::A Geek in Korea::

Last week, during the Typhoon Wukong related rain, I had a strange experience on the way to work. I got out of the taxi with my umbrella in hand. As I was walking to work, a sudden surprise downpour started. I opened my umbrella and kept walking.

Behind me, I heard opening umbrellas and a person running. The running footsteps got closer to me, and suddenly there was a man under my umbrella with me as I walked.  Instant "personal space" violation.This office worker had a dress shirt, tie, and finely sculpted hair. He said, in Korean, "Let me share this umbrella with you."

It’s not like I was going to kick this guy out and run away, as he had no umbrella and he wanted to stay dry, but it was still strange for me. I continued to walk, and when we got to the corner where I needed to turn, he asked me "This way or that way." I pointed and turned, and we did a dance to avoid other people on the sidewalk while still walking in step with each other while in an uncomfortably close proximity to one another.

Unluckily for him, my school was not far away from the corner, so I told him this was were I was going inside. He thanked me, than ran off, possibly to find the next person with an umbrella to leap frog to, I don’t know.

Someone worried, I checked my wallet, keys, and bag for anything missing. Everything was there. It seems that the man wasn’t a creative pick pocket, but rather just a guy caught in the rain.

One of my youngest, lowest level students was supposed to write a haiku for his homework. Any book that asks early readers to write poetry is insane. However, the point is that they had to count the syllables to their words and arrange them in a five, seven, five pattern. We had spent the entire class clapping out words so that the students could figure out how to say words with the proper number of syllables. Unfortunately for me, Korean, when taking an English word, will often add one or two more extra syllables which messes up almost all lower level student’s pronunciation.

I told a student that his line of poetry was one syllable too short, because when he clapped he used Korean pronunciation. He actually told me I was wrong, clapped out the same like with Korean pronunciation again, and tried to call me dumb. This did not put me in a very good mood for the rest of the day. I corrected him a second time, clapped out my pronunciation, and let him see his mistake. At least he accepted that I knew more than him after that.

Another group of older students were working on a cross word puzzle I had made for them so that they wouldn’t be forced to read the entire time. Despite what they think, this makes me a nice person, because I am thinking about their boredom and dislike of repetition. I told them we would read for a certain amount of time, then work on the puzzle.  The first ten minutes of the puzzle was closed book, and the rest was open book, as long as they didn’t just shout out the answers to one another. Spelling help was acceptable, but yelling out solutions wasn’t.

I had a girl call me over to her table to ask me a question. Instead of using English, (strike one), she used rude Korean, as if you were calling a dog or baby as if I didn’t know what she said (strike two). Then she proceeded to get pissed off that I wouldn’t just tell her the answers she wanted to know and expected her to read the question and think (strike three).

This is one of the downsides of learning Korean, in that you have to constantly be on guard against students that try to whittle away respect by treating you like a lesser person. I told her that if she ever did that to me again, she would be in very big trouble. I don’t think she’s ever had a native English speaker that actually understood how condescending she is when not speaking English. As sweet as she tries to be in front of me, I know she’s actually someone I need to watch for when she speaks Korean.

I was already a bit annoyed from all this student mischief when my taxi driver going home decided to be the worst driver ever. He took the absolute worst path, hit every traffic light, and ignored many, many opportunities go a faster route. I know how condescending it is to be told how to do your job, but I was absolutely stewing in the back of his cab as my fare went to record new highs. When I got out of the cab and someone made a dash for the taxi door to hope in the back seat, I actually told the next woman, "Don’t take this taxi, he is very slow."

She freaked out that a foreigner was speaking Korean to her and dove into the slow taxi to escape me as I walked away.
 
(Sigh)

Today, being my wife’s birthday and all, we needed to call my parents. They had called her yesterday, but she was on the bus and was unable to hear very well. Plus, everyone cues in to listen to people speaking English on the bus, so she didn’t feel like she was getting any privacy. Due to the time difference, as we were preparing for bed, my parents were actually at work, so we couldn’t give them a call back. This led me to ponder our options about the high rate long distance fares.

I had a calling card with time on it given to me by a friend, but it turned out to be unable to call the United States. Go figure. Next up on my ways of saving money was Internet telephony. Voice over IP, as it’s otherwise known, is a method of taking someone’s voice, breaking it down into packets, sending it via TCP/IP, and having it seamlessly delivered to a phone number on the other end. If my parents were more technophiles like myself, they would be more willing to install such software on their machines to try such a thing for free.

