Category: The Wonders of Work

The internet not working well at work is a bad thing – I have been using Google-docs for several years to keep all my teaching materials – so with no internet, I have no documents. I grew complacent, to think that the internet is "always on" in Korea. Obviously that only is true in theory.

So I'll write more some other time.

[daily log: walking, 5km]

내신 [naesin] literally seems to mean something like "school transcript" but it's a shorthand way of referring to the hagwon exam prep time. I suppose that's because the results of your four-times-yearly exams are what go on your transcript. The period is also called 시험대비 which more literally means "exam prep time." In the school year cycle here, there are 4 naesin periods – two in the spring semester and two in the fall. 

It started today, the first of the two fall semester prep periods. It's an early start, because of the unusual early timing of the Chuseok holiday (Korean thanksgiving) – it follows the lunar calendar so it's different every year, and it will be next weekend this year, though normally Chuseok seems to be more of a late September or early October thing.

On the one hand, naesin is nice because I get a reduce teaching schedule since I don't teach middle-schoolers normally. This time, I'm doing some tutoring with middle-schoolers, however, so my schedule is not as reduced as in some past times.

On the other hand, naesin means a lot of extra time sitting in the staff room, which is probably the least-favorite aspect of my job. I found a lot to keep me busy today before and after my 3 classes, but over the next few days, as I plow through my backlog of grading and syllabus-making, I will have more free time and will have to find some "project" to work on, possibly. Or else… I could not work on some project, and then feel guilty for being unproductive – that often seems to be the option I choose for naesin. Also, although I once said I prefer teaching elementary kids to middle-schoolers, I have to admit that I end up missing my middle-schoolers quite a bit. 

The rhythms of the Korean school calendar are quite different from what we're used to in the US. I still haven't fully gotten used to it – September should a starting time, not a "middle-of" time.

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

My coworker Ken is leaving KarmaPlus. Today was his last day.

I've mentioned him often enough in this blog, but that doesn't really capture the extent to which I interact with him. I sit across from him at work, and he is the only native English speaker at KarmaPlus, besides myself. Consequently, he and I have a basiscally continuous patter going at work whenever we are both at our desks in the staff room.

I've known Ken since 2008, when he started at LBridge after I'd been there a few months. My vague recollection is that he was hired as Basil's replacement. For a few years, when I went to Yeonggwang and came back to Karma, I didn't see him, but when Karma swallowed up the dregs of LBridge, two years ago, then Ken was one of the LBridge refugees that joined us. He's the longest lasting, now, except for May (the front-desk lady). All the other LBridge refugees have moved on (myself and Helen don't count as refugees, although we both formerly worked at LBridge, because we left LBridge before the "crash"). 

Anyway, over the last two years Ken has become a kind of surrogate younger brother to me, and I've grown to respect immensely his talent for teaching, his commitment to the kids, and his wide-ranging intelligence. I tolerate his foul language and conspiracy theories, and almost always enjoy his company. I will miss him greatly. 

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

I had a really exhausting day. I'm not sure why I found it so exhausting – it wasn't that different than some other days, although with so many speaking classes, I spoke a lot – that might not make sense, but anytime I ask students to make speeches, I have a policy of making sure to "model" good speeches for them – so I end up giving a lot of speeches in my speaking classes. Also, I think I haven't been sleeping well, lately. 

So anyway, I don't have much to say, and I have nothing interesting from the internet, as I haven't been doing much internetting either.  I guess this is an appropriately banal entry to make the day after having made explicit my intention to be uninteresting. 

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

I have reachd a point where I can often understand simple questions and comments made by my students in Korean, especially if they are pertinent to what you might call "classroom administration": "What's my homework?" "Do we have to memorize it?" … that kind of thing. It is especially comprehensible when my students stick to what's called 반말 ([banmal = half-talk]), a kind of stripped-down, informal version of Korean used by children and in intimate settings, mostly devoid of the baroque complexities of the intimidating Korean verbal system.

So the kids get lazy – they start asking me stuff in Korean, and, if I understand, I sometimes just answer in English without forcing them to figure out how to say what they want to say in English. Consequently, over time, the kids have become convinced that my level of understanding of Korean is higher than it really is, and sometimes when I don't understand, and ask them to please say it in English, the students accuse me of pretending to not understand in order to force them to speak English.

I have started to play along with this, and thus, I am pretending to be pretending not understanding, when in fact, I don't undertand.

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

휴가 [hyuga] means vacation. The next four days are holiday at my work. This is not Curt’s choice. As a small business owner struggling to make ends meet month-to-month, he would just as soon stay open – and parents, who rely on the “daycare” aspect of the hagwon biz (though they would deny it if phrased that way), mostly prefer an “always open” hagwon, too.

It is not Curt’s choice, however. The provincial government mandates this hagwon vacation, which, consequently, is the longest continuous closure for the whole year (5 whole days!!).

My coworkers seemed vaguely scandalized that I intended to do “nothing” with my vacation. Don’t you want to travel somewhere? they asked. No, I don’t.

