Austin Plus News

The trip to Austin had been Ford's idea. He wanted to visit UT Dallas to see the campus, seeing as he was applying there for graduate school. (He got in.) While he toured that campus with his quiet brother and parents, Joey and I were driving around Austin, sampling different parts of its cuisine.

There were food trucks. In fact, more than half of the food industry was made of food trucks arranged in various lots. We tried out donuts, subs, cupcakes, but occasionally, we did hit an actual restaurant for their delicious steak, some big sandwiches and alcoholic drinks. Everything was plus sized and spiced much more richly than New England could ever bear. Also, MA was still cold at this time, and TX was up in the 70s-80s. Perfect early spring trip.

We also visited some odd museums at my insistence, because I can't just keep eating. There was an arts museum downtown that had two floors but some pretty but simple modern art. There was the Museum of the Weird which was very entertaining, even though I'm pretty sure most of it were hoaxes. Believing in it was more fun, but the skeptic in me grows stronger nowadays.

For the last night of the trip, Ford, Joey, his brother Jack and I went through the Austin strip of clubs and bars. Ford wanted techno and house music, whereas Joey wanted only hard rock. We even tried to dance. We're so terribly inept... But we had so much fun.

Now, the news. I had gotten a new job that will start in twelve days. It's temp to hire, so I don't know how long I'll be there. It's a call center in Quincy servicing Fortune 500 companies' internet and broadband. They do more, but the department that I'll be in will be doing that. After my less than a year stint at Phoenix Charter Academy, this came as a welcome surprise. More to come.

Not Sex and the City

Merry Christmas! And a Happy New Year! Did you catch one of those sales and get a great deal? I know I did. I bought this pink croquet-ed Arden B. dress (originally a $59.99 value!) for $23.59. For my facebook friends and all of two followers, I realize that I haven't written for three months. There's plenty to catch up on!

My battles with organizational culture are largely over - I tend to just do what I believe is my job and ignore the rest nowadays. I managed to stay with this fourth supervisor - thank goodness! Tasks are being taken care of, despite everyone's misgivings over who does what, how to say so-and-so, and territorial boundaries. I organized the student database, monitor (and troubleshoot, when devil magic happens) the school's one hundred and eighty computers, and fulfill the legal technology requirements for this charter school.

On the first day that I arrived at Phoenix Charter Academy, the internet was down. I hadn't gotten a chance to know every face and the building, much less the school's network yet, but the pressure was on already. "Fix the internet," someone suggested to me. Such a warm welcome.

When the internet was finally okay after three long days, then the next big project was to fix the phones. Having called Comcast and CBE, I suddenly got a crash course on IT phone networking, and the way that it is not on the same network as the internet. Each phone is connected to an ethernet wall jack, which is connected to a large switch box (like a router but for phones) and there were more phones than there were empty switch holes, so I had to change around the wires to fit everything.

While these two projects were going on, there are consistently staff members who use other people's laptops to send emails to me to complain about how sometimes they can't get internet, or the laptops don't start, or the screen is black. This happens especially often when one of the members of the "data team" has me administer online surveys to the students about their feelings while in school.

I am this school's current IT department. I'm making up the rules as I go.

Oh yea, how about that hurricane Sandy? She knocked out five of our servers, so that when the school opened up again, none of the teachers can print anything, and it was four hours of panic, and then a huge meeting about preparedness at the end of the week. I had to find those programs - all virtual operating systems, by the way - and put them back online, because Sandy created a momentary blackout.

Or two weeks ago, right before Christmas, when three teachers spilled drinks on their laptops when they were lesson planning at home. As Britney Spears once sang, "Are you kidding me?" I had to disassemble them to wipe the insides up and then spray them with pressurized hydrogen or something to clean it all up. Not everything was saved, but I did my best. Taking apart computers was my idea, but Phoenix Charter Academy isn't training me. My asking the right questions to three or four IT staff members from other organizations is.

I'm really enjoying this vacation, though. Hanging out with people almost every day, learning about the better eats and places of Boston with a group of people I've recently begun to get closer to. There's a chocolate restaurant, did you know that? There are also two really good art museums. A pretty man showed me that there's such an item as Christmas rap. That's right, not wrap - rap.