Instead, I downloaded Skype and bought some minutes. 9 hours for 12 dollars charged to my account. Since I was calling a landline phone instead of another computer Skype, I got charge a $.02 cent a minute rate. This is so much cheaper than what I would usually pay it’s absurd. I’ve managed to break a hundred dollars on a single call when talking to my parents on the occasional holiday call home. The quality wasn’t perfect, and my parents complained of an echo on their end, which might have been the acoustics in computer room, but otherwise, the call home went well.

After work, I bought her flowers and we celebrated with dinner at Bennigan’s, an Irish themed family restaurant in Korea. It was the first time for either of us. It’s probably the best of the American owned family themed restaurants that have popped up in the city. (The others being T.G.I.Fridays, and Outback steakhouse.)

During our meal, the couple next to us had been set up on a blind date. We occupied ourselves while waiting for the food by making up stories about each of the people and if they were a good match for one another. The man was clearly dressed to impress. He wore each item in his closet that were individually most expensive, with no concept of how they would work together. Thus he had on a grey flower print shirt, grey pin striped slacks, and neon blue Nike basketball shoes. He also wore jewelry and eye wear that was probably best forgotten by the rest of the fashion world after the 1970’s.

My wife thought he was fashionable, but I thought he was trying too hard to make the impression of money, when it was clear he had none. He took off his nice shirt when eating ribs so he wouldn’t get a stain on it!

The woman was dressed in slacks and a conservative top, little or no makeup. She didn’t spend any time on her hair (for Korean date standards at least), and looked as if she had just gotten off work. She listened politely to his conversation, but didn’t lean in when he spoke. Was she tired from just getting off work? Was her friend that set her up doing her a favor, or was she simply playing hard to get?

Once our food arrived, we forgot our diversions and had a nice meal together. We got home a little late, but Yoshi didn’t complain with even a whimper when we let him into the house. Now we’ve retired to our usually activities for the evening. I’m writing, and she’s doing evaluations and preparing her lessons for tomorrow. It was a good day.

Going from an "anything goes" self-managed teacher’s room to a "do as we tell you" highly Korean style managed school has been a rough transition for me.

 Back when I didn’t know what the hell I was doing as a teacher, (I.E., The first three years or more of my stay here)  having someone tell me what to do occasionally made my life easier. I’d always be asking, "Was that a good lesson plan? How would you teach this? Can you give me some feedback on how the students liked my class?" Now though, it’s just as big a pain in the ass as the most annoying student in a class. Spare me the bullshit and let me do my job without you getting in the way, please.

My current problem lies with my head teacher. She was the one that gave me an unacceptable schedule after refusing my input. When I told her that she was going to have to start over with her plan because I wouldn’t be working some of the hours she had schedule, she complained. All I could tell her was,
"Sorry, should have asked me first."

Next, when I was busy grading papers and giving tests, she send me home an hour early as a "reward" for hard work. Reward my ass, she knows I get paid per hour. She sent me home because I made her waste a few hours reworking the schedule and she wanted to punish me. I don’t care if she denied it when my wife and I confronted her about it when we went to complain about the schedule some more. She claimed not to know I was part time. It’s just a lie.

Today, she was complaining to the other teachers in Korean about how "easy" we foreigners had it. She said she wished she could work as little as we do. I found this funny, as most of the time while she might be "at work", she spends most of the time complaining about something in a voice very unbecoming for a 40+ year old woman. To say that foreigners work less that Koreans is probably true, but that ignores all the facts of life that makes someone living abroad in another country so much harder. Also, I had come in early and was sitting right next to her grading tests. Don’t call me lazy, to my face, and think you can get away with it just because you think I don’t understand.

I called her out on it. "How exactly am I being lazy, grading half the written tests for the school an hour before I needed to come in?"

She said, "Well, do you want to work as hard as a Korean?"

I laughed in her face and said, "No, you missed the point."

