Category: The Wonders of Work

Sally’s essay.

Hansaem’s paean to the book is pretty typical of the students in Korea that I’ve interacted with. It’s clearly part of the Korean cultural value system, and it’s one of the reasons I feel deeply optimistic about Korean culture and society, despite its dysfunctions.

Lucy’s essay.

I was deeply touched by her message at the bottom – that’s the main reason I’m putting it here. Is it conceited of me to post it? Keep in mind that this blog has ended up functioning as a kind of “scrapbook” for my own memories over the years of teaching, too, in an unexpected way.

Work has been kind of unpleasant lately. It's not because of the kids – mostly, I enjoy my time in the classroom, as always. But the staff room has been awkward and tense ever since the merger – the disparate "company cultures" of Karma and Woongjin trying to come together. But my boss's shocking lack of "people skills" (an admittedly Western concept that may or may not even be relevant in Korean culture) seems to create more tension than is strictly called for. The native Korean staff just buckle down and deal with it (which is why I say it may not be relevant in Korea), but for me, and perhaps even more so for the various gyopo (Korean returnees – ethnic Koreans born and raised in other countries, including Canada and Australia in the case of the current staff at Karma)… well, it's hard to have to listen to the boss's various rants and complaints and carrying-ons.

Yesterday was really bad. I don't like going in the staff room.

Fifth-grader Junyeol jumped up in the middle of class for no good reason. He does this quite frequently. Sometimes he will make outlandish announcements – most often, in Korean, but occasionally he'll get ambitious and say something in English.

This time, he said the following: "I am ADHD Zombie! So," and he proceeded to mimic a pretty convincing case of severe cerebral palsy, that ended with him simulating a sort of epileptic seizure on the floor. I am NOT kidding.

I was of two minds about this. On the one hand, his disruptions are frequenly annoying. And I was, as usual, growing tired of Junyeol's utter inability to focus. On the other hand, the kid has hilarious comedic talent. Finally, I laughed, and ran out of the room. I brought back my video camera, and after convincing Junyeol to come out from under Hongseop's desk, I said, "I'd like you to do that again."

"Why?" He said, insolently. Korean students say this often, but they mean "What?" They're directly translating the idiomatic Korean "왜?" which literally means "Why" but has the pragmatics of "What" in English.

"The ADHD Zombie thing," I eleaborated.

"So funny!" he commented on his own performance. "OK. One hundred dollar." He held out his hand.

"I'm not going to PAY you for it," I said. I thought about it. It was a pretty good performance. "OK. One dollar," I offered.

"Nooo," Junyeol said, folding his arms stubbornly and looking very serious, sitting back in his seat, finally.

Interestingly, having the video camera present in the room prevented further outbursts from Junyeol for the remainder of the hour. Unfortunately, another student named Jeongyeol decided the simulated epileptic seizure was good schtick, and tried his own version after accidentally falling out of his chair while combatively protesting that he was not, in fact, handicapped. I didn't feel compelled to film it – his version was more pathetic and less over-the-top comedic.

The middle-schoolers were taking a test today. They are mostly multiple-choice tests. Students have various strategies for coming up with random numbers when they don’t know the answer – i.e., how to choose a), b), c) or d). My favorite is using their pen as a sort of die – throwing it down on the desk surface and letting how it points determine which letter answer to choose.
But another method is to use the Korean version of eeney-meeney-miney-moe, which goes as follows, in it’s most complete version (the kids mostly seem to use various abbreviations of this):

코카코라 맛있다
맛있으면 또 먹아
또 먹으면 배탈나
딩동댕동댕!
척척박사님 알아
맞혀주세요
딩동댕동댕

The content of the rhyme is something to do with the deliciousness of Coca-Cola, drinking it, and getting indigestion. How did the Coke Corp manage this bit of viral advertising? Is it beneficial to them? Who knows…
Referencing this rhyme is a short-hand way to reference the fact that students are overwhelmed by the test and thusly using random-number-generation to fill in the answers.
One of my students was saying, “Oh, Teacher! I can’t.”
I said, “코카코라 맛있다” (i.e. the first line of the rhyme: ko-ka-kol-la mas-siss-ta = Coca-Cola has great taste).
Quick as can be, the student came back: “아니, 맛없다” (a-ni, mas-eops-da = No, [it] doesn’t have great taste).
Indeed.

