::A Geek in Korea::

I detest littering. People here don’t think it’s a very big issue, but I absolutely can not stand people who litter. I don’t know anyone that litters, and if I did seem someone in my company litter, I’d probably be surprised and yell at them for being lazy. I’ll toss the occasional apple core or something on the ground in the weeds and feel guilty about it, but I absolutely never intentionally liter anything of non-organic matter.

Walking Yoshi around, there is a long wall that seperates our apartment block from the larger road that is behind our place. It is built as a sound barrier, but also has a nice little green area between it and the sidewalk where you can walk under some shade trees. It’s a very nice place to take a dog when it is dry and not muddy. In front of us was an elderly woman. She had a lollipop in her hand. She peeled off the wrapper, and started sucking on the candy right as we were walking by. She tossed the wrapper down on the ground, and I gave a nasty glare and an audible snort of disapproval. My look said, “You bring shame to both yourself and your country with your rude actions. How disgusting.”

I can get away with this because I didn’t actually say anything, and I’ve never  seen an elderly Korean person with a single shred of self-regard for strangers. I didn’t know this lady, and when an old person doesn’t know you in Korea, they don’t care at all what you think of you. When everyone is supposed to listen to and revere their elders, they don’t get much in the way of criticism pointed in their direction.

This woman must have been different, because after I walked by and shot her a nasty look, she actually leaned down and picked up not only her wrapper, but the newspaper on the ground someone else had thrown on the ground. She had gone from a net negative to a net positive in the littering for the day. I had been facing the opposite way, since I didn’t think I would have prompted any response. I was surprised when I heard her calling out to me. She was yelling something, which I couldn’t actually make out, but when I turned around I saw that she had both the wrapper and the newspaper with her. She was walking back over to her cart, which was filled with fruits or vegetables. Perhaps she was a street vendor or had come from a market.

She put the newspaper on the top of the cart to cover her haul and then darted into the middle of stopped traffic illegally, running through the flowing traffic on the other side while dragging her two wheeled cart behind her. It was a strange exit for a strange old woman who actually cared what some foreigner thought about her.

I arrived at work today early, but I wanted to use my time to prepare for my class. Instead, my director pulled me off the computer I was using to interview a student. This is totally not my job, but I had a few minutes, so I sat in. My director told me that the student had taken an entrance examination, but had missed the mark for the highest level middle school class by ten points.

The girl had tested into the second highest class the school offers for her age. For middle school students, there is a progression of classes that build on each other until they graduate into the full middle school reading level program. This is the toughest material in the school. Unfortunately there is a huge gap between these advanced classes and the class this girl tested into. She placed into the top “normal” class. The material she wanted to get into was far beyond what the test said she was ready for, but that was partially because the school wasn’t offering a level below the current highest class now. She might have qualified for a different, slightly less demanding advanced class, but she missed the cut off for the one the school is offering.

The advanced level classes are only being offered to the best of the best that test directly into them. The mother was playing hardball and wanted to skip directly to the highest level. My director is the master of the non-committal decision. She loves to shift the blame for a difficult decision down the line. When the mother didn’t accept the test results as a fair evaluation of the girl’s level, she had to pass the blame on to someone else to save face. This is where I came in.

She called me in and told me to evaluate the girl’s ability in regards to the highest classes. I am the only teacher on the staff that knows the level of the other students that qualified for the highest level class. I worked as their intensive level tutor for the advanced class student for the past two years. I was the only person that could sit down with this new girl trying to jump up levels and give my opinion. If I thought she could speak English as well as the student I had been tutoring for the past two years, she was in. If she couldn’t, I had to tell my director I agreed with the test.

The girl said she was very nervous. I have a feeling the mother was a very demanding woman. The student tried hard, and for a middle school student she was okay. Not great, but not terrible. She certainly wasn’t good enough for the highest level class. She made different mistakes in my interview that led me to believe that she would struggle with the class. I always want students to succeed, but I think this girl would have really struggled to keep pace.

