breaks

I don't mind working. But, with any job, it's nice to have a break now and then.



I've never had a typical job; a job one might expect of an American with a university degree. (Aside: whilst I'm home people occasionally ask, "When are you going to get a real job." Please don't say that to me.) But I have a general idea about them. There's the ~hour lunch break and the occasional 15 minute breaks, right? I don't get that here.

My schedule is pretty tight. I have to be at work from 3-10. I teach an average of about 5 hours a day now. Combine that with preparation time and the day to day miscellaneous work that always pops up, and it's a full day. But again, I don't mind working.

What's annoying is that the few breaks I do get a week, aren't exactly breaks. See, the word break implies a cessation of, and then return to, work. You know, work-break-work. However, my breaks either occur before I've done any work, or after I've finished it.

For example, sometimes I don't have any classes until 5. Preparation is usually no more than 20 minutes, which leaves me over an hour and a half of nothing to do. Then I'll have 5 hours in a row of teaching. Thus, my break is a break from nothing.

Even more annoying are my Wednesdays. On Wednesday, I have no more classes after 8pm. But, I can't go home until 10pm, just because. A 2 hour break in the middle of the day would be divine, however having to sit around and just exist within a certain space for 2 hours before I'm allowed to go home is agonizing. I end up spending ~30 minutes doing all of my preparation work for Thursday and Friday, but, again, I don't teach until 5 on both of those days, making those "breaks" even more useless.

It makes sense, to me, that once you are finished your work for the day, you go home. If there's no more work to do, there's no sense it just hanging around. But that's not how it works here. In Korea, your job has to be something you struggle through. You're not being paid for the work that you do, you're being paid for enduring a sufficient amount of misery. No one is supposed to love their job. If you do, something is wrong: you're either not working enough, or you're not working hard enough.

A few months ago, I was teaching all the classes that were required, meaning it's not like there were some classes that needed a teacher but were going without. And, I had a couple break periods- actual breaks- and I was pretty happy. I liked my job. But, the manager of the elementary branch just couldn't stand that my job might be something other than miserable. So, he gave me 3 extra hours a week of literally just sitting and listening to kids read as fast as they could. They had to read from page X to page Y in a certain amount of time, typically 5 minutes. If they failed to do so, they had to come back the next day and try again. It was my job to sit there with a stop watch and time them. I wasn't even supposed to correct any mispronunciations. Just start and stop the timer. I bet it'd take about 30 minutes to train a bonobo how to do that.

Now, this activity in no way benefits someone who is trying to learn English. If anything it hurts them, it instills in them the notion that speed is more important than pronunciation or comprehension. Having them read page after page of nonsense words would be just as helpful. But, the purpose of this exercise was not to benefit the student, it was simply to make my workday more difficult. Once a few more classes opened up, requiring me to teach them, wouldn't you know this activity was deemed superfluous, and fell by the wayside.

If you ever work here, you'll probably notice that your Korean coworkers always seem to be moving at a frenetic pace. If they have to make copies of something, it's always a sprint to the copy machine. If someone asks them for something that they don't have readily available, it's a breathless scramble to find it. It's never a calm, easy-going state or environment. And I know why. It's not to increase their productivity, it's a defense mechanism. Because if you don't look like you're overworked, someone will make sure that you are.