I’m in bed and just woke up from passing out.  It’s becoming this daily evening pattern.  I come home from work, take care of some business, try to find a signal on this laptop, and fall asleep mid sentence, only to wake several hours later.

I remember traveling to a country where Spanish was spoken and how exhausted I was at the end of the day.  Totally WIPED OUT from working so  hard to derive the meaning behind everything.  And when my daughter was in the Netherlands she told me how totally wiped out she would be from absorbing Dutch all day long, and how she would fall asleep early and sleep about four hours more per night than she did in the states.

Only here is not that feeling.  Here, everything is more developed than the states.  The quality of life is the same.  There are no real physical hardships, and all day long everyone is speaking English to me.  What is exhausting is more that my job never ends.  My job, it seems, is to be everyone’s English tutor.

In that Spanish speaking country I rarely got to speak Spanish because the locals wanted to practice their English as well.  Thing is, I rarely had audience with the locals, so they didn’t get to take that opportunity.  Most of the time it was just me, trying to negotiate basic needs to strangers in my poor Spanish as a tourist.

Here, I am constantly being engaged in friendly talk that gets twisted into English tutoring.  Every day at lunch, some different teacher tries to nab me to eat lunch with them so they can practice their English.  A few of them are actually interested and just being friendly, but others?  Today I went to the lunchroom with different people, and ended up with three people who all waited for me to finish eating, and where I thought we were going back to the teacher’s offices, the cadre flanking me on all sides lead me to the nurse’s room, where chairs were pulled out and soon I was being interviewed by five teachers as their English-only practice.  (once again, someone forgot to send me the memo) As the conversation began to wane on my part, because I was getting exhausted helping them say what they wanted to say and they were running out of things to ask, the teacher that had roped me into having lunch with him/them said, “show’s over.” and teachers disbanded and chairs got put away and we all went our separate ways.

Nice.

I’m the English show.

No wonder I’m so exhausted.  Hopefully this kind of exploitation will stop soon, as I’ve offered two more hours out of my week to teach more English to the teachers.  The other English for teachers class had hardly anybody sign up for it because their boss, whom they all hate, is in the class.   I like the guy just fine, but they all say he is a psychopath and he is only nice because I have something he wants.  Whether that is true or not, I am just fine with the boss liking me.  But meanwhile, everyone is moaning because they can’t go to the class and I keep getting shanghai’d (oh my god how screwed up is it that I am always saying these racist anti-Asian sayings??????)  into these unstructured, unfocused, impromptu lessons?   And then I am told the stories of English.  How English is the monkey on all teacher’s backs.  How this teacher finished his master’s degree but can’t get promoted because he can’t pass the English comprehension test.  How this other teacher was told he has to teach his non-English subject in English next year.  How the President of the Republic of Korea tried to mandate ALL subjects be taught in English.  How the teachers haven’t had the benefit of enough English classes. How the students all know better English than the teachers.  Basically, they are fucked and drowning and clinging to any Native English Teacher to save them.  Sure.  No pressure.  I’m actually happy to help.  But for God’s sake, the being taken hostage scenarios have got to stop.

Soooo the teachers are IM’g each other about these English lessons.  One for beginning conversation.  The other for advanced discussion about current events in the all-English newspaper, The Korean Herald.  They are doing this surreptitiously, as they don’t want the Vice Principal to know because they don’t want him to show up.  I told them I didn’t care what they did or how they coordinated it or how they found an empty room or anything – all I am doing was what they asked of me should the Vice Principal find out and get angry.  Actually, I find their fear/hatred of him absolutely ridiculous – the guy is barely out of beginning level English speaking, and for him to be in a class with people who work beneath him but who are more accomplished shows pretty good character to me…I told them he doesn’t bite, that he’s just a student in the English class, that he’s no better than them there.  “No.  He may not bite you, but he will bite us.”  Umm, wouldn’t he bite more if he finds out you’ve excluded him?

Whatever.

I am the English show.

The English show does not know/is not told the rules until after they are broken.

The English show does not challenge the logic of this culture.

Meanwhile, it is clear I have to get my exposure to Korean elsewhere.

between class, during class, after class, what’s the difference?
wake us up if it has anything to do with the SAT’s…

the girls aren’t napping – they shrieked and hid their faces the second I whipped out the camera…

Last night over beer we were discussing corporal punishment, and I explained to them how when I was a child there was corporal punishment in the United States, but that it got outlawed about the time I went to middle school.  That must have been around 1976,  They wondered how we controlled the students without it’s presence, and I explained how corporal punishment didn’t work.  I explained how it just gave more attention to students, that they were bad because they wanted attention, and that corporal punishment just made them be bad more.  They kind of pondered this, half nodding.  One said they had only caned someone once and felt really bad about it afterward.

I spoke about the talking in the classroom, and the teacher who had spent a lot of time in the U.S. and had observed U.S. classrooms went on to explain to the others that children in the U.S. are amazing and don’t talk when the teacher is talking.  They don’t even talk to each other.  They really CARE that they don’t hurt anyone’s feelings, they CARE that they don’t offend their teachers or their classmates.  It really amazed him.  And he went on to illustrate some of the many surprising ways in which Americans are extra polite socially.  Like holding the door open for people.  That blew him away.  The other teacher’s observation was that the Korean students have no idea that THIER talking has any impact.  I think she’s somewhat right.  Each little talking circle is like its own private social universe.  They all think what they do is inconsequential.  A dozen circles all talking in a class of forty plus is enough to make you want to throw things.