Today at work I learned that one of my favorite students (and one of my most long-term students, having had this student in class a few times even when I was working at LBridge in 2008~2009) is departing Karma. I've seen this person "grow up" and it's always amazing and remarkable to see.

At one level, I completely accept it – there's constant churn and turnover in this business, as parents all struggle with their own highly individualized decisions about that's best for their children, what they can afford, whether they feel they're getting their money's worth. And I was impressed with hearing that in this particular case, it wasn't just a parental whim but something that apparently resulted from a fairly long dialogue between the parent and the child. That's pretty rare in Korean families, still.

But at another level I'm wounded, as always when a well-liked student departs. I wonder if there was something I could have or should have done differently to help the student better. And it's in moments like this that I feel the resentment for the unbridled capitalist nature of this market and job, that seems to grant so many choices and so little of anything else of value.

The news left me moody, and then there was an ad hoc half-hour-long staff meeting after classes ended, as we try to solve scheduling conflicts that are resulting from departing teachers (yes, that too). The meeting transitioned me from moody to pissed off, as I struggled to understand, made an effort to contribute only to reveal my failure to understand, and ended frustrated beyond belief at why it is I subject myself to this bizarre existence. Why don't I get my butt in gear and learn this language?! Why. I'm trying. But it's just not easy.

In class earlier, I had a student giving her considered opinion on a rather difficult article we’d read.

“It’s not good,” she said.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked. “There’s something wrong with this article,” I agreed, elaborating. In fact, the article was a rather exaggerated rant that I’d adapted from a US newspaper website editorial about the horrors of government regulation. I expected the students to eventually figure this out, and express it somehow. “What do you think is wrong with this article?” I probed.

“I think… ” she began, thoughtfully. “In my opinion… after thinking about this a lot,” she continued. I was expecting her to nail the problem in the article at this point – she seemed to be on to something, anyway. But then, she concluded, “It’s too long.”

Today was my first day back teaching. Very long day – given I woke up wide awake at 1 am and didn’t go back to sleep. Ah, well, jetlag.

I was standing in the hallway at around 3. Some of the middle schoolers come early for special summer session classes. Suddenly, one student, Seongjun, saw me. “Teacher!” he yelled. “Oh…. teacher!”

He ran down the hall and hugged me. Really? I’ve never, ever had a middle-school student show such effusiveness. “Oh, teacher. We missed you.” Keep in mind, Seongjun isn’t a cute little kid. He’s a 7th grader, but he’s big. Nearly as tall as me, and stockily built – if he worked out, he could look like a wrestler.

“I missed you too. I came back,” I said. But I was puzzled. “Why did you miss me so much?”

“Oh, teacher, it was terrible.”

“What?” I had a flash of intuition. “Wait. Who was your substitute teacher?” Of course, all the students had substitute teachers, while I was gone – the classes went on, after all.

Seongjun looked alarmed – did I really not know who’d I’d abandoned them to? “Oh, teacher. It was Curt. Four times a week. Curt.”

It all became clear. Curt is the boss. He’s also a caring teacher – but he’s got a bit of a reputation as an overly serious and somewhat boring teacher, I have to admit. He likes to lecture and “give advice” – very Korean-style.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

It was flattering to be so missed, though.

We were doing something in a textbook in an Eldorado class today. The question was “what is the hobby of a family member?”

One girl provided, with utter aplomb: “My dad’s hobby is sleeping and drinking beer.”

[Daily log: walking, 3 km]

It’s the first typhoon of the monsoon season. I love stormy weather, but walking home from work can get a little bit wet, as last night. I need to invest in a better umbrella.
I had some students in a class, yesterday, and we were talking about “I want to be a … ” – i.e., career choices. The boys, being 5th grade boys, came up with things like soldier and even “weapons designer.” I tried to take their increasingly violent suggestions seriously, but when it got to “terrorist” and “karma destroyer” (I was visualizing Shiva, but the boy meant our hagwon, named “karma”), I had to cut it off. And then one boy suggested that he wanted to become an “umbrella designer,” and I thought, ‘damn, he’s onto something – why are umbrellas so crappy?’

