Being a Good (Conflicted) American Citizen

Forty eight days back and three interviews later, I am an Americorps IT VISTA for the Phoenix Charter Academy in Chelsea (Boston), Massachusetts. This wouldn't be nearly as interesting if I stuck to the rules regarding no blogging about work, and just didn't mention any of this. However, I will be discreet enough to use only initials and no physical descriptions of people at all.

Also, this still does fit into the mission statement of this blog, because America is very clearly a part of the international community. Just because I grew up here doesn't necessarily mean there are no new things to see; these places are local to me - but maybe not to many people who come here to see what's up with Lily.

Americorps is a program run by state governments to give qualified citizens two year-long contract jobs in their lives, in service to grassroots organizations, local communities and the state. I imagine that rules differ according to state. In return, I get experience in my chosen field and a medium sized stipend; it's a good amount of money that's not enough to live off of. VISTA stands for Volunteers in Service to America.

Chelsea is reachable through some bus lines running from the Orange Line Haymarket Station. I take bus 111 everyday. The Phoenix Charter Academy is a semi-privately funded, publicly run school for students who, for some reason, don't fit into the normal public high school system. Sample scenarios are that they are English Language Learners, were truant at other schools, or need some help with teen pregnancy or small children. Our current recruiter, JC, goes around recommending the school to kids in churches, on street corners, in rehab centers, counseling centers, hospitals, and other places (wherever people may need a good education to get their lives together, but don't know where to look).

We have our own team of counselors. The teachers are especially trained to discipline and educate inner city kids. There is a daycare center, complete with training for new parents, available on campus. The rules are strict. The curriculum is intense and aided by technology. There is a government subsidized meals program. Grassroots organizations like this really, really give me hope.

My role in this organization is less than clearly defined. While it means that I am generally a government funded volunteer for the Academy who works with information technology, my supervisor LS can lend me out to whoever needs a spare hand. Because of the special student population, I am also a part of the training that Fellows (think teacher assistants), teachers and administrators go through, which means that I function as half a teacher and am expected to enforce all the rules and enable this life-turnaround politically correct culture. There is a whole sociological approach and positive language (all in English, ha ha) that go along with this.

It sounds very philanthropic and awesome, right? Of course. Then why am I conflicted?

Despite having been a teacher in a foreign country, and maybe wanting to continue in the educational field, I wonder if I am actually capable enough to reach out to these children, when sometimes I can't completely break my own mental barriers regarding the way I think another person is when he starts describing himself with a label. I am also unsure of the meanings behind my own labels - Chinese, American, female, educated, writer. It must be only human to think about and redefine oneself daily.

I believe I have to take care of myself (I need to stop taking mid evening naps, for starters) to have enough energy and reevaluate what assumptions I hold about other people, and let these assumptions go. It's hard to know exactly how to do this. I could very well have been one of these at-risk kids. Whenever I don't yet know what to do, it may be best just to be quiet for a while and listen.

A Satire Truer Than Reality

About a month since the last post, my days at TOPIA: Cheongju have begun to feel like an exaggerated South Korean version of The Office. Previously on Lily Internationally, there was a head teacher who took his rage about customer service out on me; since then, I've talked to the homeroom teachers more about their bratty kids, cleaned the classrooms more regularly, and stayed in them until the bell rings even if I'm just standing at the ghetto podium watching the kids play tag.

We've had two new hires - Saerom and Jane. Sean, who's been here for maybe three months, picked up and left. Today, another week of debate competition starts, with the resolutions "Torture is sometimes acceptable" and "Television today is too violent." Mina, who was hired a week after myself, had to move her desk next to mine. At this very moment, I'm typing this blog entry on one of the academy's brand spanking new computers - paid for with money that the owner could have used for our overtime hours.

Speaking of overtime, we all came in at 9:40am on Thursday to stand around at a seminar so we can greet parents. The dress code was semi formal or formal black. The 25th of this month, I have to show up at 10:30am to correct speaking and listening tests. Did I mention that overtime is not assumed or promised for any of these hours? By the way, we all came in today for the debate competition classes to find out that they haven't planned the new schedule yet - which is why I have the time to write this post. Small silver lining.

Chain of Command

With the half-lull between the semester over for the middle school students and the new semester earnestly under way, events have settled into something of a routine. I was glad for it, since the middle schoolers coming to TOPIA mainly because their parents don't want them going anywhere else meant that I had to be wedded to the copy machine. I had to photocopy answer keys and then white out the answers to pretend that these were workbooks, since the real workbooks weren't available.

