As per your EPIK contract, you should have only 22 hours of actual teaching time each week. On paper, you should be working roughly 50% of the time that you’re at school. In reality, many obstacles will block you on the road to the classroom. Expect to spend a lot of time keeping your desk nice and warm. Here are just some of the reasons you’ll be doing something other than teaching:
- National Holidays (check out the full list here)
- Sports Day
- Mid-Terms and Final Exams
- Field Trips (students in South Korea have one overnight field trip a year)
- Teacher Trips (teachers also have one overnight trip), etc.
You get the idea. My point is, you need to have something to keep you entertained at school when you aren’t teaching, otherwise you’ll quickly lose your sanity. The following are some tools to keep in mind when all your classes are canceled, none of your friends are online, and the walls of your sanity are starting to crash down upon you:
- Buy a Kindle, seriously. The Kindle allows you to buy books anywhere in the world, and it’s apparently easy to use. I bought a Nook because they’re sexier and I know how to use proxies to circumvent Barnes & Nobles’ dumb policies.
- Use Eat My Browser to get around your Provincial Office of Education’s horrible firewalll. Most time-wasting websites are blocked by their firewall, but Eat My Browser will allow you to get around it.
- Volunteer on Volunteer Match, a site which lists a lot of online opportunities. My wife and I do In2Books, a pen pal program that matches you with an elementary school student from a Title 1 school so that you can read and discuss books together.
- Learn Korean. Go to Live Mocha when you’re ready to practice with another human being.
- Find cheap flights to places that aren’t South Korea.
- Talk to your friends and family cheaply. Don’t ever use your cell phone to make international calls unless you enjoy throwing your money away.
- Write the great American novel in 30 days.
- Find out what’s going on in the world.
- Start a blog.
- Do anything other than sit around and complain that you’re desk warming.
Co-teachers in South Korea are beautiful, unique snowflakes; they’re all different, and you sometimes want to swat at them to keep them out of your face. Your relationship with your co-teacher will be equal parts joyous and frustrating. Sometimes they will do things for you that are so nice that you’ll get a bit misty-eyed (but you really shouldn’t because, nine times out of ten, they’re doing nice things for you because it’s their job). Other times, your co-teacher will withhold vital information from you until the last possible moment, contribute nothing to your class, and/or possess a tenuous grasp of the English language.
If I sound even the teeniest bit cynical, it’s because, after a year and a half in this country, I think I’ve finally hit the point where I’m no longer able to contain it. Like the buttons on a morbidly obese man’s under-sized t-shirt, I’ve popped. If South Korea and I were in a relationship, this would be the point where I would say, “It’s not you, Korea, it’s me.” But that would be a bald-faced lie because South Korea is the problem.
But let me wipe away the foam that’s forming at the corners of my mouth and resume talking about co-teachers. First, however, let me say that I’m an optimist. I have no doubt in my mind that the Koreans with whom I interact on a daily basis have nothing but the best of intentions in their dealings with me. Even when I’m frustrated, I refuse to think of them as inherently bad people. But I also recognize that there are people out there who are, to put it lightly, poorly equipped to deal with the rigors of life under the guidance (or lack thereof) of a Korean co-teacher. This post is my way of throwing out a life preserver to those poor, unfortunate souls. read more…
Soju (소주) is the elixir of nightmares. The national beverage of South Korea, soju – depending on who you ask – is a spirit made from either rice, sweet potato, the sweat from an old Korean man’s socks, or pure unbridled hatred. During my first year in this country, I went from being knocked on my ass by a single bottle of the stuff, to drinking two or three bottles several times a week, and finally to being able to fade one bottle in a single sip. Nowadays, my experiences with this beverage are few and far between, as part of my commitment to put my drunken days of youth to bed (or bury them in a deep, deep grave, if you prefer that imagery).
As I mentioned in my last post, a single bottle of soju is so cheap (about $.80USD) that the drink would lay waste to lesser societies, were it available in other countries for the same price. Luckily, I’ve never found a bottle of soju in the US for less than $6-8. At that price, you might as well by a six-pack. This isn’t to say that public inebriation isn’t a massive problem in South Korea. It is. Oh, my dear sweet Buddha, it most certainly is. Passing out in public here in the good old ROK (that’s Republic of Korea) is such a common phenomenon that some intrepid foreigners have seen fit to create a blog documenting the many sightings of the drunken Korean (Latin: blitzikus outofhis mindicus) in the wild.
Granted, you may never witness this phenomenon yourself if you teach anywhere outside of Seoul, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that Koreans like to get totally wasted, and often. My co-teacher has informed me on numerous occasions that the average Korean sleeps for about three hours a night, and many convenience stores in my town stock a canned drink called Dr. Hangover. Would you ever find such a thing in a society that didn’t like to get down and dirty? Probably not. read more…
It’s the first day of the school year at Yecheon Boys’ Middle School. I’m currently sitting in the computer lab, typing this post, because my primary co-teacher isn’t sure where my desk is. To make matters even more interesting, my previous co-teacher – who now teaches at a high school in Yeongju – informed me that my school would be completely restructuring classes by sorting students according to ability, not grade. I have no idea if I have class today, nor what grade/ability levels I’m supposed to teach.