Happy holidays, everyone.

Hit the Ground Running

Hi, folks. Last we heard from me, I had left South Korea. Even though I'm back home now in Boston, MA, in the U.S. of A, my personal story is far from over - being at the prime of my life and all. ;-) I've been home for 26 days so far. So, reverse culture shock exists.

When I heard about it from other people, it struck me as kind of a myth. How hard can it be to readjust to the life that one has always had? Well, for me ... Not that hard. There are many disorienting mini-events to make me realize I've changed as a person, and my sleeping schedule is still trying to fix itself after about three weeks, but everything else is pretty okay.

During the first week, when two of my friends (who are married to each other) visit, I realize when trying to give them a tour that I had forgotten how to use the MBTA. The prices had increased again. It might just be that I had been in and out of airports for about forty something hours, but my legs felt a bit atrophied and I thought that Cheongju is not nearly as much of a walking city as Boston is.

My skin became very dry again, without the famous South Korean summer humidity. The water here is more metallic. Even though my mother mainly cooks only vegetables, the American diet feels a lot more fatty than Korean food, and a lot less salty as well. Cheongju's air quality is definitely much better than Boston's, despite our proximity to the ocean. My room is so much smaller and more cramped in comparison to my apartment in either Cheongju or on Daebudo. I miss having a lot less stuff. I miss waking up to complete silence, because I lived alone.

I love my sister, though. She thinks my cat and I are both beautiful. She'd say so to the cat when she thinks I'm not around.

My cat pretty much acclimated just fine. Eugene is grateful for my mother and sister's presences when I'm focused on something else and not paying attention to him. There is far more furniture to climb, and more small dark places to hide and sleep in. I groom his fur about every three days, and his appetite is similar - not that I would know the difference between Korean and American cat food.

I did make some changes for my own comfort. I bought a smart phone. I created a wireless network in the apartment, so I can use internet anywhere in the house. I spend a lot of time at the library, because it's much more quiet there since TV's are not allowed. My days are occupied by job searching, hanging out with friends, video games and a rapidly growing list of books on my Kindle Touch. When I play the MMORPG Maplestory, the subtle cultural influences from the game's having been developed by Koreans are far more obvious to me now. I bought classes in Mandarin that will start next month. I bought a YMCA membership so I can indulge in spiking my adrenaline when I get restless.

I get interviews, and I wait for the results. Let nothing curb the ambitions of this young woman.

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.

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.

Occupying Seoul (Yeoido)

America always has a lot of media attention from every country in the world, mostly because our international policy is to stick our nose in for what we think is right and sway the other members of the United Nations on various issues and movements whenever possible. This is old news. So it's no surprise that the entire world also has an eye on our economic and financial troubles; everyone knows that the American unemployment rate is at an all time high.

As per the power of the internet, I had first heard about the Occupy Wall Street movement through a lot of pictorial jokes on Facebook, which probably came from some graphic designers and people on 4chan. I knew that many people have been angry with Wall Street and Obama since the U.S. government organized the bank bail-out, but it wasn't until one of my Facebook friends posted a link on my wall about the movement that I connected the two and really started looking into it. I didn't understand it, because that particular link didn't give a very good representation of why people were protesting, and that the speaker sounded like he might have been high on weed didn't help either.

This link, however, clarifies the picture quite a bit and was far more persuasive, but I only saw this article after I went to the Occupy Seoul (at Yeoido) protest to do a little on-the-spot journalism to see what it was about. For a disclaimer, I will say that this is the first time I've ever been to a protest. I was a little nervous about participating because I realized this was a controversial topic. I also wasn't sure what the entire ramifications were for a Chinese American foreigner like me to contribute to this cause in this country, even though I agree with the core gist of the message, which was that financial inequality is everywhere so we as a citizenry rely on our governments to regulate giant banks and CEOs and stem the corruption.

In addition, I am aware of the counterarguments against protesting against financial institutions and the entire Occupy Wall Street movement as a whole. Here is one example. This argument states that everyone should take personal responsibility for their money; the American economy is so terrible right now because the majority of people go into debt from overspending and neglecting their bookkeeping. My friend Amy also has another perspective here.

