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.