Welcome to teaching English as a Second Language in South Korea – an exercise in equal parts joy, frustration, confusion and inebriation. I didn’t think it would be right to reboot this blog without getting at least one post in about life as an EPIK employee, so here we are. But where do I begin, really? I guess every good journey begins with a beginning, so we’ll take it from the top.
Incheon Airport is one of the best airports in the world. Its wide open terminals, comfortable seats, and pristine shops paint a picture of a country with endless possibilities. A country where the people are relaxed and time moves to the slow beat of a Sade track. A country that makes Singapore look like a giant landfill.
Unfortunately, the airport, like almost everything else in South Korea, acts as a delicious frosting masking the bitter chocolate cake below. South Korea is Wonderland, and you, the unsuspecting Alice, are about to leave the safety of the normal world and enter a world where up is down and left is right. Is South Korea a horrible place? Nope. I wouldn’t have spent a year of my life here if I didn’t love almost every minute of it. Is life in this country different from almost everything you’ve known prior? Yes. read more…
A lot of Democrats might be losing their House and Senate seats in November, but I know of at least one Republican Senator who’s going to get eaten alive come mid-terms. Yeah, I’m taking about Jim Bunning (R-Kentucky), the moron who single-handedly cut off unemployment benefits for millions of unemployed Americans. Bunning denied a one-month extension under the auspices of “proving a point,” completely oblivious to the fact that people who don’t pull in six figures a year don’t have the luxury of resting on their laurels while those they vote into power make their points.
The extension will likely pass in another vote, but that won’t help the millions of Americans whose benefits expired at the end of February. Bunning’s move is astoundingly dumb considering that constituents in his home state – 60,000, to be exact – have been without jobs since the end of 2008. You’d think a Senator from a state with an unemployment rate of 10.7% would do everything in his power to take care of his own.
To his credit, Bunning isn’t the only bad apple in the Legislative branch of our government. Democrats squandered a super-majority in the Senate and healthcare reform is likely dead on the operating table. Republicans are blocking every move the Democrats make without even a hint of compromise. And Obama? His first year in office has been heavy on hope and light on actual change. His foreign policy is non-existent, his domestic policies reek of the guy he replaced in the White House, and he recently extended the Patriot Act for another year despite campaigning against it! You know the state of American politics is a mess when the current political darling is a redneck who uses her hand as a Post-It.
Maybe The Economist has it right. I recently read their three-fold plan for repairing the Legislative branch of our government, and I think it’s the type of shock we need to heart of our democracy pumping again. Here’s their plan:
- Eliminate gerrymandering – that is, the process of drawing district lines to favor either Republicans or Democrats. This will ensure that votes in each district accurately represent the population and aren’t simply hard red or hard blue.
- Limit campaign contributions to $100 per citizen. Lobbyists have taken our democracy and put it in the hands of corporations that don’t have our best interests in mind. Politicians should represent the interests of the people who elected them.
- Prevent politicians from working for corporations related to their work in Congress or the Senate for seven years. This will stop lawmakers from protecting big business in exchange for a so-called “golden parachute” when their tenure in government ends.
I don’t think that our government is irreparable, but I do think that serious reforms need to be made. In order for this to happen, the public at large needs to be educated, but this is nigh on impossible when one considers that the majority of Americans get their news from Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC. They’re all equally worthless.
Extended absences are good for the soul. Many moons ago, I lost all of the posts on the previous incarnation of this blog, and my general disinterest in blogging at the time led me to abandon the institution altogether. But I could never forsake my old mistress completely. Absence, as they say, makes the heart grow fonder. So, without much fanfare, the blog is back. I will be maintaining this blog, as well as The Adventures of ShadKat blog on which both my wife and me post intermittently.
What’s changed? Well, let’s see. My wife and I have been teaching in South Korea for over a year and a half. The zeal with which we initially entered the field of teaching English as a Foreign Language has waned, and we’ve decided to set a hard and fast time frame for our stay in Korea: three years. That means that, in another year and a half, we’ll be back home in Arizona. What, exactly, this entails for our future remains to be seen.
They say that employers look upon a prospective employee’s work experience abroad as little more than a paid vacation – that someone who teaches in another country should expect to return home and start from scratch, so to speak. I respectfully disagree. I think I can parlay my three years of experience in South Korea into a rewarding career in diplomacy. I’m currently working toward becoming a Foreign Service Officer (FSO), a much longer title for someone who is pretty much a diplomat. That means becoming well-versed in a wide range of topics, including foreign policy, the histories of hotbed nations like Afghanistan and Iraq, and reading a daily rag like the New York Times.
It’s been an informative past few months, to say the least. I’ve blown through my first issue of the Journal of Foreign Affairs, a publication so massive that it only comes out every two months, several weeks of the ultra-liberal news magazine The Nation, and the first half of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, which is on the Department of State’s recommended reading list for one reason or another (clearly because it’s helpful in understanding why some nations cling to ancient cultures while others have quickly modernized).
What this means for you, dear reader, is that I’m back to posting about things you may or may not care about. I’ll try to stir up the pot a little bit because the Facebook fights resulting from my blog posts are always entertaining. Feel free to share your thoughts on this blog, Twitter, or Facebook.