My opinion is that, while this is true, it is nearly impossible to do if you didn't start out healthy (like if you had some genetic disease or disability) or have a family, in which case spontaneous events may keep you from saving money. I am lucky enough myself to have been born healthy, and I worked since the age of fifteen and went to a state university, so I had saved up enough money to become debt free roughly a year after graduation. Second disclaimer: I had a lot of help from my immediate family and one of my ex-boyfriends. (We're still good friends, but that's a whole other story.)

I went with my friend Mary Garcia (not her real name) and she had this green paper sign that said, "American Citizen + American Education + American Student Loans + A Lack of American Jobs = Sad American". She also participated in a handful of interviews. I refused to say anything in an interview to any of the reporters because I am not protesting any Korean financial institutions, and as I've said before, I am not sure what the full ramifications for a Chinese American to be protesting on foreign soil are. I went to the protest because I agree with the core message of the Occupy Wall Street protesters, want to support those people back home (as is true with my friend Mary Garcia) and wanted to see how this event would happen, because I'm pretty sure this will be a memorable moment in history. Citizens in a handful of different countries banding together to protest the same thing is something that I haven't heard or read about before.

 It was drizzling, but a large crowd of Korean people were there. They were chanting "We are the 99%! Occupy Yeoido!" both in Korean and then in English. Many people had signs. Though a majority of them were in Korean, a few were in English. Some even had on Scream or Vendetta masks, to protect their identities. At times, there was a man rapping in Korean. A woman's voice was leading the protesters, and a bunch of old Korean women were kneeling under the cover of the entrance to a building. Between these women and the doors of the building were a line of riot control Korean police - just in case, I guess. There were some other foreigners there too, mostly Americans and a few from other different parts of the world. Reporters from several different news stations were going around interviewing people. There were more foreigners interviewed than Korean people, so I was all the more suspicious about what the Korean press was going to say about this event and movement.

One reporter, after interviewing Mary, asked for my phone number so she can follow up on the interview, since my friend lied and told her that she had no phone. I gave her my phone number with an "Don't make me lose my job now..." but asked to be anonymous and refused an interview myself on the basis that I don't know what my employers would think. There was also one man who pointed a video camera at me without asking first, so I very warily said hi and then basically waved him away. I assumed he only got the end of what I was saying when I explained to another man - who was a reporter, but wasn't taking notes - that I agree with this movement because there is classism all over the world, and government regulation may help every country's economy a little bit.

We didn't stay for the entire time but I'm sure many Koreans are still there. When we were eating dinner back in Daejeon at a fusion Japanese noodle place, we saw on tv that the protest at Seoul Station was much larger, and it is still going on. I have my photos from the Yeoido portion of the event, which I uploaded to Facebook and may upload to my DeviantArt as well. This was Lily, reporting not-live on her blog at a friend's apartment in Daejeon, South Korea.

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.

Combo Finisher - Korea, Year One End

Saying goodbye to the munchkins was a heartrending process. The kids themselves made the work very difficult for someone without experience, but also make it so worth it. Even though the fifth and sixth graders were fairly jaded because they knew two other English teachers before myself, they still expressed sadness at my leaving.

For me, it was the beginning of the end when I translated all those kiddie speeches from Korean - with a lot of help from Google Translate - where I gained a better understanding of what each kid from grades third to sixth cared about from their essays. While coteacher assigned different topics for each grade, every speech was still unique and there was even one about how being wheelchair bound inspires him to become a social worker to help other people like himself. However, my coteacher didn't announce that I was leaving until exactly one week before I had to leave - Thursday.

Since he's probably going to have to take over teaching English for the half a year that Daenam Elementary School will not have a native English teacher, he told me to sit out the Thursdays, whereas before I would lesson plan by either expanding on a topic from the book or feeding the students vocabulary based on my interests. It doesn't make much of a difference time-wise, but it felt like I was less of a teacher. When I'm alone with the kids Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays were taken up by reading story books that I found , including Go, Dog, Go! for the younger kids and Peter Pan (the skeletally diluted version that comes with both a cd and Korean text in the back from EMart) for the older ones. Afterschool was games - who doesn't love games? Especially when I reward the winners with candy or stickers.

