End Times: Part I

"Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely."

So says Auguste Rodin. 

Today is an anniversary for me, blog readers who may no longer exist due to my perilously long absence. I have been in South Korea for exactly, exactly one year today. I completed my teaching stint four days ago with many a farewell to students, coworkers, and books such as English Land 3. I waved goodbye to free lunches and dinners five days a week. I packed up my apartment, leaving a few surprise tokens behind for the next tenants. Soap. Christmas decorations. A lint roller. 

So it seems like an appropriate time for some reflections. Reflections are simpler, though, when an experience has been wholly enriching and transformative. When you can look back and sigh with satisfaction at something accomplished, something to take pride in. It gets trickier when an experience has been almost entirely frustrating and sometimes just downright miserable. 

How can I, as Mr. Rodin suggests, use this experience wisely? I had very few expectations for South Korea when I came here--in part because I knew so little about the country. In a way, this was good: no expectations=no failed expectations. Good for me, I approached another country with a clean slate. Tabula rasa. I was a modern John Locke. 

My blank slate, however, was soon to become an Etch-a-Sketch of disorder (just go with it, the metaphor section of my brain has become a little fuzzy from the lack of opportunities to speak English here). I feel rather as if I fell through the rabbit hole one year ago and plopped down into an alternate universe where logic and reason are reversed and everyone is a participant in one long Caucus-race. My school was--is--a mess. I refrained from writing about this for a long time for fear that if it was all recorded concretely somewhere I would see the madness of it all and be unable to return to work. It just kept getting curiouser and curiouser.

I saw the signs in my first few days of work, but ignored them because of culture shock, jet lag, ignorance . . . any number of reasons could suffice. I had no training. None. Zip. Zilch. Thrown into a classroom with a book like Daniel in the lion's den. Eventually I learned methods of teaching children who spoke a vastly different language than myself, but it took several months and mind-boggling amounts of trial and error. I never once received direction on how or what to teach, and never heard a word of feedback. 

Most of my coworkers barely spoke to me except when they absolutely had to. This could be put down to cultural differences, but I eventually realized that it was because most of them simply spoke fairly poor English. At any other job, I could have been understanding. I don't expect the whole world to speak English well. I don't want them to. English is an exceptionally difficult language to learn, and the world would be transformed into one giant suburbia if everyone spoke the same language. If teaching English is your job, however, I do hold people to certain standards. I can't help it. I love the English language. I love it. If not the most beautiful language in the world, it is complex, varied, playful, and wonderfully descriptive. The intricacies of the language are what make it so hard to learn. I couldn't help but cringe every time one of my students would make the same mistake I heard coming out of my coworkers' mouths. Because I was a foreigner and therefore not a legitimate source of information, my students often did not believe me if I tried to correct a wrong their Korean teacher had passed on. If you think I'm being overly critical, you may be right. But these were not just the reasonable mistakes of a non-native speaker. Many of my coworkers would forgo the plural as if the number of things being talked about could just be inferred, and articles were ignored outright. Most painful was the feeling that anything that I felt I actually accomplished with my students would be undone by the teacher who shared the class with me.

The building itself was a disaster. The windows leaked so that rain swept into the classrooms during a downpour. The walls lacked insulation, and during the frigid Korean winter, students and teachers wore coats, scarves and mittens to class, but could still distinctly see the white clouds of their breath inside. Tiny gas heaters in the corners did little to expunge the winter winds. Textbooks were shared between teachers, and frequently there would not be enough per teacher per class. Half of the CD players in the school were broken, so the listening portion of the lesson could frequently not be completed. All of this could be excusable, perhaps, if I was describing a school in a poorer country, or even a public school with low funds. But Korea is no longer a poor country, and parents pay scads of money every month for their children to attend this hagwon. 

My boss disappeared almost completely four months ago. He was present nearly every day for the first several months I was here, and then he began to slowly vanish, like the Cheshire cat. Where did he go? If anyone had any idea, they never told me. As far as I can tell, no one has been running the school for the last few months. 

In our last week, the absent boss tried to get away with not paying Angela and me for the five days of vacation we took earlier this month, though our contract specifies fifteen days of paid vacation, most of which we did not take because there is no backup plan if a teacher is absent, not even if he or she is sick for a day. His excuse? "Oh . . . we tried to change your contract at the beginning, but we couldn't . . ." 

There is no plan, there is no organization, it is chaos, and not the organized kind that can be fun sometimes. 

For a time, I thought (as you may, too), "Well, that's just how it is teaching in Korea!" Until I began talking in depth to fellow English teachers about my experience here, and found out that it was not the norm. Sure, some aspects are similar, and I realize that teaching in another country will never be the same as teaching in your own. However, I believe it was after I spoke to someone who has been teaching here for over ten years who remarked, "Oh yeah, I've heard all about your school. It's terrible," that I realized I was not just being a whiny foreigner. Well, maybe just a little bit. 

Suffice it to say, I've been ready to get out for a long time. I never wanted to admit it to myself, but I have not been very happy here. I am tired of being an English-speaking puppet. I am tired of feeling owned by my school, which was the only reason I had housing or a legal reason to be in this country. I am tired of being isolated by my coworkers and stared at like a disfigured being by the community around me. 

And yet. Last Friday, twinges of sadness overcame me when I said my goodbyes to my students, many of whom did not understand until then that I was not coming back. The students, as any teacher will tell you, are of course what made the experience worthwhile. Many of them followed me around all day like a pleasant swarm of mosquitoes, hanging off of my arms and legs as I attempted to move through the halls. I received several small gifts, cutesy in a way that only Korean (and perhaps Japanese) gifts can be, as well as a multitude of handwritten notes that made some sort of sense in English.

While I taught my last few classes, a few of my students overwhelmed me with frustration, because it seemed that, though I had been working with them for a year, their English skills had not improved one bit. But those students were in the minority. Taking a close look at the majority, I noticed that most of my students had indeed improved as speakers, and were better able to communicate their thoughts to me. Whether I contributed anything to this, or whether it was simply their own fierce work ethic, I can’t be certain.

What I do know is that many of them really did like me, and I them. I will miss being greeted every day with shouts of “Ereen Teacha!” I will miss certain students’ excitement in telling me about their weekend, even if the string of words they put together was practically incomprehensible. I will miss making up songs with them while we were supposed to be studying the lesson.

Frankly, I’m not sure if I used this experience wisely. Maybe that comes later, though. For now, I think I can be content knowing that I completed a year of living and working in another country, and I did not set fire to my workplace even when I wanted to, I did not accidentally enter North Korea to be put in a labor camp, and I did not throw any of my students out the window as I so often threatened.

Success?