexisting condition catch-22 – it doesn't appear to have done so).

I do not use the metaphor "I'm married to Korea, now" lightly – I mean to capture exactly that level of meaning: "for better or for worse…"

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

One Korean word that I use quite frequently is 시간표. It means “schedule” – I use it because it comes up so much at work, and there are so many issues involving the scheduling of classes, etc.
Today we had a sort of “schedule crisis” – that’s how I would describe it. I am of the opinion that KarmaPlus has made its own schedule unnecessarily complicated, but it’s more a consequence of lack-of-planning and the “evolved” nature of it than because of any specific incompetence. In any event, anytime some policy change (e.g. in this case, the new policy “Jared should teach all the advanced level speaking classes for the elementary students”) is decided, there arise numerous scheduling conflicts and problems – in fact, we have 11 cohorts in parallel and only 10 teachers – so you can see where the problems can arise as resources get spread quite thin. Thus, the new schedule (intended for July 1st) failed to represent the intended policy. My reaction was to just shrug and take it in stride, but Ken felt upset because it was something we had fought hard for. Now we are madly struggling to solve the problem, well past the deadline. This is typical in Korea, I guess – at least in hagwonland.
I’m writing about this because in the event of discussing this, I got a bit defensive and got angry. “I didn’t make the f__ing schedule,” I said to Ken and Razel. This was bad behavior, on my part. I agree. Now I feel badly about it. That kind of reaction poisons coworker relationships.
Partly, this event occurred after I had just gotten out of three not-so-well-done classes. I had attempted to “have a fun class” with the elementary kids, since it’s the last day of the old schedule before cohorts get rearranged and new books and levels are started. The kids weren’t getting it, though. After having computer problems during my first class (I was trying to do one of the karaoke-style “CC” classes with them), the second and third classes failed to play by the rules of the game we were trying to play. So I was annoyed with them; we stopped the game and went back to textbook, which was a bummer for everyone. I didn’t lose my temper in class, but I was on a short fuse by the time I got back upstairs to the staff room, and when I got confronted with “why is the schedule like this? This isn’t what we agreed on,” immediately, I blew it.
Thus I’ve spent the last 2 hours feeling repentant and trying to solve the schedule problem, but I can’t. It’s just too complicated. There are universities with less complex schedules than this small 10 teacher hagwon, I swear. A person would need a degree in mathematics with a specialization in graph theory and combinatorics to solve it.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]