After the school day was over though, I cleaned and packed. Cleaning out my dormitory was a conscious process of deciding what's important, so the least important but worth keeping things were packed first. I had four luggages and my backpack and a handful of other bags plus the cat and his things. I did not travel lightly. Every other weekend, I would drag one of these luggages over to a friend's apartment who lives closer to Cheongju. It was the only way that I was able to take everything I wanted on moving day and not fill my coteacher's caravan to the brim. Those decisions weren't the hardest part. The hardest part was scrubbing out all the patches of cat hair mixed with my own hair that were ejected from under the washing machine and had accumulated on the bathroom floor. Grossed out yet?

Between cleaning my dormitory and the English classroom, my students gave me gifts. There were some handwritten letters that I enjoyed, expressing their heartfelt goodbyes. I received a plastic bouquet, a fan, a highlighter, a plastic rose, a mirror, some soap, and a few other things I hadn't had time to open yet. My teachers insisted on a goodbye dinner, though it was the most awkward affair ever, because I can't drink well and had no idea what to say when I'm supposed to make my rounds and toast people. So my coteacher urged me on and I had to stand up and give short speeches. They gave me a bag of Skinfood products. I felt special and popular, all the while knowing that they're just doing this out of courtesy and tradition. That was on Friday.

I even had a final disagreement with my coteacher. He and the administrator were checking my dormitory before the staff goodbye dinner. I had cleaned everything, but because I was still packing, there was clutter in places and my coteacher took one look and said, "No clean?" This was because when Koreans say clean, they mean organized and dust free. I was disappointed that he didn't even look at the areas I did clean, considering I worked so hard. It was part of the reason the staff dinner was so awkward - I wasn't in the mood for it, because I was irritated at him. Skip past Saturday and Sunday where I'm hanging out with English speaking friends - though there was a mildly interesting Korean American Friendship Festival on Sunday in Songtan.

On Monday, I had less clutter, but there were still a few bags on the small kitchen table, and some clothes strewn about the sofa because I was either still using them or planning to use them. Coteacher and administrator checked all the items off the list that they had to make sure everything is still there, but my coteacher still said, "You think this is clean?" gesturing at the kitchen table and the couch. Even the administrator paused and said, "Ooh... Smile again."

Coteacher waited til he was outside then went on to try to say that he wanted me to clear things so that it was like when I arrived, and I explained that everything still out are objects that I'm keeping. I have no sense of timing, because I asked that moment whether I'd still be in a car on my way to Cheongju or a bus since my recruiter had new information on where he wanted to meet. He said if I didn't clean the dormitory AND the English classroom to his satisfaction within the next few hours, then he's no longer driving me - good luck , I'm taking the bus and going alone, which would add roughly three or four hours to my commute.

I listen to him because I was going to do it all anyway, but he was just impatient and wanted it done by a very specific moment on Monday. Still, it didn't feel good, and I walked past them without saying much on my way to the English classroom to clean. It was much easier to deal with than the dormitory - I just put all the waste paper in the can, wiped down the desk and all the tables, swept the floor, then proceeded the mop it with all purpose cleaner. He wanted it to be like before I arrived, so I moved several pieces of furniture, pulled up the blinds and opened all the curtains. - All while singing to songs my friends suggested and dancing with the mop. The adrenaline made my bad mood go away, though it didn't erase this memory.

Tuesday. I get up early to finish packing all the little odds and ends, clothes, toiletries, and others. It takes me two hours to do that and finish with all the cat objects as well as urge him into the carrier. I visit my librarian friend, who also made me something. I sadly bade my goodbyes - she was the only person I can relate to in some form at that school, though the kids are great and the other teachers were all well meaning. Coteacher led me around to say goodbye to every teacher who was around individually, as well as the principal. So there we have it - no more Daenam, unless I actually take up their offer to visit.