So today, I did.   This one class from hell just wouldn’t shut up when it was anyone’s turn.  And this one boy was just totally oblivious to anything I would say.  About respect.  About being rude.  Most of the time I just wait quietly until they all notice progress has ground to a halt, and then they shape up.  But not this class.  The guy just kept on as if it was his social hour, so I threw a chalkboard eraser at him and pegged him in the head.  Direct hit.  Nice white rectangle on top of his head.  Ten, fifteen minutes later he was still trying to get the white out of his hair, and he was still pissed about it.  We’ll see if he talks next week when I see him.

The earlier boy class today, I had FIVE boys standing due to sleeping, and one boy sitting in a chair by himself because he wouldn’t stop talking to his neighbor.

I’ve decided Tuesday boys won’t get music or video next week.  I can’t get through the complete lesson due to having to stop and control their behavior.  I’ve also learned that lessons are more effective when we work together on the board.  But maybe for this class we will have to do some really dry paperwork until they shape up.  IN FACT, I am going to pull out one of the really long, really dry sample lesson plans assembled from the other English teachers that the ministry of education has distributed amongst the Korean English teachers so they can learn how to teach spoken English better.  That’ll show them to fuck with me.  It is too bad for the good kids in class.  One adorable cute and smaller boy with impeccable English handed me back my note card with two hands.  I felt like curtsying back to him.

The mocking has pretty much stopped.  I gave someone my kamikaze look (sorry – that unfortunate term was given me by my politically incorrect racist adoptive father, and I pull it, and the term for it, out when I can’t think of a term that pisses me off more or expresses just how pissed off I am) and then told the boy that was NOT funny and DON’T ever do it again.

My male co-teacher is still AWOL.  I have no idea wtf he is doing with all of his free time, but I have also let the other teachers know I haven’t seen him…

So I just got off the phone, explaining to the PLUS loan lender that it takes 25 days for my Korean bank to clear an American check and that even though I get my first paycheck tomorrow, I still have to find a break in my work schedule to make it physically to the bank to fill out an overseas remittance form to my U.S. bank account and I don’t know how long that takes to process.  Could I get a shift in my payment date please?

Sure.  No shift allowed.  Only a one month forbearance.

42 minutes and 47 seconds later.

That equals 2,567 sconds.

At 18 won a second, that equals 46,206 won.

At approximately 1,500 won per $1, that equals $30.80

It’s 3 a.m. and I haven’t figured out tomorrow’s lesson plan to the teachers yet, which includes my boss…

.

Dear Lord,

Please let tomorrow work.  I pray.

May there be viable wireless internet signals everywhere.

May all the classrooms have working monitors.

May paychecks actually electronically be deposited in bank accounts.

May sleep-starved teachers wake with the dawn and get to school on time.

May sleep-starved Korean children get some rest.

May all orphans know their own names.

Nothing like a beer and REAL CONVERSATION to make you feel better.

No, actually it’s to be understood and vindicted.  Three of the teachers took me out for a beer after work today.  It’s not often they see another teacher cry, I guess.  The teachers have generally agreed with almost everything I’ve said about English education.  They now understand fully how much I CARE about what I do, WHY I care, and I even think they believe I am going about it the best way in the classroom.  The ones with training in the states understand the TESOL approach and feel it is a more effective way for students to learn a non-native language, but they understand that it is impossible to incorporate effectively in a class size of forty.  They also understand the serious deficit of fostering creativity within this educational model of theirs, and that it is crucial to Korea’s economic advantage in the future.

And I also don’t feel I have an excess of negative energy, but a long list of real and valid traumatic experiences here that others haven’t been blessed with:  from being whisked to my school an hour after my arrival at the place where I had MADE ARRANGEMENTS for two weeks of rest and cultural assimilation and many resources to help me, to be taken to my apartment and left high and dry, to going to work and to be physically isolated and segregated from the entire staff, to not being told what any of the rules were until AFTER I broke them, to STILL not be able to access the internet, intranet, and printers, to have my alien registration card for over a week and still not be able to get a bank account or phone because nobody had enough time to help me, and to be treated as if I were a Korean teacher and not a foreign teacher.  Then there is the poorly written legalese covering travel under the uncommon circumstance of stopping for training, which I would win my dispute over in the states if I had a lawyer, but can’t do anything about because I am here in Korea without recourse.

Except for not being smart enough to know when to shut up about the latter, everything else has been completely horrid, avoidable, and I HAVE ROLLED WITH IT.  But when Dain Bae of GePIK insinuated “whatever your reasons for being here, others are here to teach English” I seriously lost it.  Should read more like “whatever everyone else’s reasons for being here, at least you care deeply about Korea” and btw, NONE of that has anything to do with contract verbiage.  This was the infuriating thing about the conversation with Bae – she kept turning it into personal insult against Korea and flinging personal insult at me.  This is why contracts should be written better.  IDIOT.

It does turn out, btw, that the last foreign teacher was not asked to follow any of the rules I am asked to follow, nor was he asked to work Saturdays.  The Korean teachers pointed this out to me.  There’s no explanation for this, other than the fact that I look Korean.

Anyway, the positive thing to come of all this is I have a half dozen Korean co-workers concerned about me and in my camp.  Maybe they’ll even go to bat for me when it’s needed.