Mike Meets World

Alright, I’ve come to a very important conclusion recently. I’m going to stop being so negative towards my work and start being exceptionally positive no matter what for the rest of the month of May.  My new writings will center on how beautiful and great life is living in Korea! Despite the horror stories or should I say endless amounts of complaints that I’ve been dishing out against my employer  I’ve actually been very happy over the past few  months even though my writing doesn’t appear so. Almost every weekend I’ve been traveling around and experiencing some very wonderful things! And now, I am about to share some of those more lighthearted moments of my life.

I was right, my director was saving up for a new car and that’s why all of the field trips were suspended. Actually, that is only a guess but he did get a new car, which does seem quite strange and very suspicious if you ask me.  The reason I know he bought a new car even though I can’t speak to the director of my “English Institute” because he can’t speak English was because he bought us pizza! Yes, that’s right he bought a new car and rewarded us with two pizzas worth sixty dollars ($30 a piece). When I saw the receipt my eyes almost blew out of my head because I know how cheap he usually is.  I’ve learned that it’s customary to have a party whenever someone buys a new car in Korea but instead he bought us pizza. The funniest yet most annoying part was that he didn’t even come up to celebrate with us.  Imagine having a party and not even showing up to it! I wish he knew how important the little things were to people! I think it’s even more amazing how he thinks that we can be won over with thirty dollar pizzas, even though he is dreadfully wrong!

The world is full of big buildings, millions of cars, and a whole lot of things that I just don’t understand. Everyone goes from place to place for some preposterous reason and then buys things that aren’t ever needed. Everyone is working for their futures and for their elder years, but doing so during their prime. I have a hard time coming to terms with justifying why I should work for someone else for half of my life just for the chance to be comfortable later on. I sometimes can’t even justify working for myself for that matter.

Why can’t I just work for the things that I need and when I need them? Why do I need to pay taxes for things I don’t even support? Why should I pay for insurance that I may never even use and invest in businesses that I don’t have the slightest moral inclination to believe in? Why am I such a strange person because I don’t believe in the supernatural? Why are some people so corrupt and only care about their own interests?  Why do governments pretend to represent the people who vote for them when in fact it’s really only the big corporations and conglomerates that these elected officials care about? But mainly all of these questions center around why has the world become so complicated that we can’t even enjoy the world in which we live in? 

 I said “the chance to be comfortable” because I keep thinking of my grandfather who worked hard his entire life and then died just a few years after he retired. He is why this “real world” that everyone is apart of has never seemed fair or practical to me. But for the government and his employer he was the perfect case. He worked for his employer’s and the economy’s gain, then dropped dead just after retirement. Therefore no one had to pay up. He was nearly 100% profit! 

With that why should I work five days a week just for my future?  Why do I even need to work at all? And who ever invented this strange system of living? It’s such a strange idea to work 5 to 6 days a week and get paid every week, two weeks, or month just to survive and feed my family.  If someone not from this world visited us imagine trying to explain the complexity of our world. I guess it would start with the words “everyone works their entire life for the possibility to maybe enjoy it after the age of 65”. Then the next part would most certainly have to be that “over 90% of the world believes in a supernatural being not from this earth that will make all of our miseries go away after we die”. I think that maybe those two things would most certainly scare that strange life form from our planet immediately! I guess all I can say to end this little rant is that the world is truly a strange place with a limitless amount of possibilities!

I disappeared again for another month. I was lost in wonders of Wonderland or maybe it was because my workload increased as a form of censorship but I don’t know! The only worthy thing I can report is our latest field trip, granted they happen every month. Actually that is a lie, the field trips are supposed to happen every month but my director must have been saving up for a new car because last months Forestry Museum was the first one since November when we went to Body World (a playground).

This month’s trip took us to a strawberry farm. Once again it was fun  to leave the confines of our prison like English sweat shop but still annoying to  be on a completely Korean field trip when my job is to teach English. I love my weekends when I can go and explore Korea in Korean but at work I would rather do it in English!