A new start comes with new joys and a new set of problems. While I really enjoy the pretty set of reading books in the Spotlight series, the writing books tend to have too many activities for the time allotted. This is especially true since the daily vocabulary tests started up again and moved the whole schedule forward by twenty minutes. The activities in the debate books are more than repetitive, encouraging the kids to brainstorm the same topic over and over. For middle school debate, the books show both sides of an issue, but the research team chose issues that I don't think the kids care about. For example, very few Koreans are animal rights activists - this is a meat eating country, after all.

There's also a new class named Library. While the elementary school students are adjusting pretty well, the middle school students and we teachers are not. The textbook for the middle school Library classes has many grammar oriented activities, while most of the teachers want to teach it like a literature or book club type class. I was teaching it as a grammar class because I was going by the activities in the textbook, but since teachers disagree and the students have been complaining, there have been a handful or so of meetings to improve this class. Some meetings were right after work, so all of us had to stay a couple of hours after without overtime pay. I've been told that this is business-as-usual in Korea, whereas I know Americans would probably raise a riot.

The grading system is also kind of on the fritz. While we can input the homework grades for debate classes, we can't for the rest of the classes so everyone has been kind of ignoring the fact. We can upload the homework assignments for all the kids, thankfully, but it's inconsistent. Just two days ago, some classes didn't show up in the database. The next day, some kids showed up with no homework and blamed the database even though all teachers assign homework in class, on the board.

While all of this is a tad frustrating, I wasn't affected much until today. Today I got hit directly by the chain of command. What happened was that the private academy owner's son is in one of my writing classes, and he's cocky enough to laugh at the rest of the class out loud. One of the female students felt offended, but instead of speaking up about this, she goes home and tells her mother. Her mother calls TOPIA in a rage, so the head teacher of the foreigner teachers gets to deal with her since he's the homeroom teacher of that class. He goes searching for any "incidents," and when it was my turn I didn't think what happened was anything so I just said the boy was cocky and didn't mention it.

Today, apparently what happened was that head teacher tells the girl's mother that nothing was amiss, so she gets even more angry. Then he hears what I said to two other teachers regarding what the student said in the "incident" and comes back to lecture me about not giving him all the information he needs.

All this is the simple result of one kid being a jackass, while the female student overreacts and then her mother does too, so the head teacher comes to say something to me about it. I'm going to talk to the academy owner's son alone the next time this happens, but I can't tell the girl to ignore the opinions of others since head teacher wouldn't tell me who she is. I'll report anything out of the ordinary about this class specially to the head teacher, but I won't do this for everything the kids say to each other, because they're cruel on a daily basis consistently.

This kind of politics happens all over the Earth, so this has nothing to do with whether I am in South Korea. In fact, it feels to me like an episode out of "Boston High School" or "The Wire" - and unfortunately, today I was the one being kicked. I won't let it happen again tomorrow.

End and Begin a Semester

The debate competition ended with a sigh of relief from everyone, except for the higher level kids who enjoyed etching out the ideas and details of one topic, because it involves a lot more speaking than writing and less homework.

It occurred in a gumdo training room beneath TOPIA. (Gumdo is a martial art style that's like kendo, but geared toward big groups of enemies instead of just individual combat. Kendo is a Japanese one-on-one sword fighting style complete with structure and armor. ) While more than just this private academy uses this building, I think the academy's owner has the rights to it, which is why we have to clean the classrooms after all the kids leave at 10pm and the Korean teachers clean much more during unofficial office hours.

 We moved some unused bookcases and shelves into the giant store room next to it, cleaned it up, and then moved all the chairs (except for two classrooms) and a handful of tables down into the training room in the basement. That only took one sentence to explain, but the actual process is always a lot slower. For example, I had to hold open the elevator consistently for people to move chairs and tables into it. Before that, it took a while to move all the chairs and tables from their classrooms to the space in front of the elevator. Once we moved all the chairs and tables to outside of the elevator in the basement, we still had to place them in the training room. It also took three or four trips because the elevator is roughly only four feet by four feet.

The preparation was a lot more work than the actual competition. While I did judge one elementary competition in a panel with two other teachers, one part of the competition itself only took maybe forty minutes. There were roughly five rounds. In between, the vice academy owner treated the kids and teachers with hamburgers and cola. The kids who were too young to participate watched a movie until their time was up on that day, and I babysat them with one other teacher to make sure they don't get too out of control or make a mess of the classroom since they got hamburgers and cola as well. The first four rounds took place in classrooms on the fourth floor.

