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.