The strawberry farm was a funny trip because it had very little if any educational value for the students. The buses drove 40 minutes to a greenhouse farm way out in the countryside and dropped us off. Once there everyone piled out and lined up in a militaristic formation while my favorite person, the director climbed a pile of dirt with his bull horn and started shouting directions. After listening to what sounded like yelling and everyone yelling “Nay” (Korean for yes) multiple times, we proceeded to move class by class in single file towards the greenhouses? Once we arrived at our respective greenhouse we were all given a 14oz cup (said it on the bottom) and started picking. The only direction I heard that was translated to me was “don’t pick the green ones”. After fifteen minutes of picking and pigging out on delicious strawberries we all left our greenhouses and reloaded our busses. The buses then took us to an old abandoned school with a nice playground.  Once there, we all ate lunch (lots of kimbap) and then played until our dictator, oops I mean director got back on his bull horn and started yelling some more. After his latest dose of screaming we boarded our buses and drove forty minutes back to school.  With that our field trip was over! I honestly felt like I was going on the field trip as well. This day proved to me that once again I was not working for a school.  

On a bright note our school took us to the Chungcheongnam-do Forestry Museum for a field trip recently. I said a bright note because all I have been doing has been ragging on how much I dislike my director and his institute.  The best part about our little excursion was that we finally left the monotony of our not so wonderful classrooms at Wonderland and mind numbing workbooks for a day of “hands on” fun and learning. Yet somehow, our school still managed to mess this up!

 Instead of hitting up the “Bird Aviary” or the “Wild Animal Coop” we were led on a tour of boring exhibits in a museum and a botanical garden. I’m not an expert on children by any means but if the choices are between a museum designed for adults and a botanical garden or a Wild Animal Coop and an aviary, I know for a fact that the students would rather see the animals. My 6 year old students took absolutely nothing educationally from the garden and the museum.  A few days after our little trip the students didn’t even remember what we went and saw.

Okay, the decision was definitely bad but that wasn’t even the worst part for me. The worst part lies in the fact that our teaching is basically shut down on the field trips. During the course of the entire field trip the Korean helper teachers, Korean teachers, and our director speak to the children in Korean the whole time. Meanwhile, the foreign contingent, myself included feel useless and as if maybe we should have had the morning off because we aren’t even told what is going on. I always feel like I’m a four year-old being led on a field trip and not a teacher. I love feeling unneeded and unappreciated, it’s definitely one of my favorite feelings in life!   

There’s a tradition at my school /business/ sweat shop for English education to take all of the teachers out to dinner at the start of each new school year. I am convinced that the reason for this tradition is because we do not have a single day off between the old session and the new one and our director thinks that a dinner makes it up to us (not true).  I’ve noticed that Korea’s national motto must be “go… go… go” or “hurry… hurry… hurry” because at least with my experience I am left very little time to enjoy my life. In a country where parents push there kids to do excessive amounts of homework and have tutors come to their houses until eleven o’clock at night, there must be a major problem. When children go to special tutors to learn how to jump rope and play with Lego’s because there isn’t time for kids to be kids during the day here, I think that the country might have a slight problem.

Anyway, this journal wasn’t supposed to get into what makes Korea what it is but to bash my director just a little more because I am so fond of him. When he decided to take us out for our “mandatory” dinner meeting he gave us only twenty-four hours notice (unlike the two months he wants before we quit). Good thing I didn’t have any plans these days.  The dinner was delicious but it was the way that he did this that really irritated me.

Instead of taking everyone out together and trying to form some sort of community within his business he took us all out separately and missed a great opportunity. Once again, he divided his workforce into Koreans and foreigners. He took the foreigners out on a Tuesday evening but the Korean teachers on a Friday night. Our dear director took us out on a Tuesday after putting in 9 hours of teaching and our night ended early because we had work the next morning. Whereas, the Korean teacher went out on a Friday and could sleep in on the following day, not to mention had a whole lot more fun with their karaoke room rental after dinner. Okay, so maybe I ‘m just jealous that the Korean teachers were out late on a Friday eating and drinking for free while we were all home by 8:30pm after very little or should I say zero enjoyment for that manner. While the Koreans were having fun, the foreigners were trying to constructively discuss with him through our translator just how unhappy we were with his whole business and how ineffective his whole curriculum really was. And as a result, absolutely nothing came out of our discussion.

