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.

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.

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.

Promise to Give 'Em Ecstatic Hell

Substituting for the coworker who had to go to the dentist from last time went very smoothly, because my one year of experience teaching ESL on Daebudo really did make me comfortable with South Korean children and having authority over them. Naively, I thought that first mild test was the only one, and that I'd have started to officially teach by now.

Nope. TOPIA had me back at observation of coworkers' classes, which relaxed me a bit because it was easy and I didn't know for how long I was going to be doing that. I told them I was ready to teach, but then they had me Microteach, which means I pretended that a panel of coworkers are students, have half the duration of actual class time, with material from their highest English middle school class. It was a reading comprehension class, so I had my coworkers read passages and discuss the main points of the story. When evaluation time came, they really kicked me down a notch - as was their job to do so.

It felt like a Maoist style criticism, and I was so tense that I started hyperventilating. I only got better when half of them left and I sat down, only to know that my skin had gone chalk white and there was a half subconscious part of me willing myself to breathe. The administrator Yvonne seemed really disappointed and hadn't spoken to me, but the academy owner patted my shoulder in sympathy and almost all my coworkers gave me pep talks because they all had to go through this trial by fire. In hindsight, it was true that I was under prepared, but to be fair, it wasn't that I didn't teach - it was simply not anything similar to what they were looking for. That was Wednesday.

Because this is a private academy, what they are looking for is what matters the most. It's similar to the way that one has to fit in with the corporate culture of whatever big company a person is working at in America - like EMC, the data storage company, practices Lean Six Sigma which emphasizes customer service and "project focus on the key business gaps and strategies critical to the business success". TOPIA's principles are Credibility, Competence and Compassion. The Microteaching aspect probably focuses on credibility and competence - in the way that they want me to teach.

They wanted me to go by the syllabus, which means that I will not have any students read anything in class - they will only go over the workbook exercises with my half guidance with the assumption that they all did the homework. So then my real role - as was true for my time at the public school in Daebudo as well - was to discipline them, sporadically add in new ideas and personality to the textbooks (read: be a particularly authoritative performance artist), and engage them in conversation while adding in new ideas

And I did do that, partially, but I hadn't used the workbook and wasn't informed of how to read the syllabus, or the very structured and ordered way they had wanted me to use class time. I only had maybe twenty minutes because I spent ten photocopying reading pages from the student book last minute - while they did tell me that I was going to Microteach, they didn't tell me the specific chapter or structure they wanted - and so I thought teaching the way I taught before was going to be fine.

So now that I've been fully woken up to what they actually want from me, I've spent the last two days preparing. The next Microteaching is tomorrow, Friday. To make up for my lack of satisfactory performance in their eyes, they're actually having me demonstrate two times back-to-back, so I have to go in half an hour early. I'm well prepared now, having planned everything that I think they want down to the half minute. This also means I should go to bed almost right after I log off here. Wish me luck, and goodnight.