I excused the girl and told my director that the test was accurate. She shouldn’t be placed in the advanced class.  The girl wasn’t going to be able to keep up in that sort of intensive environment. I could be wrong, without a sample of her writing and an extended period of time to get to know her ability, but I made a snap judgment and wasn’t about to put the girl into the class only to find out she couldn’t hack it. If she excelled on her next aptitude test, she might be able to make it.

My director looked at me like I was causing a problem. She wanted me to make a case for pushing her upwards, not an honest evaluation of her ability. My director didn’t want to face the mother after I walked out of the office. She thought that I was going to give her permission to bump up the kid to have her fail in the class, instead of force my director to tell the mother she shouldn’t be placed that high. She thought I’d make the Korean decision, or the financial decision before I made the educational one.

I gave her my opinion, so the girl might not have enrolled when the mother didn’t get her way. I don’t know if the director shared my opinion with the mother or not. If she did enroll, I’d be very surprised to see that student anywhere but the advanced class over my objections on the matter. It’s hard for any director to give up money, but even harder when they don’t want to be forced to give a reason when they can no longer push off the blame.

I was walking my dog, Yoshi, on a one lane street near our home. The reason the street is one lane is because the excessive number of cars parked on one side of the street that take up one of the lanes, making it nearly impossible for people to walk or drive down that side of the street. The only reason cars weren’t parked on the other side of the street was because there are several local government service buildings there, and parking in front of those will cause your car to be towed. Since there are no sidewalks, and cars blocked the other side of the street, I was walking as far to the right as possible.

A Korean grandmother and her five to six year old grandson were walking, where else, but in the street. People just don’t have any concept of road safety or awareness. To be fair, when this woman was born, there were no roads in the area. It probably was all dirt paths and rice paddies, but things have changed. The child was wearing a taekwondo uniform and was walking on the ride side of his grandmother, who was walking down the middle of the street like she owned it.

Coming up behind the elderly woman and her grandson was a car, snaking through the partially blocked road. Up ahead a truck was delivering gas containers to the fire department, as was parked on the right side of the street in front of me. I kept walking straight, with Yoshi in the drainage ditch, who was minding his own business, avoiding the drainage grates and just enjoying his walk.

The young boy started freaking out trying to squirm out of his grandmother’s handhold. Yoshi was entirely unaware that there was another person on the street and hadn’t made as much as a glance in their direction. The elderly lady took one look at my dog, who was safely on a leash over three meters away, and made her move. She pushed the boy behind her and to her left, as to bravely defend her grandson against the 5 kilogram bundle of pure murder my cute dog Yoshi must represent. While pushing her son to the left and behind her without looking, she actually pushed her son into the side mirror of the car that was snaking it’s way past them. If the lady had been walking on the side of the road instead of the middle, the car would have had enough space to have passed them without incident. However, there wasn’t enough room for the car, the woman, and the dog on the road because the elderly lady was walking down the middle.

To protect her grandson from the dog, she had actually pushed him into the side of a car. Great instincts! The boy sort of leaned back to avoid being rolled along the side of the car, or have his feet run over. The old woman looked over this scene with disinterest. She had nothing to say to the driver of the car,  or in alarm because her grandson nearly got run over.

The car didn’t stop  after clipping the boy, of course. The boy remained upright and through luck, uninjured. The car wasn’t traveling very fast, but if part of the boys clothing had been caught on the side of the car, it would have been a painful drag. The accident didn’t draw blood, so where’s the harm in not stopping, right?

The BEST part was that after seeing her grandson nearly run over because of her own stupidity, the elderly woman smacked the boy on the head and say, “HEY! Watch where you’re going!” loudly in Korean.

Now that my classes average 10-15 students each, you have to do something to work with the large numbers of students that sit around while people are practicing their reading. A difficult thing for a teacher to do is trying to give bored students that have already read their materials a reason to keep interested in the readings of other students as you work your way around the classroom. I’ve stolen a game I saw during a demo in Seoul and used it in class today. It went over really well.

