Miryang . . . Finally, I’m a Lucky Boy!
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Living in Korea
A blog which poses the question: Why does changing jobs in a place like South Korea have to be so stressful???
In a nutcase: lack of communication. You may have noticed that the agency expected me to "do" things on a minimal informational basis, and then wondered why I wasn't available as they expected when they had set up a contract signing session with Mr. Jeong, the Big Man from the KEB. Why was that? Because they couldn't be bothered to tell me. Perhaps if they'd told me earlier that the contract signing was at 1:00pm, I could have been there on time?
And again: they told me that they were sending my Degree certificate back by express mail. It had been sent last Friday – now a week past – but I only got it back yesterday (the following Thursday). The person who signed for it when it was delivered didn't bother to pass it on . . . it just goes on forever. Astuteness and timeliness seem not to matter to the Korean mindset; conformism and procrastination are often the order of the day.
But (as they used to say in some old Guinness commercials) life's too short to be bitter . . . I am here now and though things are going in fits and starts, progress is being made. I have invested considerable time this week seeking out a free virtual disk manager for Windoze and installing it on both my systems here. And it works beautifully! Google for "Magic Disk", you'll find it on Download.com, ZDNet and Softpedia.
This was to allow me to prepare as fully as possible for lessons by being able to see the multimedia materials – some of it rather entertaining, I must admit – and together with electronic teacher manuals, I am slowly becoming able to compensate for the fact that unlike with EPIK, there is no real "orientation", something which is really Pissing Me Off Big Time about working in Korea. No-one here seems to understand that foreigners cannot simply walk in and suddenly and magically "know" everything that they are required to know – even the most experienced ones have to be taught first, especially if they have not been to Korea previously. Yet you encounter this all the time.
Even worse, every time one foreigner is replaced, the new incumbent is at Square One; there is no information, because no-one has thought to collect it; the excuse is always that they are "too busy", but this is because Koreans work "hard" but not "clever". This is one respect in which I have to "educate" my (actually quite beautiful) coworker, as I don't want her to end up overworked. And I don't want too much work myself if I want to get into a position where the quality of what I am doing is really good. But the reality is that every job you walk into here is not properly thought out; the fact that it is not all the Koreans' fault (like one foreigner might have the decency to WRITE THINGS DOWN and KEEP ACCURATE RECORDS before they depart) is a motivating factor; and you would really like to leave things better after you leave (whenever that may be) than they were when you arrived.
Having said all of this . . . what confronts me now is much better than my previous hagwon life. I get up early in the morning (and the buses are often a pain), but I can go home early and actually get a good night's sleep. Normal classes number five maximum and I will have four "after school" classes (plus two teachers' English classes) to teach each week, but even so, I still get to travel home early (i.e. before 5:00pm), so once I am fully conversant with the teaching method and in the swing of things, I am finally free to catch up with all the things I had to drop because working for a hagwon prevented it. Like my teaching course – stuck in the middle – and my language studies – Chinese (Traditional), Japanese and Korean. How can someone like myself be here for so long and not speak enough of the local lingo? It's ridiculous, but I know others who are worse. And then there's a resumption of computer programming (Linux is great for this, and it's FREE!!!), which I really want to do, especially C. Some people (I mean you, Joerg!) can combine hagwon work with these things, but in the end, I couldn't and that's why I am where I am now.
I hate to ramble, but Asia generally is a place of disorientation for the foreigner, and it takes a long time to find your feet, to find the "right path", as the Buddha might have said, and perhaps to cast off what we might call the essential self-centredness of the Western habituation and settle into the swing of the place to which fortune has taken us. And each path is deeply personal, every experience unique, but for the self-critical person, deeply enlightening.
But it can be deeply maddening at times, too. 😛
Andrew. =^-^=
Tags: English, hagwon, Korea, public school, teaching