Why the hell would I fly around the world to work in a foreign country to do twice as much work as I needed to? I know Korean jobs suck, but that’s the price you pay for staying in Korea in an over saturated English language teaching market. Premiums go to people that can speak the language as a first language, fairly or not, and no amount of complaining or jealousy will change the fact that the head teacher of a school is going to work harder than the average foreigner. If foreigners had to work as hard as a Korean, none of them would be here, because there are plenty of undesirable jobs back home that didn’t require the sacrifices of living abroad long term.

For as hard as they claim to work, I find myself needing more help knowing where to go and what to teach these days because she doesn’t do her job and prepare schedules or class materials. The woman has a nasty attitude that really gets under my skin. I thought that the last foreigner to work with them probably soured them on working with non-Koreans, but it seems like they complain about everything.

I woke up this morning thinking, "Funny, I don’t remember being stabbed  yesterday." And yet, my stomach was fairly insistent that it had been, or at least, that I had done something it didn’t like enough to wake me with waves of pain. Of course, there was no blood, but the pain didn’t suggest that there wan’t anything less than a rusty pipe sticking through my insides. I actually woke up moaning in pain and went to the bathroom to see if there was anything I could do to settle once and for all  I had a large lump of metal sticking out of my gut.

Pain or otherwise, I was in trouble. I remembered the meat we picked up shopping at Wal-mart the night before. I was thinking it was it was on sale for a reason now. For example no one must have  mentioned the likely "Causes intense intestinal, 50% off!" label on it somewhere. I picked up wondering why it was on sale, and I guess I found out.

It’s my own fault. When we were finished shopping I was far to tired to worry about cooking the proper amount of food for the both of us, so I told my wife just to throw all the meat into the pan. We ate dutifully, but at the end there was far to much left on our plates. She said that we couldn’t store this kind of meat for reheating since it would be rubbery and bad. Taking up her challenge, I finished the rest of the meat on the plate. Was that ever a mistake.

The entire day I’ve been bed ridden, too weak to move much. My wife had church today, so she picked up some medicine for me on her trip back after the pharmacy opened. I spent the morning alternatively sleeping, shivering, and overheating, sometimes all at once. Luckily for me, I didn’t have to run to the bathroom, or run anywhere.

I was far to dizzy and weak to make anything faster than a "zombie shuffle" as I walked around the house. Shuffling feet, moaning in pain, green complexion, bloodshot eyes. Hell, I might have been a zombie. It’s better my wife went out to church, as there is a possibility I might have feasted on her brains. Who knows?

I’m better off this happened on a Sunday where my income wasn’t impacted. The nine or so extra hours of sleep today should probably help me recover some of my stamina as I go about my business tomorrow. Today was going to be a night out, as my wife’s birthday approaches and we were going to check out a new restaurant to celebrate. We had to  cancel due to my stomach bug, and instead she had to care for her feeble husband instead. We’ll book some reservations sometime this week instead.

Now, the effort of writing this post has made me double over. Don’t worry about me. The blog will go on.

I was responsible for testing half the students in the school today. In my last hour, I had fifty minutes to test twenty two students. Minus the time it took to get students to my room, attendance, explanations, and everything else, I didn’t have enough time to do what was asked of me.

I was testing higher level students who had to read an article that explained how the availability of cheap steel, elevators, and a booming inner city population lead to the rise of skyscrapers being built in cities like New York at the turn of the century. I had written three questions drawn from the article that the students had to answer in full sentences to get a good score on their speaking test. I was checking their speech, not the accuracy of their statements, so it didn’t matter if they didn’t really answer 100% factually, only that they said something correctly.

My first ten students went like this:
I sat them down, asked them each of the questions with about a minute for response time between each question. If they didn’t answer right away, I read the questions again. Then, as they tried to answer I would help them with some gestures or clues to tell them if they were on the right track. This took about twenty five minutes to get through, and I had an accurate appraisal of who could speak and what level most of the students were.

Then the teacher who was proctoring the reading test I was taking students from to test for speaking told me that I had half the students to do and only fifteen or so minutes left. I dropped one of the questions that most of the students were struggling to answer and gave them only one reading of the questions before they had to answer. I also started using the gestures right away and even started using my cup as a prop to help me explain.