First, you pair up the students into two teams. They don’t have to be of equal number, but having them of generally equal ability is a good idea. One team has to decide to go first or second. The team that goes first must successfully complete a reading passage for points. At any point in time, if the reader makes a mistake, the other team must yell “STOP!” and then give the specific reason, in English, why the other team had made a mistake.

If it is a successful, correct, well mannered challenge, you award the challenging team with a point, then let them start the reading from the beginning of the page, or where ever has been decided before the game began. If it is short material for younger children, it could start after every sentence.  If the other team makes a poor, nonsensical, or untruthful challenge, the team that yelled stop loses a point and the reading team continues from the same point. If a team manages to finish the reading passage before everyone has had a chance to read, you can loop around and finish the passage a second time. I also tried to give more people a chance to read by stopping anyone that read a complete page successfully to give them reward points and then moving on to the next person. If one student on a team could read the entire thing perfectly, it’d probably take too much time. Getting those students that make an occasional mistake a chance to fix their errors is better to focus on in class. Letting the good readers bask in the glory of their accomplishments is good too.

All you need to do is set the reward points for finishing a game greater than the challenge points, and you’ve got a great little game. The game requires everyone to listen for mistakes, but it also requires the teacher to be listening extremely carefully. When a student realizes his team is about to lose if they don’t stop the other team, they suddenly care about everyone else’s pronunciation and nitpick the hell out of everyone’s reading. They’ll also just lie if you let them, so you need to make sure you hear and that the challenges are as specific as possible.

Students that usually are just chatting with friends would shush everyone and listen intensely for mistakes. This caused the later readers to feel a lot of pressure to read as perfectly as possible, because everyone was listening to them. Their team was depending on them to finish the sentences perfectly, which can be a lot to handle for students that aren’t comfortable reading out loud. I’d only do this in a class of eager readers.

Our classroom has a computer, speaker, and if it had a microphone, we could even record and play back what the students read to catch mistakes. This might take the activity to the next level, as long as you could get everyone up in front of the microphone easily enough.

I like to call on all students by name in every class I teach. At the moment, this is a moderate challenge, as the class sizes have jumped about 30-50% from what I was used to. I remember most of the students names that I taught that have continued on to the new school. As of this week, I still know about 75-80% of students names in all of my classes.

On the first day of classes, I always take time to go around the class and try to get a name, an age, and one interesting thing about the students to stick in my memory. We talk about hobbies, pets, or anything slightly quirky that might help me jog my memory. I write their names on the board and use that as a list. I work down the list and try to match a name to a face. By the end of the day, I make sure to call on everyone once or twice and see if I can remember their personality as well as their name too.

Today one of my classes grew by three students, putting the total at 13. I no longer handle the attendance, so I never have a list of students name to work from to eliminate choices and work from. It’s all done electronically, and the Korean teacher completes it before I walk in the room. I had to learn three new names, and I only new half of the students names that joined last week. I wrote them on the board again like before, and tried to come up with a mnemonic device to help me recall them.

For example, in one of my classes last week, a girl introduced herself. She had the English name, “Hannah”. She had spent time in the United States.  “My name is easy to remember. Just think of Hannah Montana.” Uh…yeah. I told her that wasn’t as helpful for me as it was for her since I’ve never seen that show.

“Hannah, your name is a palindrome. Like R-A-C-E-C-A-R. Hannah is spelled the same backwards and forwards. Isn’t that pretty cool?”

The students in the class were impressed that I could come up with something unique about her name on the fly to help me remember. They don’t know my deep love for palindromes yet. This week, I was going around the same class, the students tried to drop hints for each of their names when I was drawing a blank. “Vroom, Vroom.”

“Ah ha! Racecar! Hannah!”

Another girl said, “My name is very close to the word KITE.”

“Oh, you are Kate! Thanks for the hint!”

It was pretty helpful. I’m still trying to get over some of their quirky ways of spelling their names, but I’m about to be tested extremely quickly. The number of classes we teach in a week will double. 15 students will probably be in each new class added. By my math, I’m looking at around 150 new names to learn if we don’t have any more returning students. That’s just for my classes. I’ve already given up trying to learn the names of the students in my coworker’s classes.

