The Gig

So, if you are like most people, you've probably always wondered what it's like to teach young Koreans to speak English. Well, fortunately for me as a teacher, teaching English is a huge industry so that it is not only well-paying, but also the kids are pretty well-versed by the time they reach elementary school. As I think I mentioned in a earlier post, I am working for a private school that teaches only English. Kids come to these private schools after public school which makes for a long day of schooling. Much like charter schools in the United States, these schools are run as a business, with making money the priority and teaching English second. There is a lot of controversy about the educational system of public and private schools in Korea because families will spend up to half of their income on their kids' educations and yet not see a major return on their won. These private institutions are much like colleges in the U.S. where the most prestigious are the most expensive and most sought after. Parents will sacrifice a lot to get their kids to the most prestigious after school programs. Thus, as a native English speaker in Korea, I am being used more as a selling point for a private school than as a bonafide language teacher. Anyway, I try not to dwell on the big picture as the day-to-day work is actually pretty fun and quite stressless compared to other teaching jobs.

The school I am at is unique in that we do not have the same students regularly. Our owner also owns a ton of other private schools around Daegu that send their students over to us at IBC English Town. There is a rotation that each school sends its students to us once every eight weeks so it is kind of like a field trip when the kids come to our school. The IBC English Town covers the fourth floor of the Daegu Bank building which is about 5 minutes walking from my apartment. There are six of us native speakers that work on this floor, they include: Nathan and Chelsea, a couple that met in college in Boston and now seem to travel the world working and backpacking. Chelsea is from Snohomish and has dreadlocks, which the kids call "snake hair". There is Adina, who is quite religious and also an avid hiker and explorer of cultures. Brad and Brendan are your fun-loving Ohio State graduates trying to get back in shape after a few years of inactivity. Last there is Cathleen who is from the City and attended Princeton. She finds the nightlife to be a bit dull here, though that is not surprising considering she is from NYC. Nathan and Chelsea will be the first to leave IBC Town as their year ends in late-October. Kingston-natives Reid Ammann and Thomas Grout are scrambling to get their paperwork in and take their place (oh and I get a commission if they do).  We also are supposed to dress nicely with dress pants and shirts, so my ironing skills have gotten some practice.  They say that the nicer you dress as a teacher, the more respect you get.

The job is like this: We get to work at either 12, 1, or 2 during the afternoon and work 8 hours. This 8 hours includes a 1 hour lunch break (usually taken soon after arriving to work), either an hour or half hour of voice recording (recording sentences into he computer through a microphone), maybe one speaking lesson (1 on 1 private lesson for an hour) and finally at the end of the day, teaching anywhere from 2-4 one-hour classes. Classes never begin until 4:20 at the earliest. Unless they come up with some other side job for you, you can pretty much surf the net or read for 2-3 hours everyday. Not only is this the easiest job I have had (with the exception of game room attendant in college), it is also the best paying. Since we do not have the same kids everyday, we have to teach the exact same curriculum everyday for 8 weeks. There are stations at IBC Town, including: Cafe, Classroom, Bank, Gym, Theater, Hotel and Flower Shop. For this rotation I am working in the classroom with Chelsea and we are teaching the kids a science project. We instruct them in building a "tornado in a bottle" from two plastic bottles with the tops taped together. We also are trying to teach the kids to be able to talk about tornadoes and other natural disasters, but obviously they are most interested in playing with their tornadoes.

The kids range from quiet and shy to hilarious and annoying. Most of the girls have crushes on the male teachers and most of the guys want to wrestle you or each other. They also have some great names, including Im So-Young, Park Duh-Bom and Yu Suk-Bum. They do not wear uniforms which I think they should because some of these shirts they wear are totally inappropriate. Everything with any English on it is totally golden and stylish, so everyone wears English shirts, but it is obvious that no one has any idea what they say. There is one particular line of shirts in which there are insane sayings in big letters covering the whole front of the shirt, they say things like: "I'm a f@#$%%^ Canadian!" or "Yellow men can't rap" or "I'm drunk take me home". These are shirts that you don't want to see your 12 year old daughter in.