When I got down to about five or six students left with little more than a minute or two left before the students had to go home, I threw out the other question, gave them thirty seconds to answer, and was flailing my arms and using post it notes with drawings of little people entering elevators to explain as fast as possible. Any answer, no matter how short or incorrect, as soon as it was finished coming out of the students mouth counted as their test response. I marked the grade, the next student came in and sat down before the last student was out the door and we started all over again. This is what the other teacher expected me to do the entire time.

I got the last student done as the bell was ringing, but I really wasn’t happy about having to basically cut the test down so much. I have no idea how well some of the students actually talk in most situations. This is just a formality to justify a number I wrote on a test sheet when parents wonder where they ended up in a class.

Today was low level "adjustment test" day. After an arbitrary deadline at the school is reached, they retest everyone and place them in new levels according to their scores. Then we all get new schedules with new classes. The hope is that these classes are filled with students of roughly the same level which makes teaching as easy as possible. Even in the lowest levels of classes full of students where they have either just started to study English, or have only learned the basics, the students that do better start pulling away from those that don’t study as much or don’t have an ideal family situation. That is why these tests are good.

Since I am the speaking/pronunciation focused instructor at the school, it was my responsibility to come up with speaking tests for each level of class. I gave speaking tests to the lowest levels of students today. It consisted of five questions. Anyone able to answer all of them correctly with sentences got a perfect score. Anyone that had to guess or needed a little help got a lower score. Those students that didn’t have a clue I helped, taught, and gave them the lowest score.

Even going as fast as I possibly could, I couldn’t have conversations with twenty five students when the two classes were combined in a single hour. Simple questions, quick answers was what we needed. This isn’t a good testing situation. I hadn’t taught some of the students before, so they might have also been nervous. Anyway, there seemed to be a few questions I asked that were "stumpers". Here are some of the common wrong answers:

1. "How old are you?"
Answer: "I’m fine." 
This is a programmed sort of response. I caught the kid when they were trying to guess what I was going to say instead of what I actually said.

2. "What’s your favorite fruit."
Answer: "Pizza" or "Kimchi stew!"
I made sure to pronounce "fruit" distinctly from "food", so they either didn’t listen or didn’t know.

3. "What are you wearing today?"
Answer: Blank stares or perhaps a color.
No one has taught the word "shorts" the these students. Really weird. When I would give examples of clothes in Korean, half the boys told me they were wearing dresses today. I guess none of the books at this school have a clothing unit, which was standard at all my other schools.

4. "How’s the weather?"
Answer: Uh…? Hot?
I gave them a hint by waving my hand next to my face. Then most of them got it after that.

5. "Who is your best friend?"
Answer: Either someone in the class, or nothing.
This is complicated, because friend in Korean means, "Someone of the same age". The younger kids in the class sometimes don’t have anyone the same age to technically call a "friend", but I didn’t limit it to the classroom.

6.What day is it today?"
Answer: A lucky guess.
I started bringing in the calendar and setting it on the desk to see if they would use it. If they knew the date but not the day the could check.

I think my test scaled nicely for the levels. The higher level students did much better than the lower, which means that whoever put them in classes last time did a good enough job. There were a few perfect scores, and a few surprises too.

I do the same thing for my classes tomorrow, but instead of making questions, they have to read something and summarize a page of writing into something I can understand. This seems like a tough challenge, but is what defines this level from the "low" kids. After that, I will quiz the upper level students on something they read so they have to find specific details. This is what separates the next tier of levels. It’s cool to see a well thought out testing procedure work as advertised after having so many bad experiences with meaningless level tests in the past.

One of the things that irks me at my school is how "hands off" they are with foreigners and planning. The last guy that worked here was having a good day if he showed up sober, let alone if he knew where he was going or doing most of the day. I think this lead the Korean teachers to think that it was best of they handled everything concerning the school right away. Here I come into the equations, part time, experienced, somewhat able understand what is going on in both languages, and they still keep me out of the loop.

When requests are made of me, like "The other teacher doesn’t have a book for the new class yet, can you develop a lesson plan in five minutes before he goes to class!? It should last an hour! Go!" I try my best to handle them. Hell, I did that two TIMES today and everyone thought it was magic. Since we are between books series and won’t have our books until the schedule is finalized. This is not a cause for concern. Ladies, this is what I do for a living. Stand back and watch me work.

