Beyond These Walls

Phew! It's effing cold right now, and either my keyboard's keys are getting slightly stuck as I type, or my fingers aren't working so well. Cold, however, is a relative thing it seems, as the weather compared to Canada right now is very good. Unfortunately my school still hasn't bought into the idea of indoor heating, so my work environment is at best unpleasant and at worst a painful struggle. It does create an opportunity to play a lot of active games with my kids in the classroom; though as always, getting the little guys all riled up can be like playing tag with a hungry tiger - eventually, it's going to bite you in the ass.

To date, my blog has given (I feel) a fairly in-depth description of life at my school, covering all the good, bad and strange times that have befallen me. The experiences I have had, however, are not necessarily typical of all English teachers in Korea. Every school has its own unique environment for staff, and there is an amazing contrast between different schools I've found. Shannon's school and mine, two demographically similar schools, are quite far apart in terms of what kind of work environment we face, and her experience has not been nearly as positive as mine when it comes to enjoying her teaching position.

The kids are always hit-or-miss when it comes to being bad-asses. I hate to say it, but income demographics certainly has a lot to do with how they are in class, though the spoiled rich kids can be as bad as the disrespectful poor kids. In the end, the kids can be rough, but they’re not usually what makes or breaks a good school.

Co-workers however can ruin a school, and principals can make your life hell. At Shannon’s school, the teacher is a horrible person (she’s bald, so we call her a witch). She threatens to take away Shannon’s vacation time, pays other teacher 3 or 4 times what Shannon gets for the same job, and subtly makes fun of her clothes (which are really nice, so I just don’t get that). Another English teacher in town was dealt a sexual predator for a co-teacher. That’s right, the man who she worked with, side-by-side everyday, had been busted for sexually harassing both fellow teachers and students. His punishment? A week off the job and a different school to teach at. Of course, the English teacher didn’t learn all of this until AFTER he took her out for a day long hike, then drove to a secluded area outside of town. She was fine in the end, thank goodness, but the 30 minutes sitting in the car waiting to get back to town took an eternity, she said.

Most other teachers who have difficult times don’t face such threatening situations. There are several teachers who have been given homes with cockroaches and another whose power is rather suspect at the best of times and may possibly give her a good jolt one rainy day in the future. Some people are given tones of extra hours to work with little or no overtime pay (Shannon falls slightly into this category), and some –such as myself – will find themselves doing out-of-town English camps where the only money you get is to cover your travel costs. Yep, you never really know exactly what it’s going to be like here until you finally start at school.

(Brief interlude – I’m listening to a friend, Pete Golden, over the radio. I tell my kids, and what do they do? They grabbed the speaker and tried to talk to Pete. So cute.)

Well, I think that’s my tale for today. Holidays are coming up fast, and while I won’t have any exciting stories about them for a while, Shannon and I have just booked our flights to Australia and New Zealand. Spending January lying on a beach is going to be wonderful.