Hopefully that gives you some idea of what my job is like. For a quick update, last weekend was the harvesting holiday Chu seok, so we got monday off from work. We all got great gifts from the school president - cases full of 10 cans of spam. Spam is huge out here! Anyway, I politely declined. On Wednesday of this week, we hosted the King of Quiz, which was a competition for all the top students from each school. The organization went pretty poorly I thought and we finally arrived at an undeserving winner in our opinion, but the best part was that at some point in the middle, for the purpose of deciding something, all the teachers from all the schools and us engaged in a soccer juggling contest. I guess that it was to decide how many kids from each school would be let back into the competition. As the women were all in high heels and probably poor at soccer anyway, the schools with female teachers were utterly screwed while the other schools got a much better chance. Sadly, I could only muster two touches on the stupid little piece of plastic we were juggling, while the top score was 11. On that low note and the impending financial doom, I will leave you. Have a great week, see you again soon!

The Crib

(Beautiful view from my window)

Ahn-nyong-ha-se-yo, I have been in Daegu for 5 days now and am still baffled by the fact that I am in Korea. I have been getting along fine and had a jovial journey over here. Most of the trans-pacific flights seem to leave late at night in the U.S. and get in early in the morning in Korea, thus it is night time the entire trip and much easier to sleep. I was met at the train station by my schoolmaster, Lana, who is married to a Bostonian, and she zipped me over to the school to meet all the teachers and the high-master and owner Mr. Kim. After that I got some much needed sleep and came in the next day, friday, for training and medical exams. I guess the training went pretty well because they had me teaching the last class of the day which was difficult but certainly not over my head. The main problem I am going to have is using words that the kids understand, as I have no idea how big their vocabularies are. The structure of the school is pretty confusing, but I think I understand it now and will write about it next time. This time however, I thought I would introduce you to my living situation:

I have been put up by the school in a studio apartment in the southern outskirts of Daegu (though it still feels like the middle of a city). My pad is about a five minutes walk from the school and is just off a major road and subway stop, so it is a great location. There are about 100 restaurants, 20 cell phone stores and 5 English language schools within a 5 minute walk. Unfortunately I do not live in the same building as the other teachers, but they are not too far away either. The apartment is a linoleum shrine with 3 rooms. The main room has the bed, dining table and refrigerator. The kitchen has the washing machine, stove and sink. And the bathroom is a just a bathroom. Though, bathrooms are totally ridiculous here as they also double as a shower. Just turn on the faucet and you're taking a shower right there where you would brush your teeth and the water drains through a grate in the floor. Though the system does encourage water conservation, the problems with it are that it is difficult to take a shower without soaking your towel or toilet paper or other bathroom goods, and the bathroom floor is usually wet, depending on how often you shower. Thus the floor would seem a good breeding ground for mosquitoes, bacteria or other foul (yet important in their own right) life forms.   

While my stove doesn't work and I don't have a drying rack to do laundry yet, I do have cable TV which is a completely ridiculous entity in Korea. The good news is that there are always lots of sports on the tube, however, they are always centered around Korean teams and/or players. So, if I am watching Premiership highlights, I am pretty much only seeing the teams that have a Korean player and that player's most significant contributions. Oh and every time I check the stations, at least one channel is showing the Korea vs. Cuba gold medal baseball triumph. Also there are two channels that show video games 24-7 (either Starcraft, Warcraft, or CS) and yes I do know who the current Starcraft champion is (I just can't make out his name). Oh and for those Food Network fans, the U.S. can't even touch the outrageousness of these food shows. All the seafood is usually alive and moving and some strange breed that is unrecognizable. It is thrown in a stir-fry and then is still moving as the ingredients are sprinkled on top of it. Then it is piled on to a serving plate as it crawls and wiggles around and is then devoured by the hosts as they go wild explaining something in Korean.

Friday night, I was taken out to a traditional dinner by my fellow teachers and we feasted on pork that we cooked ourselves on our own hibachi and a million side dishes. Side dishes are the main attraction for most of us foreigners as they are free and are brought out until you can stomach no more. Oh and vegetarian food is hard to come by, but hopefully I will have it figured out in a few weeks. After that, two guys and I hit the subway and went downtown to see the late-night scene in Downtown Daegu. We met and raged with most of the young foreigners in Daegu who are either English teachers or study-abroad students. One of the main differences between living in Seoul and in living in a different Korean city is the number of foreigners. I have heard that the number of foreigners in Seoul is pretty formidable compared to the number in Daegu, so it is much more likely that you will see the same people out at the bars and clubs. I guess it is similar to the whole large vs. small-college debate. So, once again I am at the small college.