Anticipation, Streamlining All I Have

Breakfast was a slice of bread with water, and that's enough to last me for a few hours. This means that I'm okay with a mostly Spartan lifestyle - cue: heavy guitar riffs, voice from the movie 300, "This is Sparta!!!" while I kick someone I dislike down into a metaphorical 6-foot hole. Don't worry people, lunch and dinner are always far more substantial (to back up the assertion that I do eat from the last post). Anyway, the process of moving to another city and another apartment is far under way.

Let's recalibrate. A few weeks ago, my school had told me that it's impossible for my contract to be renewed. I found another job at a private academy, since the timing of my contract's ending closed off most public school positions for me, and what scraps are left mean that I would be in a similar situation to where I am now: out in the suburbs - read, middle of nowhere - and having to travel fairly far to shop for food or see friends. So despite the bad reputation private academies have in terms of employing foreigners in this country, I really had no choice but to give it a shot. I spoke to a few recruiters, and these were my terms.

I wanted to be nearer to a city, while retaining the rest of the benefits I had before. They include health insurance, vacation time, weekends off, and having a (preferably free) apartment that's near both public transportation and the school. I also decided to move further south in favor of a less harsh winter, some people I already know there, and having it easier as a tourist to travel in any direction within the country. These are somewhat strict requirements, especially for someone without a teaching certificate with only one year of experience who was very much short on time (since I didn't want to spend the extra money to go home before coming back again to work). I was found by John Yoon of JICC Recruiting, and he sold me to the Cheongju branch of TOPIA. (I encourage everyone to blog about their recruiters - this way, we find out which ones are the liars who exaggerate to get you to take the job so they get paid.)

While I didn't get away with having nearly as much vacation time and there's more work, the pay is higher and I would not have to lesson plan. There will be a lot of student work to grade and forums to respond to online, and maybe I would have to bow to some extra parental demands. As with most academies, hours are afternoons through evenings. I will be working with more people because it is a large franchise and it can even afford having a handful of foreigners in one institution. However, the classes may remain small.

Even after I signed the contract, I continued to do my research - if this was a blacklisted private academy, for example, I wouldn't show up regardless of what paper I put my name on. When I called them and asked to speak to an English teacher, they gave me a Korean American or gyobo to speak to - whose word I still took for granted, despite the grain of salt that she would not have the guts to say she hated the place even if she did feel that way. But when she said, "Oh, you'll love it here!" there was enough enthusiasm that I think she would be telling the truth. I also reasoned that no matter how bad it is, it can't be as bad as my 11 months at Target, where my hours shifted on a weekly basis and I had no health insurance.

So John Yoon will pick me up from Cheongju train station on September 27th at 4pm. I still haven't figured out exactly how I'm going to meet him with two big luggages and a cat kennel, when I will have no cell phone and only two arms since I will be traveling alone. Later today or Saturday, I will go to Ansan Station to find a pay phone, so that I can at least call the local taxi van service to take me and my luggage + cat from my apartment near the mud flats to Oido Station, on Line 4. It might be a good idea to somehow get one more luggage to that area this weekend, so that when I meet with John Yoon I'll only have one big luggage and my cat.

In terms of packing, I've put away all my sweaters and jackets, and most of the small things are in this blue luggage next to me, and I know how I'm going to organize my shoes, my cat things, wires and small electronics. I also have another bag of toiletries, and a backpack of the stuff I'll need to stay comfortable for the next handful of days when everything else is packed away. I also need to go to the bank today to cash in all my coins so that I can travel roughly 3 kgs less.

Cleaning wise, I've cleaned the washing machine and porch area, most of the bathroom, and cleared out most of the drawers of everything that I'm keeping. I need to finish up the bathroom, work on the living/bedroom floor, the kitchen floor, sink and gas range, and perhaps the inside of the fridge. Now my goals for the next few hours are set.

I'm finished mentally recalibrating and organizing. And now, cue Juno's voice, "Thundercats are Goooo!!!"

Sudden Changes

A few months ago, the South Korean Board of Education had decided - and related through GEPIK (Gyeonggi English Program of Korea) - that due to budget cuts, they will cease to hire any new people before March 2012. This means that everyone who already has a contract can finish, but renewing with public schools will be a problem Korea-wide until they say otherwise. No one seems to know when they're going to have enough money to hire again; the March 2012 date is tentative and mainly there to stem any further questions.