Overall, if there is one way to divide workers there isn’t a better way to do it then to segregate them and not let them socialize together. I feel that I have nothing invested and therefore am not motivated to try harder or to try at all for that matter because I don’t have stock in anything. Luckily though, working here hasn’t completely killed my spirit. Instead I have been using my experience at Wonderland as a lesson on how to not to run a business.

I work in a funny place. I work in a place that wants us there all day (9am-6pm) but only pays us for the classes that we teach. And all of the other hours are free hours but we are still supposed to prepare and grade for our other classes. I work at a place that makes us serve lunch to screaming bratty Korean children who demand that we put their rice and soup on a certain side of their lunch trays. I in turn look at my 7 year olds and clearly tell them that I am not their waiter or their parents. And somehow our greedy timid video camera watching director doesn’t believe serving lunch for an half hour deserves payment either.

 My sourness really comes from how I am there for over 180 hours a month and only get credit for 105 of those! I want compensation and do not like being taken advantage of. My other issue is that the man who is making a whole lot of money off of me and off of English can’t even speak the language that feeds him. How can you not speak English yet be the director of hundreds of children at an academy’s that only purpose is English education. Imagine Bill Gates not knowing anything about computers but then again I guess its all relative since George W. Bush doesn’t know the first thing about governing a country and is the president (oh wait, he talks to god!).   

 I work for a place that makes us grade material that we don’t even teach and that is taught by non-native speakers who cannot write well themselves but yet are teaching writing. And so, I waste my unpaid “break time” marking papers that I don’t even teach. There should be a policy that if you can teach it, you can grade it because right now I just waste my time marking the same mistakes over and over again. It reminds me of playing a scratched CD over and over again even though I know it’s scratched. Sometimes, something’s just need to be thrown out and this routine is one of them.

The funny part is that this is only a few of the ridiculous things that the funny place I call my work makes me do. Every time we (foreigners) mention how unhappy many of these issues make us feel we are always assured that our “dear director” will take these complaints into consideration. Luckily though the one thing that I do know for sure is that when I have enough he is not getting a two month notice before I leave like it states in my fake contract. He will be lucky to get five minutes. Imagine being unhappy somewhere and you are told that you must give a two month notice before you can depart! In my mind it’s really designed to be the perfect hell on earth! Oh joy, just another two months of unhappiness.

 However, I have found a bit of joy even though I hate the place with a passion. Every time a student drops a class a sense of satisfaction tingles down my spine because it means less money for him. See, I know I sound cold but there isn’t one incentive to working harder or even trying because all we get is the same meager base salary and mind-numbing schedule. If he was smart he would set it up so that we would either feel like we were working for something or had a stake in what we were doing but right now, we have neither! For me, it’s too late. I’ve already been trampled on for too long to ever feel happy at Wonderland (funny name for a place that sucks).

Side note on teaching in Korea: The reason why I’m irritated at my work is because I’ve heard and know of many better opportunities that keep teachers around for years. I am just disgruntled about working for one of the worst employers in Korea!!!  The only positive with Wonderland is that it pays on time, which a direct quote from one of Kim’s (directors) former soldiers.

Life is looking up for the month ahead. My partner teacher just showed me next month’s calendar and it appears that the monotony might end or just get worse. I’m not entirely sure yet.  I suppose the biggest highlight for the month of April is our first day off since the first week in February. The country is giving us a WEDNESDAY on the ninth of this month for Election Day. Hooray for Wednesday! I guess it’s against the law or makes too much sense to put an Election Day on a Monday or a Friday to allow people to make the most out of their lives (but then I guess this does force people to vote instead of taking holidays).

I guess it wasn’t really that long of a time between our days off but it’s really the first one until the second week in May when we are awarded a long weekend of three whole days to celebrate Buddha’s birthday. This translates into working from the first week in February to the second weekend in May before having a vacation day that allows more than two days off of work. I can’t express my enthusiasm of how happy I am that I’ve been given the opportunity to work nearly 4 months straight five days a week without a break. I know I will feel a great sense of fulfillment in my life after I complete this long stretch of working day in and day out. Is this what life is all about? I guess I wouldn’t be complaining so much if I was allotted a couple personal or sick days but I wasn’t. Instead, for my year contract I have just three. And all of the holidays we receive just happen to fall on the same day that everyone else in Korea has off, which makes moving around the country impossible. Is the concept of “personal days” so far out in this country?

