always sometimes

The days keep going by. I suppose that's an unremarkable observation. In fact, I've never lived a day I couldn't say that about.



There's a very low level of trust in my current profession. The owners of the types of places I work don't trust us foreigners they've hired. I think it's an artifact of a bygone era, when the now-moribund English academy business wasn't just alive, it was thriving. It's supply and demand, there were more academies than there were foreigners willing to teach in them. As such, schools got stuck with whatever dipshit with a liberal arts degree was willing to come over; they couldn't afford to be selective. Said dipshit would arrive and treat it like a mix between a working holiday and an extension of college. So you hear stories of people who would drink on the job, or vomit in kindergarten classrooms, or otherwise fail deplorably at their jobs. This is 15-20 years ago I'm talking.

What the academies did, then, to be vigilante of these vomiting dipshits, was to install CCTV cameras in every classroom. Now, I should mention, our ranks are still populated with dipshits with liberal arts degrees, but with the industry withering we can't afford to be so incompetent. Again, supply and demand, but the variables have swapped places.

Now, despite what I'd call a sharp increase in the quality (or at the very least, disposition) of the average teacher here, the cameras are a mainstay. Koreans aren't likely to give the benefit of the doubt to foreigners in any regard. Fool me once, as the saying goes. There are even TVs in the foyer with feeds from the various classrooms, so that moms are anyone else can keep an eye on the teacher. And make no mistake about it: their primary function is to surveil the teacher, not the students.

It's always bugged me, to have that eye in the corner constantly, maybe, watching. In some respects I'm lucky; some academies take it to an absurd level. I have a friend who worked at a place where every class was monitored.  He then had weekly meetings with a supervisor where they'd watch bits of classes together and discuss the things he'd done that were deemed unsatisfactory.  Prosaic allusions to Big Brother notwithstanding, that's creepy.

I mention all this because today I was clearly being watched in my class. It was the last 5 minutes of the day, at the end of a 90 minute impromptu class I was given. Coming up with 90 minutes of English education, on the fly, using no book, and with five middle school students who you've never taught before and who are all at varying levels of English proficiency, none of which could be considered passable, isn't easy. In this case, I came up 5 minutes short. To kill the remaining 5 minutes I figured why not play a simple, English-centric game. So we start to play, and not long after, my boss comes into my classroom and puts the kibosh on the game real quick.  She tells me no games. Now, instead of a few minutes of mirthful interaction with the English language, our time is spent in silence, doing precisely nothing.

It was clear that she was peeking in and saw something she didn't like. I spoke to her afterwards and explained what we were doing, and everything is fine now. It was just an occasional reminder that someone is always sometimes watching.