A Taste of Chaos

Do you think it's lucky or a misfortune that SeoCheongju TOPIA gives me so much to write about? After the last post in which I thought I was going to be fired, more strange events have been happening at my work place. Thankfully, this news has nothing directly to do with me.

This past Monday was a very hectic work day, because both the head teacher and another teacher were out, both due to illness. I imagine some people had to cover the second teacher's classes, and the academy owner himself covered the head teacher's classes. This doesn't mean that the owner actually taught, mind you. He just took all the classes to the second floor to have them sit in the computer lab and do their online homework. He said that teachers shouldn't bring their kids down to the computer lab while he's conducting classes there (in Korean). It wasn't until after another teacher told me directly what he said that I understood he meant me.

In this back drop, the real story happened during seventh period. By eighth period, we were told no kids were allowed on the second floor because of something that happened. While most people were teaching, apparently the father of one of our lower level students stormed in with his wife to talk to the teenager's homeroom teacher. Two teachers went to talk to him, one male and one female. Whatever they said to him must not have satisfied him, because he took one of the academy owner's trophies and cut himself accidentally while smashing it. When I came back from class to sit down and try to plan the next day, a different female teacher told me that she was commanded to clean up the blood that the father had smeared everywhere. A male teacher helped her. She said that the father was really crazy. When one of the receptionists had me leave, the father was red faced, pushing past the vice academy owner demanding to see the male teacher who had initially went to talk to him. The teacher went out reluctantly, full of fury at the lower level student.

Then I was instructed to go monitor the same class that the lower level kid belonged to. I told them that nothing was really happening, but that they were to continue to do their own work independently. When I offered to help anyone who asked, a group of three boys had me help them do a crossword puzzle that was part of their reading class homework. I led them on, giving them small hints here and there for them to figure out since they couldn't do it using the clues the book provided alone. At the end, the atmosphere of the class was much more relaxed, and those three boys finished their crossword puzzles. One of the receptionists came in to pass out the academy announcements for April, which included tuition fees information and such. When the bell rang, we were all glad that the day was over.

Today, the father came again to negotiate with the academy owner - with a friend, in a suit. According to the head teacher, he had filed a complaint to the Board of Education against TOPIA. He said that none of the teachers at TOPIA paid much attention to his son, and that none of us can teach. Therefore, someone from the Board came by to do an inspection. Before the man came to inspect, however, the head teacher ushered a Canadian male teacher, an American Korean female teacher and I into the break/meeting room to tell us that we must leave the premises until the vice academy owner calls and tells us to come back. The reason for this is that we three were, for some reason, not registered as TOPIA teachers in the paperwork for the Board of Education. So the three of us leave and head to a coffee shop to talk for an hour.

Everything is fine when we come back. There may still be a lawsuit between TOPIA and that parent. Oh, and I'm not getting fired. I pressed the head teacher to give me the details of the "final warning letter" and he wrote out that I just got the letter because the academy owner gestured and supposedly told me to go calm down a crying child who failed a test, but since he was gesturing and not saying anything, I misunderstood -  not to mention at that time, I didn't yet know why the child was crying, because I asked her and she kept crying and refused to talk to me. I only found out later because one of her classmates told me. Basically, as long as I keep my head down and give the academy owner no reason to think that I'm deliberately disobeying him, I'm good to go. They also really need people, because the turnover rate is so high.

This means that I'm going to attempt to stay for the rest of the six months and then decide what to do from there.

Things Fall Apart

Since I've stopped drinking and the incident in this episode, my social life at work has gone downhill from there. One would think that since everyone's planning for classes when they're not teaching that this wouldn't matter, but it gives my whole ten hours there a nice sheen of disinterested silver grey. I still enjoy teaching, and planning for classes is easy - it just involves writing down the past homework, scheduled teaching material, new homework, then printing all the tests out and reading over the material for a few minutes.

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.

Cycles of the Moon

During quieter moments, I often wonder how life would be different for me if I were Korean and had to go through this school system. They study roughly sixteen to eighteen hours a day. Up until recently, that included Saturdays as well, which means only one resting day. Aside from art class, most of the curriculum is comprised of memorizing ginormous amounts of information. I have no doubt that were I in one of their places, I would be much less likely to be the writer I am today. Their legal system is completely different, so I would imagine the whole process of getting published is also completely different. I love their equivalent of Borders, though.

Nevertheless, they are who they are, and I am myself. Once more a semester has ended, and another new one has begun. Most of it is the same, but I have two new textbooks to teach to fairly low level kids. Aside from the usual grappling against altering my own style to suit these books, there are a few more challenges this semester. One of them is the familiar challenge of kids staring at me because they have no idea what I'm talking about - I'm just the strange foreigner who's telling them what to do and they're trying to figure it out. The other is that since Sean quit, everyone in the office has at least one day per week where we teach five classes in a row. This makes for really long days, and for me, they are Monday and Thursday.

Some students leveled up, and others didn't. Every class is new, because there is at least one kid I don't know. But there is a comfort level with the kids that I do know. The other challenge is that not all the textbooks came at the same time, so there are some classes where we had to basically make up some random thing for them to do. The head teacher decided to make them write a self introduction essay and then present it. I got called in for a talking to because some kids said others were playing with their cell phones, and also some say I was under prepared. It's not just the kids who don't have books sometimes, though - we teachers don't get copies of the books for some classes.

In terms of personal challenges, sometimes I feel that maybe because Koreans grew up in such a competitive society, they get used to acting like they always have something to prove. Literally everything is a competition. Today I was told that it's common for students to put their test scores on their resumes for consideration by colleges, and then later, as graduates for consideration by jobs. Everyone seems to have a do or die attitude.

The academy owner likes to annoy me by keeping close tabs and coming into my classes in attempts to point out things that I've missed. For example, after I got a talking to about some students playing with their phones, he caught someone and took the student's phone in front of me. I'm sure that in his mind, he's trying to help and this is his way of motivating me or something, but I really just feel harassed.

Then I feel like this is the way this society works. If someone higher than you in status feels like you're not doing something that you ought to, they'll just harass and alternatively make your life miserable until you hide all your feelings of scorn and contempt for them, even if you take only the most minimalist steps in doing what they want.

From what I gather, the whole atmosphere when it comes to foreigners has become somewhat more hostile. Because another coworker is quitting soon, the academy owner is urging us to turn our documents in to him again, to make sure that the organization has hold of our visas, with the excuse that it's an order from the government. The government itself is making the contracts of even the public school teachers much more dependent on their staying for the entire duration of the contract. In somewhat related news, I just got my national criminal background check, but I wonder if it's worth the effort to find another job in this country if it means staying here for a longer period of time.