Anyway, you’d think that since I’ve proven myself capable of teaching, when they go and develop a new schedule they’d at least consult me. I’m the only person working there with strict time guidelines written into his contract. I’ve got the maximum hours per week, as well as "does not work later than this" written in my contract. That was the entire point of my contract negotiations. "No later than this. No more than this."

When they were developing the schedule last week, I asked to see it. I asked two or three people. I told them I wanted to see it. I was told it wasn’t ready yet, so I didn’t need to see. I thought at the time, "If they wanted to keep me from seeing it, they better get it all right the first time."

Lo and behold, today, my schedule was waiting for me on my desk. Not only had they given me too many hours on one day, forcing me to stay late, but they also had another day spaced out with breaks that doubled my time at the school. I’m getting paid by hour. I’m not going to be sitting around the office. When the teacher came in, I broke the news to her. The schedule wasn’t acceptable, I wasn’t going to do it.

This meant they had to completely redo everything they had worked on over the weekend. Today’s schedule remained in tact, even though it was beyond what I had negotiated for in my contract. My dog went and extra long evening without food, and I missed dinner plans with friends as a result. No ounce of sympathy was given by me for all the work I caused to the head teacher. I was doing a big favor when I took over other teacher’s classes to work full time last month, there is no way I’m going to give them another inch because I saw how many miles it took me as a result. Deal with it.

The nice thing about my visa is the fact that if people don’t play nice, I can threaten to take my ball and go home. That is, if they don’t like my demands, I don’t have to keep working there. While someone employed full time would have no choice other than to rot in the office when given a bad schedule, i can basically call them out and tell them what I want.

Why I wasn’t listened to at the beginning to spare people all the effort of trying to fix a broken schedule I’ll never understand. If the other teachers resent the fact that I’m using my contract as a way to get what I want, they need to understand that someone with my teaching experience is an asset that helps the school in more ways than just teaching. That’s why I don’t mind helping make impromptu lessons or develop speaking tests without much prior notice. I’m showing them I’m worth the hassle. If they don’t like it, we’ll see what needs to happen so we can both be happy. What won’t happen is me getting stuck in a bad schedule. My time is too valuable for that.

We have a government office that handles paperwork we occasionally need to prove things, file things, or to make things official in our very own neighborhood. The place is set up like a bank, with people at stations that look things up on computers and print out the paperwork you need to file. You can wait and use one of the free (!) vibrating massage chairs as they copy and stamp the paperwork with their red ink legal stamp pads. It’s also air conditioned and functions as a community center, so occasionally the walls will be rumbling with aerobic music as people exercise on another floor. It’s a nice place to go to get paperwork done, but I avoid it because no one can speak English there, and all the paperwork is "Korean Only" sorts of things that I can’t legally do myself. Since I don’t have the same legal status as Koreans do, most of the time the paperwork is left up to my wife.

Since tomorrow is my pay day, and my wife needed to teacher her last week of intensive morning classes, I was the only one available to go to the local government office today to get some sort of paper my director claimed I needed for tax purposes. I didn’t know what the paper said, what it was about, or why I really needed it. All I know was I was handed a hand written note and my wife’s Korean ID and told to go there to get the paper as she went to work. Any reason to get out of the house is a good one, even if I am simply a messenger.

I was assured that the people in the office would be on the lookout for me. My wife said, when she handed me the papers, that she would call ahead and tell them, "Look for a clueless guy with a note from me and give him the paper he needs. He’s my husband and can’t speak Korean well enough to fill out this sort of paperwork on his own." The note she gave me basically said the same thing.

When I got to the office, I walked up, presented my note, presented the Korean ID, and waited. Whatever was supposed to happen when I had preformed this task didn’t come into being. The guy sort of looked at me, looked at the ID, then asked me for my wife’s phone number. She hadn’t called yet, and she was in class! He couldn’t get in touch with her. I fully expected to be told to get in touch with her to prove everything was legitimate before I could be given what I needed.

He asked for my foreigner ID, which was odd. It turns out he was trying to confirm my story. I think he looked up my marital status to see if our names matched.

I eventually got the paperwork. What pushed him over the edge, I think, was the fact that If I wasn’t the person I was claiming to be, who wrote the letter explaining why I was there?  I still needed someone to write the note that explained who I was, and why I needed the paperwork, because it was clearly beyond my ability.

Once again, playing dumb has saved me.