For an extra bit of challenge, I’ll only see some of the classes once a week, and there are no assigned seats. Those are two of the most helpful things to get names down quickly. I can remember my first few years in Korea, it took me ages to remember people’s names. I think my brain has been rewired a bit over my stay in Korea, as I have a much easier time remembering student names, but still fail easily at remembering the names of people in my day to day life or that I meet in passing, like at a bar or socially through friends.

Last Monday was the last day of the old program, so this week I saw my new Monday classes for the first time. It started out with a 75 minute class with only two students. It was a nightmare. One student was silent and shy, while the other student had a rebellious streak and terrible behavior. The new students can be shy for a little while, which is acceptable, but when students start trying to push my buttons on the first day of class, I get really annoyed. It didn’t help we were locked in class for my longest class period of all week, and had a scant two pages of story to cover.

The extremely naughty student was only a few weeks out of studying for Kindergarten, but was bold and boastful about his English ability. He claimed that he rode to school alone from across town on the subway. I didn’t find out that was a lie until he was being put on a bus after class. He would state something, then I’d ask him a follow up question, to which he would immediately lie about and say the opposite. He was restless and couldn’t sit down. He threatened to throw shoes at me, he wanted to go home early, etc, etc. If he didn’t understand, that’s one thing. If he wanted to make problems for no reason, that’s something totally different. He could read, and he had a large vocabulary, but he just didn’t want to study.

Eventually, I walked out of the class. I’m not going to babysit a brat for 75 minutes. My Korean coteacher told me he had the same behavior problems with the same student. My coworker said, “I thought he just didn’t like me…”. No, he just doesn’t like anyone. At least the Korean teacher and I are coming from the same place. Even the secretary stated that the mother was a bit of a hassle to deal with too. Perhaps the pain-in-the-ass streak runs in the family?I got a Korean teacher to come in and talk to him. He claimed he hadn’t understood me, but I think he was pulling a fast one on the teacher. I only see the boy once a week, so it’s going to take some time to see him improve. At least the Korean teacher can try to calm him down before I see him again.

My two other classes are absolutely awesome, and a total joy to teach. If the ratio is 1 bad student to 10 above average to the occasionally awesome classooms filled with kids, I’m totally fine with that. If the boy keeps causing a problem in the Korean teachers class, he might only stick around long enough until there is a full classroom, then we can start tossing out the bad ones when we have our waiting list full.

This weekend was the “trial run” for my new coworker to join our D&D group. I had helped him roll of up a character, but he had made all of his own choices when it came to abilities and whatnot. He was on time for the game, and we started out in a mini-scenario created from scratch by our second DM, then went into a player versus player scenario. I now operate as “Substitute DM” in both campaigns, which is fine for my desired level of involvement. I’ll probably DM once or twice in a three month period of time, which is plenty of unique chances to vex the players at the table for me, and is enough to wrap up the occasional subplot loose end, which is my specialty..

The first mini-campaign was really pretty fun for a simple “test scenario” sort of even. We were trapped in a canyon, and had to reach the other side without either getting caught in traps, crushed by collapsing rock slides, or picked off by kobold sharpshooters. It was a challenging, well planned scenario that kept things fresh by having different elements come into the battle at different times. I’ll have to keep this in mind the next time I plan an encounter. Not knowing where the enemies are changes to battle considerably. Luckily, the new Druid at the table had an amazing perception skill set that let us scope out some of the enemies before they were on top of us.

We were fighting through the battle as a team. My new Drow Star Pact Warlock was mechanically and numerically pretty sound. He got bonuses and had a burst based darkness ability that basically saved the party, albeit somewhat unintentionally. A tunneling creature popped up within the darkness my character had generated and was completly blind for one of it’s attacks. He would have eaten one of us if it weren’t for that. My character  was immobilized by a pot of glue the round before the entire valley was going to be brought down on us. In a pinch I rolled a save and made it out before it all came crashing down. It was close though.