Only the final round took place in the big training room, where several banners about TOPIA have been put up, and a new banner for the debate competition itself hung behind the two competing teams. Aside from all the teachers, the academy owner and vice owner, all the students and a tiny number of parents made up the audience. The students get restless, and we had to shush them many times. The judges sat in front of the audience, the podium is in the middle, and the two teams sat on either side of the podium. The elementary teams had five members each, while the middle school teams had three students each. The final round took around an hour and a half to two hours.

The winners received cash prizes; the runner ups received participation certificates and dark chocolates that we teachers had to pass out next week in class. We also had to skip some chapters in the book so that we can say we finished the textbooks, since the semester ends this week. I went in this past Saturday to proctor an interview and grade some placement tests, and I'm not sure how much I would receive for compensation. I also have to wait one more month for health insurance.

Two weekends ago, all the teachers plus our supervisors went to Daejeon for training. The new program is called Debate and Library. There will be next textbooks, and the teaching will be much more reading and debate based. This is good for teachers who like using story formats, but bad for everyone else. There will be new schedules, which will include the one or two new teachers who have arrived since the last entry. I was just getting used to these textbooks and this routine, but situations change quickly - such is life.

Debate Competition

A month into my new job, working at TOPIA, there is a randomly announced debate competition. While there were three debate competitions before, they were only for the higher levels on a voluntary basis, for students who have taken the debate class. Now, the entire schedule has been paused, all syllabi notwithstanding, for a new version of the debate competition that's for all levels, whether they signed up for the debate classes or not, on a semi-voluntary basis. It's just that those kids not participating in the contest will still have to partake in the group oriented debate classes for everyone.

Teachers are suddenly grouped together, whether they've previously taught debate or not. Information meetings are held at the last minute, people are lost, but everyone's winging their way through. At the risk of sounding like I'm stereotyping, I wager to say that snap decisions from higher up that overhaul everything at a moment's notice is a Korean practice. This is encouraged by the way employees don't complain even when very discontent, because it is viewed as a sign of weakness, not that something might be wrong with the system. The way people compare each other is used to persuade people to work harder towards the ideal.

Sometimes I feel like this 'the group is always right' mentality might be more consistent than the American ideals of individuality, given that democracy is basically that group opinions overrule any one voice, and the majority wins. However, that is not to say I believe it's right to see dissension as a sign of weakness, because most of the time that is probably not true. I'm never sure whether or how much bias there is in my thinking, though, because I was raised in an American system where the loudest opinions are the most easily heard (and more so assumed to be correct). The underdog is the hero in American culture; that is, the dissenter is usually seen as right.

In this situation though, I have no real choice but to go with the flow. The elementary school children are using semi-parliamentary style debate, where there are five members per team, and one team is for the motion, whereas the other team is against the motion. The pro team always goes first, then the con team goes, with the introduction. The same is true for arguments one, two and three, where a person always replies in a rebuttal to the points that the previous person makes, and then speaks more in detail about her own argument. She should end with giving evidence. In the conclusion, the con side goes first, so that the pro team can have the final rebuttal, and then everyone in the house votes on the motion after listening to this debate in real life, but in the competition, the judges will vote.

Meanwhile, the middle schoolers will use parliamentary style debate. Instead of pro and con, the sides are named government and opposition. Each side will have three speakers, and every speaker has a name. On the government side, we have the prime minister, the deputy prime minister, and the government whip. On the opposition side, we have the leader of the opposition, the deputy leader of the opposition, and the opposition whip. Government goes first, as with the elementary schoolers, then the opposition. As before, the present speaker will contradict the prior speaker's points. This time, however, everyone has to give evidence, not just the people giving the arguments. The first two speakers on each side has to talk about the topic, give three points with evidence, and the whips give more supporting evidence. Then the opposition gives a reply speech before the government does, and the debate is at an end.

The first round will be on November 9th, with the final round on November 11th. I'm not sure who will be the judges of the competition, but I know that some parents will be there, so our academy owner wants us to prepare the children very well. After this, the schedule will return to being guided by the syllabi and then everything will be as usual. I've been having a bit of a hard time both adapting to all of this and having time at the end of the work day to create as I usually do. I miss my drawings, poetry, fiction, photography, video games and books. Of course, there's also social networking and blogging.