At the Foothills of the Headlands
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Living in Korea
Time to consider the upsides rather than the downsides. . .
Normally, when I sit down and cobble together one of my blogs, I have an idea in mind. This is one of the main reasons why there tends to be so little activity here: I take a long time to mull things over, to chew the fat before finding my own particular way of expressing myself. All of this is especially true now that I am on the cusp of what is (for me at least) a radical departure – leaving the relative security of a five-and-a-half-year hagwon job and exchanging it for something corresponding in the state sector.
The last few posts might make my reader think that pressures had got to the point at which I could take no more, and in a sense this is true, as the new materials being brought in by the franchise are illogical, badly explained and (as I could tell from the beginning) actually only partly finished. More care should have been taken to "polish" them before they hit the market, and especially they should have checked their spelling for consistency (one unit in US English, the next in British, with not a word of explanation). And true to form, JC have continued their eccentric choice of materials . . . two units involved trying (and failing) to discuss and summarise the storylines of Aesop's Fables. What possible relevance could an understanding of Aesop have to young teenagers in modern South Korea? Why is there so much insistence upon the likes of opera and classical composers? It's almost as if the whole thing was slapped together in a mad rush, and frankly, I think it was. None of these things will help the kids be more competent with computers, understand why they picked up a nasty rash the other night, or communicate effectively with speakers of other tongues. It's only thorough in the way it is impractical, and unlike the older materials, hardly encourages the students to actually, er, talk.
However, there are other reasons why I felt compelled to leave. Five and a half years is a long time in one position, and the fact is that there is no promotion in the hagwon environment; it is a dead-end job. In a real school (or at any rate, in a larger institution), a person might expect to progress within a department and maybe, after a number of years of service, be considered for things like a DoS (Director of Studies, not Denial of Service, I hasten to add), departmental head or even principal or vice-principal post. But hagwons are generally rather small and in truth, a foreigner seems unlikely to be considered in that kind of way, all of which makes you start to think after a while.
Hagwons can be stressful and cosy at the same time, as things like housing are thrown in as part of the contract (meaning that you only pay for utilities, cable, Internet etc.), whereas many of the kids who attend your classes are in fact in the lower quartile of learning ability and often have difficulty concentrating on anything for any length of time; the disparity between what you are trying to achieve (academic essay writing, for example) and the kids' existing abilities is often sufficient to make you want to give up. As we say back in Blighty: "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear", and brother do we have a lot of sow's ears out here . . .
At the end of all of this, and despite all of the benefits you undoubtedly reap as a foreigner here, you do become disillusioned. You have to pause for a moment and take stock, and try to steer a path towards where you think you ought to be. Notionally at least, the process of "education" should be one in which there is an end product which is better-trained and more capable than it was when it fell into your care; but it just doesn't seem to work. Everything is screwed up; not only can we not get the kids to break out of the repetitious, rote-learning frame of mind enough to show some real individuality, many of us actually throw in the towel when confronted with learning to speak Korean, despite the fact that we need it desperately for work, navigation and general daily living. As work starts to build up, the time you had at the beginning which was available for things like this diminishes and you feel that the situation is hopeless. Never mind the fact that Korean learning materials are often of poor quality, you cannot find either the time to use them or a comfortable space in which to do it.
I guess you could say that it's a bit too easy to become jaded and pessimistic, and you start to forget that, hey, Korea is actually a very nice place with often very friendly people, who really want to help you and communicate their ideas to you, the living here is not bad at all, it's just that the Korean way of doing things often strikes the foreigner as strange. And this brings us back to what I said previously about "orientation" – half of the troubles the foreigners have here stem from lack of care on the part of the hagwons themselves. They don't go the full nine yards with anything, and the consequences of this constantly return to bite them up the bum (as we might say in England). The Boss has to go to a meeting somewhere, let's say, and because you have a spare set of keys, you are effectively in charge of the place at least until a Korean member of staff arrives. You can't take important calls because, well, you can't speak enough telephone Korean; then one or more of the parents comes in and you struggle to explain that maybe the Boss might be back by two o'clock, so they have to go away feeling less than "gruntled". Each day is punctuated by "happenings" which a better-organised and more professional institution would be able to avoid, and encouraging the foreigners to learn some effective Korean by having regular lessons with feedback, while undoubtedly welcome, seems to be something only a minority of hagwons feel inclined to lay on for people.
So for the record, let me forget the inconveniences of being a foreigner here and lay some stress on the positives. Although it's cold in the winter (and the winter of 2003, for example, was very cold), rain and snow are infrequent (at least here in the extreme south) and for most days of the year, the sun is always shining. Typhoons happen but they are rarer than in Japan or Taiwan/China, for example. Summers can be very hot, but this is not always a bad thing.
Your job is usually stable both practically and financially, and the hagwon scene these days shows much more legal rectitude than, say, ten years ago; you would understand this if you were like myself, an old lag often chewing the fat with even older lags. Shopping is easy and your bank will issue you with a debit card so that if you are short, you can use this to pay for things; transferring funds between banks is likewise a complete doddle, although when you want to send funds back home to pay your bills, it becomes more involved (in my case, from Korean won to US dollars to UK pounds via Wachovia in New York, urrrghhh). Prices are generally low and it's therefore not unreasonable to assume that a careful person could save money while they are here (unlike myself, ahem).
Accommodation is often not perfect for hagwon workers but it is generally OK; cable Internet can be arranged and for more adventurous bods like myself, you can actually approach people to order the parts and then build a computer yourself, as I did four (and a bit) years ago. The overall situation is better than in places like Japan and Taiwan, where the cost of accommodation etc. can be quite limiting; Taiwan extracts much more income tax from foreigners as well.
Maybe the killer, however, is the lack of substantial time off from work. Generally, the hagwon's "summer break" amounts to three week days and the closest weekend back-to-back; this year (and last), national celebrations like Chuseok and even Christmas fall at bad times, and we lose out; due to a small chorus of complaints, the Boss gave us an extra day for the Lunar New Year this time. The state schools' situation is, of course, radically different, but then, they don't have to worry so much about their bottom line.
I would always return to the topic of a previous blog and suggest to people that if they get accepted for a post here, they should stay here as long as they can, nowadays of course because of the lamentable situation in the global economy, from which they will be largely buffered, but also because, for those approaching their "mid-life crisis" especially, living and working here allows you more time to take stock. Arrive here with the definite intention of formulating a plan for the future, and as you achieve each step of your plan, your confidence will grow. I am nowhere near as pessimistic now as I was only five years ago – disillusioned, yes; downhearted, hell, no!
I left England with one specific goal in mind: to learn as much as I could and return wiser. Korea in particular has enabled this more than other places, and the learning process continues. But you have to be focused and get the right tools. Maybe I'll blog about that soon . . .
Andrew. ^_^
Tags: hagwon, Korea, living, student, teaching
