teaching

Today South Korea held their congressional elections. Now, I don't know too many people, but nobody I know had to work. Not my good friend, nor his wife. Nor my other good friend. Nor some other acquaintances. My girlfriend, who ordinarily works 60 hour weeks, didn't have to work. The two other English academies in my building were off, as well as the ballet academy that's on the same floor as my academy. You probably know where this is heading by now: I did have to work.


The youngest class I teach is one of ten 9-10 year olds. In this class there are two girls who share the same name, Chae-yeun. The other day I was typing up my monthly report cards, and I couldn't remember which one was which. One has the surname Park, the other Han. I went to the class's Korean teacher and asked who was who. "Park is the cuter one," she told me. That seemed to me to be a heartless way of distinguishing between the two girls, but if I'm being honest, I knew right away who she meant.

That same Korean teacher is quitting at the end of the month. She feels she is being overworked. Her workday starts, as does mine, at 2:00. Our boss wants her to stay until 11:00, despite the fact that our teaching schedules end at 9:25. It's pretty pointless for her to have to stay that late, and she let our boss know that, in no uncertain terms. Our boss was unwilling to budge, so the teacher is quitting.

That's the life of a Korean teacher at an English academy. They are often forced to go well beyond the call of duty, and if they refuse they can easily be replaced by the next teacher, who will then put up with it for as long as they can, until they in turn quit as well. The reason I'm not asked to do so much is because if I quit the school must go through the whole process of finding another westerner to work for them, and shell out a couple grand for their plane ticket over here.

I kinda hate my school. There is not one major problem, just a bunch of annoying stuff. One of the most annoying things is the truly terrible books I have to teach with. One of the worst is a book I use to teach the highest level of students at the academy. The book is a collection of English news articles from a Korean newspaper that is published in English. The problem is that the book is 6 years old, and was obviously hastily put together. As a result, every article is from a two month span in 2006. They aren't so much "news" articles, as "olds" articles. One recent article was about President Roh's decision to limit private school funding. President Roh, you may recall, leapt to his death from a mountain a few years ago (By the way, if you click that link and scroll to the comments, you'll be treated to one of the best comments ever left on this blog). The discussion questions aren't exactly topical anymore.

On Tuesday we read an article about a case of bird flu that popped up in Korea in 2006. Whilst the class was reading the article out loud, I foresaw another agonizing class of me trying to make a 6 year old topic something these kids could possibly care about and discuss. Then I had an idea. I had the class go through the article and cross out every instance of the phrase "bird flu" and replace it with "zombie virus". We read the article again and it was much more riveting. We then had a lengthy discussion of what we would do if during our class hordes of zombies came shuffling down the street.

It took a few minutes for them to get creative with their ideas, but I was soon impressed with their moxie and ingenuity. They even came up with some ideas straight out of "The Walking Dead", such as covering ourselves in zombie entrails and pretending to be zombies, despite never seeing the show or reading the comic book. By the end of the class they were describing mowing down throngs of zombies with a machine gun mounted on a helicopter.

I am one hell of a teacher.