On the brighter side of life we are going on a field trip to a strawberry farm at the end of the month. And we have an activity day in which we will cook with the children (AKA: rolling rice into balls). Oh and I almost forgot, one of my classes will be awarded Best Class this month. Of course, it’s not because they are the best class in the school but because they come up next in the rotation. I want to give each student a certificate with the phrase, “Good Job for being Next” on it and then explain that it is in fact only a pity prize and not a real accomplishment.

For this MAJOR AWARD we will be taken us by bus to the local Pizza Hut where I will be the babysitter for 10 screaming seven year olds. Hooray for baby sitting at Pizza Hut with children who can barely speak to me! The last time I went, the caretaker (I really don’t know what he does except that he does whatever my boss says) was sent with me and had a mental breakdown while driving. He ended up pounding a hard U-turn and slamming all of the children into the side of the bus which then resulted into everyone crying in obvious fear; me almost included. Afterwards, my friend Mike who came along with us and I had to pick up the pieces by trying to settle the children down and then take them all calmly into Pizza Hut. Let me just say that the looks we received escorting our 10 red face previously sobbing children into the restaurant was amazing. It couldn’t have helped any that we were foreigners with Korean children. Anyway, without going into too much detail about crazy Gin (the driver), it was on my last trip there that I realized how cheap my director was when he only purchased one salad bowl for 12 people to share, which translated into piling it sky high because we were only allowed to make one trip. In conclusion, I’m having really good times at WONDERLAND if not cannot tell by my sarcasm!!! I do like Korea though!

Last week, one of my more fluent classes was reading a story about two friends who made a robot for their science fair project and I decided to do something constructive with this topic. I wanted to make our own class robot. We (the students and I) assigned everyone to bring in certain material because I didn’t want to cut into my greedy owners profits! I decided to do this constructive project because over the past few months I’ve noticed that my students have been getting quite bored with reading one story for three weeks and then being tested on it. Imagine that, book work being boring! It doesn’t matter how interesting my cookie cutter lessons are, the students just don’t want to do it.  And believe me, I wouldn’t suggest reading each story for three weeks but that is what’s assigned to me each week by our horrible “curriculum”. And unlike a real classroom I cannot just shut my door and begin teaching because the video cameras are always on.

Going on, when the day arrived to begin our giant class project I could just feel the energy coming from the students. Everyone was excited and eager to begin.  At the beginning the students started working at a very Korean pace, which translates into very fast without much forethought. It’s unfortunate that the students in this country think that it’s not the best quality that wins but the fastest. After I just let them go at it with no direction from me, we all soon realized that our robot was going to be a big disaster if we didn’t plan our design out.

We ended up talking about the best design for the materials that we had and then assigned each student a task. It was great to watch these students work together and use their English skills. On of the biggest things that I noticed during this three day project was that what we are teaching them only helps them talk about books and not how to work together. We really started running into difficulties with trying to discuss exactly what we wanted to do but after enough hand gesturing we were able to make it happen. In the end, this lesson was a big success and a great learning experience for all of us. On the last class after we finished gluing everything together I took the class into the library and we posed for a funny Korean photo with our creation and then we left it up for display.

And that was it, that picture is all we have left of our class project. On the next day, the day after we finished our robot it was gone. It was destroyed and thrown away forever without even a word said to me. One day it was there and the next it was destroyed and missing. Our supervisor claims to know nothing about what happened but I know. Since it wasn’t as beautiful as the rest of the artwork in our school, which is either done by actual artists or teachers it was unworthy to display. It wasn’t pretty enough because it was student done. The fact that it didn’t even make it a day makes me sick to my stomach and without a doubt turned me off from ever trying to do another quality lesson at my school, oops I mean business again. My work isn’t a school even though that was something I was trying to defend for the longest time but this incident sealed the deal for me! In my mind I’m done with Wonderland.