The rest of the party worked pretty well too. We now have summoned monsters from the new wizard that adds some expendable meat shields. The Druid’s quirky power to hit only enemies, then drop them to provide healing to things was huge. My coworker kicked ass as well. The challenge placed forth by our DM was that if we chose to be encumbered by carrying extra gold, we could lose a square of movement each round of movement and end the scenario with more loot. No one took up the challenge except my coworker. He was a new kind of fighter that specializes in using two weapons at once and doing a fair amount of damage with each shot. He sliced the head off the kobold the DM sent in riding a Kruthik. It was pretty awesome. (Natural 20s rule.)

The follow-up scenario was pretty surreal. It was filled with illusionary forest creatures. As we walked around, we had to make skill checks. The DM modified and improved upon the system I had introduced in a previous session as DM. The entire movement and discovery was handled through checks. For example, my coworker grabbed a vine and was swinging through the forest Tarzan style, while I was using my perception and bluff skills to try hear noises or throw things off our path. Our druid talked to a squirrel that provided us with some information.

It was all well and good until our gnome rolled extremely high and discovered it was all an illusion. We were actually walking through a giant spiderweb. My coworker had been swinging on spiderwebs, and the squirrel we had interrogated was actually strung up and was about to be devoured. While one person had seen through the illusion, the rest of us kept failing our checks, so we saw both things at once. We were penalized in our movement, and it caused us to have to make some tough choices about where we were going to end our turns.

While we were exploring this spider web/ illusionary forest, we were attacked by a hideous spider that had two swords in place of it’s two legs. However, the characters that hadn’t seen through the illusion saw a cute deer.  We went into mortal combat with a giant friendly looking deer that was trying to eat/stab/look cute at us. Even better, some swarms of spiders appeared as butterflies, since we couldn’t roll high enough through the battle to ever break the illusion. Imagine a bunch of stock fantasy characters slaughtering an evil version of Bambi and that’s what the scenario ended up looking like.

After the Bambi slaughter, we got to play a team game, players versus players. In the first game, my coworker and I got smoked because we set up the board poorly and got hit by attacks from our starting position. The best that could be said about that game was that we got a clarification on the “Coup de grace” rules as a dwarf went around collapsing unconscious people’s heads in after they fell. It was a slaughter and was worsened by bad rolls on our part.

The second team battle was a lot more even. We set out with lots more hindering terrain, and I had a plan to try to interrupt the chaos caused by the opposing team’s wizard. I pushed him into a pit with a Sarlaac-like monster and forced him to give up his flaming sphere before it cooked us alive. We had to call this second head to head battle a draw due to time constraints. We traded hits and both teams were done one character when we finally wrapped up. Our DM was really aggressive when things changed to be head to head competitive, so I’m glad that’s not going to be a regular thing.

Learned that while my Drow could kill Kobolds pretty easily with the help of our team mates, against other characters I had problems with getting a high enough attack roll to hit their Will defenses consistently. Without my curses kicking in, I was really in a world of hurt. I really need to have my Star Pact bonus as well as my “Prime Shot” ability to mechanically build up enough of a bonus to my rolls to hit people every round.  When baddies fall left and right, I do well, but if we go up against a solo, I’m almost out of luck trying to get my bonuses. However, the trade off for “Student of Caiphon” allowing me to regain encounter powers for self-harming myself in battle was TOTALLY worth ever bit of damage taken.

The DM said this was the first Warlock we had seen that “didn’t suck in combat”, which is a small victory for me, since I had made it my goal to prove myself in combat this weekend to justify my pick of race and class for the new campaign. I delivered on my promise, so it looks like there won’t be any complaints. I’ve min-maxed myself well enough to justify my choices and now I can explore my character’s story more! YES! I’ve already got my paragon and epic level paths picked out, so I have a pretty strong vision of what will ultimately be a tragic character (for story reasons) to play.

My coworker has also passed his “interview” gaming session and is going to be invited back to play in future campaigns. He expressed interest in playing again too, which gives both the DM’s a bit of flexibility to allow for more interesting campaigns and storylines. It also means that even when one of the other players can’t make it, due to a plane, baby, or a complication, we can still keep the story moving on. Plus it’s something else to talk about at work and geek out about. I’m happy about that.

