Teaching was never the hard part. Playing the disciplinarian and being a coworker are much harder. Aside from the day to day, two things happened to make the atmosphere at Seocheongju TOPIA that much more grey. First, one of my coworkers administered a daily vocabulary test as per usual. The students who failed this test had to stay at the academy afterward for an extra hour; this is routine as well. One student - was she new? I can't be sure - cried throughout my entire class because she had to stay. Naturally, I didn't know this, and I kept asking her what's wrong, and then tried to distract her by getting her to do some work with the rest of the class. She wouldn't tell me anything - but told one of her classmates later that it was because she had to stay at the end of class. In the middle, the academy owner came in to poke around, and I couldn't tell him anything because the kid wouldn't talk to me. I told the homeroom teacher about this afterward. The child left TOPIA the next day. For a few reasons, I became the scapegoat of this situation.
Second, in that same class, there's one student named Jenny who keeps insulting me for absolutely no reason. While I do realize that she's 8 or around there, I'd like to think that her mother taught her better manners than this. However, I punished her because she disregards my requests for her to sit down and be quiet, and yes - to stop yelling insults at me in class. I told her to be quiet more than four times, and she refused, so I told her to go stand outside the classroom so I can talk to her later. She refused that too, more than a few times, so I removed her from the classroom. Some children watched because they were waiting for the next class, and she cried. Not only did the homeroom and head teacher both believe that I was in the wrong, they had me apologize to the student - and now that same student provokes me in class whenever she has the chance, because she feels she can get away with it. The sad part is, because of customer service, she probably would.
Partially due to these two scenarios, this past Monday, the head teacher gave me a "final" warning letter - complete with a line that, and here I paraphrase, says it doesn't matter whether I agree with the warning or not, just that I understood that I was being warned. On Tuesday, I took the head teacher aside and debated against him about the contents of the warning letter, and he doesn't even know what it was about. This makes me angry, both because the warning letter was very vague, not mentioning specifics, and that the head teacher doesn't know anything about this. While I sound fairly furious right now, I agreed with my employers about one of their bullet points in what I can change in my performance, and that alone is not enough to fire me.
I admit to having the thought of just leaving in a midnight flight run, but I don't want to let them take away my visa and have it be impossible for me to work in this country again. Because I don't spend nearly as much as I earn, money is not really an issue and I can afford this. I imagine midnight runners just go to an ATM and take out all of their money in cash. Just because this academy is unhappy for me personally, it doesn't mean that it's impossible for me to be happy elsewhere. The contract also states that should I breach it, they would demand back a year's worth of housing management, the recruitment fee and a month's worth of salary. I don't want to give it back to them because I earned that money.
There's also that I'll change my performance a bit, maybe just enough that they can't say anything, because then I can say that I tried, and even if they fire me, the consequences aren't all that bad, relatively speaking. If I want to stay in Korea, then I can pay back what they demand, because they will most likely demand it, and then go on my merry way and work at some other private academy or even a public school again, which over the long run will build more experience towards obtaining a university job. If I decide to go home, it will hurt my wallet, but I get to be closer to family and in an English speaking country again, where I will start over and find a nonprofit sector job if I can. If there are really no jobs in America for me still, I'm going to go to China. After a friend and I had a discussion, I realized that I don't care consistently about many things nearly enough, but the happenings at this private academy will never make me capable of caring more.
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