There is a schadenfreude in what’s been happening. When I left LBridge in 2009, it was with mixed emotions. One thing I felt was certain was that that company was in something of a downward spiral due to mismanagement.

And so… to be working for Karma, 3 years later, and have Karma take over the dregs of that LBridge business, now re-named as Woongjin but barely 6 months ago… well, one wants to mutter “I told you so.”

There is some familiarity, too. Some things aren’t that different from LBridge – including several staff members that I knew from back then, still around, and a PC on a colleague’s desk that is exactly the PC I had on my desk at LBridge – I know because there are stickers there that are too distinctive to have been coincidentally placed by someone else. Although LBridge had rebranded as Woongjin recently, a lot of the internals still bear the familiar LBridge logo.

I don’t feel a lot of confidence, right now, that this will go exceptionally smoothly. There are so many uncertainties, and I suspect (although I don’t know for certain) that there are some major financial risks involved, too, that are utterly beyond my control. Such is the churn of the Korean hagwon market, though. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. When Curt asked me how I was doing, yesterday, as if worried about the classes, I said I liked inheriting Woongjin’s (LBridge’s) rigid curriculum, and looked forward to making it work for the Karma kids.

Here’s a picture of the Woongjin building, with new “Karma Plus” signage attached (hard to see well because of the trees, the Karma sign is yellow, at the top of the building on the left: 카르마). This is LBridge’s former Hugok Middle-school campus, which is across the street from the former elementary campus where I worked in 2008-2009 (long ago closed down). So I took the photo this morning standing at the entry of my former work place.

Welcome to yesterday. Life repeats, recycles, with renewal. Karma.

Scene 1 from day 2 of The Merger.

Under the new schedule, I've been required to give up my little-ones – the first and second graders in my Phonics classes. Those kids are so difficult to teach, but I truly love them, too. Today, after their class was finishing with their new teacher, I saw little Yedam in the hall. A tiny girl, very cute, charming personality, but amazingly difficult to teach, as she has so far utterly failed to wrap her mind around the concept of "chair." (She doesn't know how to sit down.)

"예담아," I motioned for her to come over to where I was coming out of another classroom. "Clark-셈, 어떼요?" She had been panicked earlier, at the idea of changing teachers. She is the girl who used to cry whenever we had a vocabulary quiz. I expected the worst.

But she surprised me. She smiled shyly and held up forefinger joined to thumb, in the "OK" sign. "응… 좋아. Bye teacher." She ran away down the stairs. I felt happy and relieved.

Scene 2 from day 2 of The Merger.

We were sitting around in the cramped, over-crowded, not yet properly configured staff room. The middle schooler teachers mostly off doing the test-prep stuff, we mostly elementary teachers not having much to do, but Curt had had a tantrum yesterday about teachers leaving earlier than 10 pm when things still weren't settled (10 pm is the official end time).

It's weird, for me, because all of a sudden I have a bunch of colleagues who are fluent English speakers – Karma only had me and Grace, and Grace was part-time, but now there's a group of 4 of us. Frank was reading something online about a zombie attack (a la the recent weird news from Miami), but now in China. Differentiated, apparently, by the fact that this zombie attack in China didn't involve drugs, as the Miami event had. Some guy had tried to eat the face of some other guy. Ken said something about oh, how strange, there's maybe a real zombie virus out there. But then Frank said, very funny, "Yeah, but those Chinese, they will eat anything."

Um. Get it? I thought it was funny at the time.

Scene 3 from day 2 of The Merger.

Actually, a scene unrelated to The Merger. I was walking home. I saw one of those motorcycles that looks like a prop from a Mad Max movie – beaten up and dirty, and saddlebags and boxes duct taped onto the back in a big pile, some guy who looks like he lives on his motorcycle, with a cool windshield-type-contraption on the front, made out of plastic and duct tape and cardboard (and how does he see through it?). The man wearing a bandana and no helmet. He looked like post-apocalyptic Korean pirate. But his motorcyle had a GPS taped onto the handlebars. And he was talking on an iPhone. And running a red light. This is Korea.

[Daily log: walking, 4 km]