One of the Indie games that has some buzz behind it is “Jumpman”, a retro-lofi platformer that has a clever take on the 2600-esque games of yore. When I discovered this game through Offworld, the name of the creator in the description sounded familiar. My suspicion was confirmed when I explored the site’s Youtube link. I recognized the distinctive avatar of the creator of the game. He used to be a mod at a forum I frequent, but had quit a few years ago after a policy change. He was a pretty cool guy, and I enjoyed his style and moderation. Reading through the readme.txt included with the game, I recognized other people involved in the making of this game. In fact, the only person I’ve ever had visit my Animal Crossing DS village was responsible for the enemy artwork. Seems people I know at a forum I read made a game. Weird.

How can I describe my relationship to the creator of this game? I don’t “know” him in person, and I’ve never had any formal conversations with him personally. I’ve seen him express his opinion on numerous topics, and I’ve seen him arbitrate debates. I don’t have his email address, or even know if he is on Twitter. Really, all I know is an avatar and some text, and now a game, associated with it. Even then, the last time I saw him moderating or “online” was years ago. He’s clearly been up to other things since then. He’s neither a confidant, a friend, or a total stranger. An online former acquaintance? That sounds so lame.

Online relationships are weird. There are people I interact with, talk to, and think about on a daily basis that I’ve never met. I also have friendships with people I know, but haven’t seen for years, or months at a time. Is the occasional email to a person I met more authentic a relationship than someone I might converse with but not ever see? I personally set limits on the involvement I allow in my personal life from people I don’t know in person. Sorry to all of those of you that read this blog for hyper-personal diary like posts where I bare my soul: I’m holding out on you. There is a limit to the amount of information I’d share with a total stranger on the Internet. Same with the online world bleeding into my real world social interactions. I never want to get to a point where I start talking about online-only friendships as if they are invisible people living in a machine. There is a divide between my online and offline life that occasionally mixes, partially due to this blog, but I want to remain discreet and differentiated.

This is why I favor a more distant, picture-of-me-free sort of environment on my blog. Using something like Facebook strips away my anonymity, and even though I primarily interact with people online that I don’t mind sharing my name or identification with, I still like to preserve that distance. I have a feeling that if I didn’t try to keep the two separate, I’d lose sense of myself and get infatuated with the idea that all those people online that follow me or read my blog actually were “friends” to any real degree beyond online acquaintance.

While I’m happy about this former former moderators game, I won’t pretend I know him well enough to claim he’s anything other than a guy I knew once online.

Dwarf Fortress now has a Linux native build (Version 40d)! Huzzah!

Dwarf Fortress, for those of you not in the know, is a comprehensive, intimidating, utterly awesome game. Build on ASCII graphics, you take control of seven dwarves as they embark on a journey to make a Dwarf Fortress. You customize their gear, you customize their abilities, then are set loose in a randomly generated world of staggering depth. Imagine a dungeon builder mixed with The Sims, add insane RPG customization, and a dash of roguelike. It’s a game that seems destined for the ultra-dorky, but it’s so rewarding once you start. While the things in the game are represented with simple characters from the ASCII, they are incredibly detailed. In a future update, the creator will add statistics and names for every individual tooth and rib on a creature. This is a game where the main protagonists are smily faces.

In an average game, you’ll choose a spot on the gigantic pre-generated world built before your eyes. They really try to create a “living world”, and there are legends and stories created on the fly as you begin. After searching through different areas and biomes to find a suitable place, your dwarves will embark on an epic journey. You start in Spring, and have three seasons to try to establish farms, set up a brewery, carve bedrooms and grand halls into a mountain, and survive before the winter comes. If you survive, you’ll have to deal with migrants, fight off raids, appease nobles, and basically run a gigantic fort. Ever dwarf has an individual personality, skills, and talents. You need to organize your fortress how you see fit, utilizing carpenty, mechanical ingenity, and a comprehensive set of abilities to make what you need from the earth. Will your dwarves survive, or will they be drown in a river by a rampaging carp?