What does this mean for me personally? Well, my contract is over this coming September 26. My E-2 visa expires October 27, and my corresponding Alien Registration Card expires on the same date. This means that either I find a job here before that time, so a new school will help me acquire a new visa or I'm going back to either the U.S.A. or preparing to go to another country. I decided that I want to stay here for another year, because I have more to learn about teaching, there is more to see in this country and I don't want to immediately leave some of the new friends I've met here.

So the past two weeks have been a mildly feverish rush of contacting recruiters and applying for jobs that way. Two days ago, I had made a list, and realized that I had actually contacted and applied with up to twelve recruiters. They all initially responded to receive my resume and photo, but many of them stopped after that, and around four stayed. I ended up half applying with EPIK, and then talking to a few other people about private academies. Because I am not Korean American, some places were off limits to me - this is because some parents really want a teacher at their academy that they can talk to, and my lack of Korean would be a barrier to that. Other places only want men or white people, sometimes their criteria can be very specific. I even heard that there are sometimes age requirements.

As with choosing between countries when teaching abroad, transitioning between jobs means choosing the ideal setting for me to live in. By now I had tired of the country life and want actual cities with convenience stores nearby, so I looked at my options for large cities. I've already explore a good part of Ansan and Siheung, even though the move to those two places would be easy, so I wanted something new. Seoul is too prestigious, and not being Korean American or having more experience teaching, this city is mainly closed off to me anyway. Incheon might have sounded interesting, but I know more people down south now, so that's where I opted to go. I applied in Suwon, Daejeon, Busan and Daegu. Next is the realization that because my contract ends September 26 - terrible timing! - just after most public schools are done hiring, I would have to take the place of someone who changed their minds, or just go for a private academy.

Private academies are completely different from public schools. The hours are from afternoon to night instead of morning, there are fewer vacation days and shorter breaks, and your supervisors get much more control over your teaching methods and style. I'm hoping the last one won't get me into trouble, because I had to change many things as is even when I was teaching in public school. There's a lot more paperwork to be done, in terms of others' evaluations of you and then your evaluations of the students and having to comment on students' posts on internet sites. I expect to have seven more teaching hours each week. While in public schools, they expect you to create your own curriculum, academies give you a curriculum and you follow that. I also heard that the academy sometimes either doesn't follow the contract or interprets it in such a way that they make it hard for an employee to leave or fine them so much that they ended up with only 20% of their total income.

As a result, whenever I was offered a place to work, I have to research it across a few sites for a good while before concluding whether that place has a bad reputation and whether the posters' complaints have any grounding to them. In fact, I'm still doing that, and one of the methods that people often says works is to call the school directly and ask to speak with one of their English teachers to see whether they are happy there. Either way, I'm expected to move out of my apartment by September 26, so I've begun packing. And the beat goes on.

Curriculum

So my schedule goes something like this.

I teach "morning English" every day of the week, twenty minutes before actual classes when I think of a simple game for kids of all ages involving English. So far, I've only come up with a song to sing, Hangman, Simon Says, and because Friday I was feeling lazy, I just let them watch Looney Tunes instead.

Then on Mondays and Wednesdays, I teach gym classes. So far, I've had them play tag and soccer, and haven't thought of anything much else yet. Mr. Jeong says that I should go by the textbooks and use English to teach them stretches and strengthen them through obstacle courses, except that I'm not sure how to go about that, so I will need to think of something soon. Monday's three periods are for grades one through three, whereas Wednesdays are for grades four through six.

There's also the afterschool activities, but these are kind of casual, no one really cares what I do with them, so sometimes they convince me to let them go outside, or just hang out, or something or other. But I also try to have them review the things they learned throughout the day through word games and such.

The goal is to have conversational English, so there are a lot of skits and role playing. The more talented ones can memorize the lines and act them out immediately, whereas most of them read them out loud from the "script". To make things fun, multimedia is almost always used - from sing alongs to memory games with prizes to whatever else we can think of. The main classes are through Mr. Jeong, so I don't actually assign homework - and this is perfectly fine with me.