To be, or not to be . . . that is illogical, Captain . . .
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Living in Korea
Teaching English – or, at any rate, trying to teach English – in Korea often seems like a minefield. Communication tends to be poor and you often have little idea what you are supposed to be doing. But one of the biggest disadvantages of trying to teach here is that the school is private and the kids arrive here having already been at school all day, and are always very demotivated. Locally-produced texts and other materials are often produced by non-native speakers and hence are prone to typos and grammatical errors. And they can be very dull.
Against this type of background, it can be hard to complete any allotted task. In Japan, the "Collapse of the Classroom" has become a well-documented phenomenon and Korea has been going the same way for some time, with dull uninterested post-day-school kids forced to have additional schooling after normal school hours. These teaching environments also tend to be sparse in terms of useful equipment; one of the kids even stole the trackball out of a computer mouse this week, amazing us all (but at least that PC has a nice new optical mouse now!) :up:
In any case, we are now approaching that time in the calendar when the foreigner has to contemplate the possibility of a new job. Job contracts in East Asia seem to be uniformly of one year's duration and although renewable, they can of course be conveniently ended simply by allowing them to expire. Stay here or go back to Taiwan? Go on to Japan? Or go home? What a choice!
Earlier today, I wrote another e-mail back to my editor in Stevenage, England, pointing out what a truly terrible place England now seems to be for someone like myself, who would prefer to be self-employed rather than employed. We now have the dire (and expensive) Council Tax topping a thousand quid a year, a regime which doesn't seem to understand that we don't need huge amounts of red tape to run businesses and a need to cut the production of global pollutants by actually avoiding things like, er, cars, which seemed such a good idea before I left England. Living for a time in a place like Taipei, with its MRT system, and popping over occasionally to Hong Kong and seeing its own MTR system, made me think that most of the places in England and Wales had missed the boat when it came to having cheap, fast urban transport systems. Instead (in my home town) we had a makeshift "Bus Station" and the road on which it was situated becomes clogged with buses and diesel exhausts every summer.
My own opinion now, based especially upon the last year spent here in Korea with a new PC and a nice fast cable connection, is that provided you have a certain minimum of things you will be OK, and it has to be said that this becomes more vital the further you get from major urban centres and entertainment. But East Asia doesn't have to be a bad experience. The real problem is what to do with yourself after your all-too-brief time in distant and exotic lands, when the thought of returning home to nothing enthuses you not at all.