The game is so staggeringly complex, I’ve tried multiple occasions to play the game, but failed before I ever managed to strike the earth. Hilarious stories abound about muderous rages and unintended dwarven accidents. I wanted to play the game, but I stumbled over the interface and the cumbersome amount of button presses involved in trying to accomplish a goal. The game has a difficulty curve for beginners that looks a lot like a vert ramp at a skate park. Once you climb the steep heights, it can be amazing, but most of the time you end up landing flat on your face.

Thankfully, someone on Youtube has put together a comprehensive set of video tutorials in high quality that allow even a beginner learn the basics of the game. I went from not understanding anything about how to manage my dwarves to starting my own farms and building beds for the first time. It’s pretty awesome when you start planning out a fortress and need to overcome small challenges like needed soil to grow your mushrooms, to building a still to keep your dwarves happy and drunk.

Right now I have a dwarven fortress that is slowly consuming the side of a mountain, but my only arible soil is located near a pond outside. I’ve got to mine out a large enough farm before winter hits, otherwise my dwarves are going to starve. Also, I’ve got to move my masonry and carpentry shops inside before I get robbed by a bunch of goblins, which reminds me I still need a military. The list of things to do when you begin the game in earnest is never ending. The best part is, even if I fail to keep my dwarves safe, I’ve learned how to play the beginning part of the game better through the tutorials online, so I don’t feel so overwhelmed when I try again. I know this fortress will end in tragedy (comedy), so it’s better to learn and soldier on so that the next fortress will last even longer. Who knows, I might get one that lasts a year sooner or later.

Right now my school is running at a minimal capacity. We have buses going, we have Korean teachers with excellent English fluency, and we have students of various levels in a learning environment. Currently my schedule is extremely light, which I thought was going to cause a huge problem.

Instead of a problem, my director insisted on sticking to our old contract, which means that I have a maximum/minimum sort of clause. I operate like a salaried employee under my contacted minimum hours, and work as a part timer after they add more than the the minimum hours. I hit overtime earlier than everyone else too. I’m getting paid to NOT teach classes up to my capacity at the moment. Sweet. The benefits of a “part timer with a sweet visa” still accrue to me though, as I’ve got the most seniority out of everyone minus the director and the accountant at the entire school.

My coworker isn’t as lucky. Since he is a salaried employee that has housing owned by the school, they basically “own” his time in the afternoon as part of his contract. He knew what he was getting into, but this is a little ridiculous at the moment. I haven’t been in a “school wastes my time” situation since I got married, so I sometimes forget the ridiculous things a school sometimes asks you to do.

His contract mentions a maximum amount of hours, and as he isn’t being asked to work more than that, he’s stuck in the school. He teaches more than I do, but even still he’s under his minimum hours. They’ve asked him to come in to greet the students as they arrive in the afternoon, but his first class isn’t until the evening at the earliest. This is causing some annoyance on his part, as he’s forced to sit around for five or more hours between greeting students and teaching. I’ve greeted my students when they arrive because it happens at the time my classes are scheduled to be. If I had to come in early to do it I’d be raising a stink about it.

When more classes are added in a few weeks, this sort of problem will disappear, but he said that he’ll keep coming in for a week just to appease his director. I get to come and go as I please, but hey, those are the perks of seniority and sweet visas.

Due to a scheduling twist, I’ve got a one hour workday on Friday. I would have taken the entire day off if I could have,  but I’m not complaining about the workload for the time being. If it stays like this for the rest of the full semester, I’ll be shocked. My coworker is stuck teaching from the early afternoon to the very last class of the evening on the same day. The difference in our schedules isn’t caused by me handing any of my classes to him, and my workload isn’t being doubled for him either. It’s just bad luck that the classes he has happen to come three times a week while mine come twice. I didn’t plan the schedule, and I didn’t plan the classes, but his schedule is as awful on Friday as mine is fantastic.

All of this is still temporary while we’re at minimal capacity. Once there are more Korean teachers of significant quality and quantity hired in the school, we’ll have plenty of classes occupying our time, and the schedules will balance out to some degree. Right now though, things are pretty sweet.