Perhaps my three month cancer vacation last year permanently altered my psyche and goals, but travel of any kind is uninteresting to me, these days. Have I become an old man, prematurely? My students call me “할아버지” [harabeoji = grandfather], mostly behind my back.
I intend on just hanging out at my home, taking walks and reading books and, if attacked by ambition, writing.

Below is a picture of the sign from the KarmaPlus door announcing our vacation. [NOTE somehow this picture was never added, and is now lost to history]

[daily log: walking, 2.5 km]

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]

The "verbal contest" was a successful event, with the main failing being that, since we failed to a full start-to-finish dress rehearsal we underestimated how long it would go – which is always the case with such things, I suppose. 

I was co-MC. Ken was the Korean-speaking MC while I was the English-speaking MC. So not only was there the job of preparing the students for their many various speeches, songs, roleplays and debates, but also there was the matter of being on the ball and saying the right introduction at the right time. 

Anyway, I think it went pretty well. Certainly, the parents were for the most part pleased with it and we got some positive feedback. 

I did not take any video or pictures, because I was in it, up on stage most of the time. I'm hoping that next week I can get copies of the video files that Curt and Razel made and post some pictures or videos from it. Meanwhile, I can only discuss it.

My efforts to have the kids have a less-than-fully-scripted debate for my "Newton  반" classes was pretty disappointing. Razel had more success with just working out a scripted debate and making the kids memorize their appointed roles in the PRO or CON teams. I still remain committed to avoiding fully scripting debates, however.

The best successes were the Noraebang-style (karaoke) song-and-dance to pop songs – those are always entertaining and Irene did a great job working out some clever little choreographies for them. The little ones from the Phonics and Stars classes were the absolute best in my opinion – they did such a great job memorizing and putting on their little shows – which were actually pretty long. Maybe next time we should combine these classes into and do a single larger production. 

I will make a separate entry about the play my two lonesome "Betelgeuse 반" kids did. It's culturally interesting, too. I'll leave that in suspense until I can get some video of it. 

It was hard because I was so tired – I have been more tired than usual, I think, because Spring is fading into Summer, and because I'm eating so poorly (which is my own fault, I guess, but, as Ken commented recently, "Eating really is just a chore for you now, isn't it?" and I had to agree). Anyway I guess I did OK.

We went out for "meat" hoe-sik (회식) after. So I was out late after work and then ended up going to bed at almost 1 am. That is a problem because Saturday morning I actually have to wake up early and teach in the morning, rather than the week-day afternoon and evening schedule. 

That's my journal for the KarmaPlus 2014 annual talent show "verbal contest."

[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

This Friday, we are doing an annual talent show at KarmaPlus, for the elementary kids… except that they think it's bad to call it a talent show, which I guess is a term that has some negative or at the least insufficiently academic connotations for a presumeably rigorous after-school English academy. So it's being called a "verbal contest" – which personally I think sounds much dumber. But whatever.

We are doing a lot of practicing. All the time. Extra classes and extra hours. Basically the last week or so I have had zero downtime or break at work.

So I've been very busy last week and this week. Hopefully we'll have a good result on Friday. I'll try to post some video or result when it's over.

[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

Last night (Friday) we went out to a sort of mini 회식 [hoesik] that was really just going out for drinks and food after work. We went to a jeon (전) joint, which was a friendly accommodation of my own preferences, and which I appreciated. It wasn't everyone from work – just the "Elementary team" meaning there were only five of us. I think the new teacher – Gina's replacement – wasn't that happy to be there, perhaps not feeling like she was fitting in. I actually had some makkeolli and some kimchi jeon, which is a step in the direction of normalcy.

As usual, however, I ended the evening feeling gloomier for the experience – mostly for the same reasons I always have: such experiences always hammer home the fact that my Korean-language competence is utterly unsatisfactory.

I did laugh at one person's joke, somewhat unexpectedly (perhaps the makkeolli was influencing). Ken was getting a little bit drunk and was trying to demonstrate all these "street handshakes" – I don't know what else to call them, the kind where you bump fists then wiggle your fingers or do a high  five or some transition to dropping your hands in sync – which Koreans associate with Western culture. I explained that they were utterly alien to my own upbringing, too – just as alien to me as to the Koreans. As Ken fumbled trying to show how it worked, Irene said "켄도 몰라" [Ken doesn't know either]. I found this quite funny and pretty insightful, too – I really doubt Ken knew what he was demonstrating. That was just a single shining moment of lucid understanding in the generalized sea of what-in-the-world-are-they-saying.

Today I went to work, but I have a slimmer Saturday schedule because of 내신 [test prep period]. I taught my single class. We ordered pizza and I made the kids debate the proposition: "Potato pizza is better than pepperoni pizza" (whereby my overseas readers learn that "potato pizza" is a thing in Korea). One boy accused me of ruining what would have been a fun class by making them have that debate, but overall I think it went OK.

I came home and did my standard Saturday thing: I turned off my phone and crashed, napping off a long week.

What I'm listening to right now.

넬 – "환생의 밤."

[daily log: walking, 6 km]