On Sunday, we took a hike up to the top of the 3,000 foot Mt. Apsan which is just south of Daegu. Korea is a very mountainous country, though the mountains are not that high, though a lot have temples at the top, so that makes up for their lack of elevation in my mind. Anyway, there is a cable car to the top but we opted for the almost 4 hour round trip hike. I am impressed by how fit the older Koreans are (younger Koreans seem to be more interested in fashion or video games). Many of them would hike halfway up the mountain to where the city has outdoor weight lifting areas and then workout. Also, we would often see large families hiking to the top and stopping for a picnic in the woods. From what I've seen and heard the Koreans are ambitious and on-the-move people. I have heard about five times now how they have built their economy from scratch in the last 30 years.

OK, so it is off to class for me, I will try to explain what it's like to teach young Koreans next time after I get a few more classes under my belt. Oh and no, I haven't hit any students yet.

At the Starting Line

Well, it's another adventure and another blog for your favorite engineer-in-waiting. You might remember the last time we met which was last summer, when the deft-blogger Duncan joined me for a romp around our great country from Ohio to California. Since then, my camel loving friend has moved to Morocco for a 2 year stint with the Peace Corps where he is lurking in the shadows trying to talk to women about midwifery. No, but seriously, he is getting well-adapted, stunning everyone with his Berber language skills and resisting the temptation of Islam. In fact, he has had an infinite amount of marriage requests, unfortunately they are all from 16 year old girls, kind of inappropriate for his Quaker upbringing.

As for me, I have been on the front lines in protecting Nevada's mighty fine public lands. As a year-long Americorps volunteer I have been building trails, killing invasive species and cutting down ladder fuels and hazard trees. Upon retelling my experiences, everyone wants to know, "So what have you learned from this experience?" Usually I could say something about how maybe I can lead up to 40 people in a safety meeting, or maybe about how I can cut down 5 trees at once and buck them up with one hand, or perhaps you might be impressed that I can now build a 4 foot wide horse trail on a 45 degree slope in the snow, you might be disgusted by the fact that my comrades and I routinely went 8 days without showering while sweating it out in the Mojave Desert spraying herbicide and wandering 50 miles in a week looking for a particularly invasive tree that is sucking all the water out of Lake Mead. Whatever the individual experience and growth from it may be, the most pertinent and long-lasting effect of the year would have to be that I have learned to be able to eat anything* and be pretty happy about it. (* granted that it is actually food and was obtained at a grocery store, food bank or equally respected vendor) Now those that have fed me lately know that I would prefer the vegan option (or In-n-Out), but throughout this past year, I routinely had to eat very poorly cooked food, dirt/dust covered food, cooked-by-unwashed-hands food, food eaten way too frequently, and food that is supposed to be cold but is warm due to lack of refrigeration. As you can tell, this year was an reintroduction back into germ-infested nature and a rapid rehabilitation for my formerly giardia-infested digestive tract.

Now, for the next adventure, you may have heard that I willbe moving to the Republic of South Korea to teach English to young Starcraft champions. This is, in fact, 100% true. You may also want to know if along with English I will be teaching other great American traditions, such as carnivourism, alcoholism and pharmaceuticalism. No, I will not. Now, you may notice that I have no qualifications for teaching english, nor can I speak more than 10 words of Korean, however, all that is needed to obtain such a teaching position is a Bachelor's degree in any subject and the ability to stick it out for what has been almost a 5-month application process. My working visa was finally obtained on August 27th and my plane ticket booked the same day (paid for by the school), so considering I am flying out September 2, it is pretty last minute.

My home for the next year will be the fourth largest city in South Korea, Daegu. It is known to be the hottest part of the country and the birthplace of Samsung. It also has the best professional soccer team in the K-League, FC Daegu. I will be working at the English Village IBC Town, which is kind of a progressive private school, teaching English and some other subjects. I'll be teaching English Conversation for Elementary school-age kids and working weekdays from 2PM - 10PM. School is intense for young Koreans, they attend public schools in the mornings and then many go to private schools called "Hagwans" for more studying and then they get home late at night and prepare to do the whole thing all over again. Oh, that's not even mentioning that they still get whacked on the hands by teachers for bad behavior.

I will be flying out tonight, leaving at about 6PM out of Seattle and will fly to Los Angeles, then to Incheon, Korea, then to Busan, Korea where I will then take a train up to Daegu. It is a two-day trip as I will be getting into Daegu sometime on Thursday. So, if I can survive the trip, I should have a lot more to share with you, so stay tuned!