The Absurdity of Teaching EFL in South Korea
Depending on where you're placed for a silly EFL job assignment in the country, experiences can vary considerably. These trials and tribulations have been well documented on many an EFL blog and website, such as Dave's ESL Cafe, and Waygookin.com, etc. It's not my intention with this post to get into all the particular grievances that could be aired regarding sub-standard employment contracts or housing accommodations, contractual legal issues, or managerial gripes. The basic distinction I will draw is that their are essentially three genres of teaching jobs in South Korea: public school teaching, university teaching, and academy (or "hagwon") teaching. There are probably more than a few that also cross-pollinate, creating some genre-bending employment situations, but these are the three most common situations that are found in South Korea. I've heard horror stories from all three employment camps. I've been here 8 years now and I have experience teaching at the public schools in both a middle and an elementary school and now I'm employed as a university professor.
The Seoul Ministry of Education works with EPIK (English Program in Korea) to recruit foreign teachers from English speaking countries around the world to come and teach in their public schools. They are hired to be a "Guest Native English Speaking Teacher". Essentially they've been hired to "co-teach" English "speaking" classes with a Korean teacher. They teach, on average, 3 grade levels per year and teach approximately 22 hours of classes per week, depending. The job varies as wide as you can imagine depending on the school culture, administration, inter-faculty personality dynamics, and other variables, such as the particular receptiveness that the school culture, and the English department and your superior has towards the outside globalized, multi-cultural world, and towards Western culture in particular. These core factors will largely predetermine your job satisfaction and the employment responsibilities that you'll be given. That being said, more often than not - in my experience and in the stories that I've heard from other foreign guest English teachers - it seems that there are a few ubiquitous systemic cultural grudge-matches that are statistically probable in any public school.
First, many Korean English teacher's insecurity with their linguistic abilities in front of the native English teacher and the students during classes is common, resulting in many passive aggressive moments transpiring, e.g. Korean English teacher remains quiet and submissive in the classroom to the point of retarded negligence, resulting in the guest foreign English teacher having full-responsibility of the class dynamic, student behavior, curriculum, and many times, testing. Now, just this one variable can wreak havoc on a second-language learning classroom, as one can easily imagine. Low-level students get left behind as the negligent Korean teacher doesn't bother to translate into Korean, student and classroom behavior becomes unmanageable because students have reached a cognitive dissonance overload and have tuned out, thus making it twice as hard for the foreign teacher to control the class, as many of whom lack sufficient language proficiency to reprimand the class effectively in the student's native language: Korean. Worsening the situation, many Korean teachers then consequently are resentful, feeling bulled-over by the confidence or the assertiveness of the native speaking English teachers taking control of a class that they themselves have been negligent to handle adequately to begin with, thus deepening the communication divide and provoking a more pronounced passive-aggressive workplace dynamic. I've been involved with many a grudge match with Korean teachers just like this. Although,
many of these grudge matches can be traced back to an easily identifiable root cause. In Korean culture and society, as well as in many East Asian cultures, direct communication isn't a common nor accepted practice, and is in fact discouraged, while in Western cultures, speaking one's mind and voicing concerns, suggestions, opinions, and criticisms is widely accepted, encouraged, and valued. This, in my estimation, is one of the biggest problems faced inside the Korean English public school classrooms. Unless you're working at an academy (i.e. "hagwon") with a foreign administration and management, you will no doubt find yourself in what feels like absurdly bizarre situations at times, and rightly so; they are. And what you'll soon realize is that the only way to survive the absolutely maddening futility and infuriatingly Sisyphean workplace situations is to accept them for what they are: absurd. Your many creative suggestions and solutions to problems are not welcome. Instead, hone a technique of non-confrontation in everything that you do and say, learn to become a psychological jiu-jitsu master, able to grapple with the ubiquity of odd social dynamics inherent in Confucian workplace hierarchies. You'll be much better off in the long run. Either that or bail after your contract. Some just can't take it. For me, it's been instructive for me to swallow my pride and bite my tongue a little more. I remind myself of what the American actor Robert Downey Jr. once said, "Listen, smile, agree. And then do whatever the fuck that you were gonna do anyway." Beautifully elegant, non-confrontational, creatively diplomatic jiu-jitsu.
As a case and point for how bad things can get, let me offer an example. Mrs. "Young Hee sohn-sahng-nim" was a substitute teacher that I encountered my 6th year on the job at a large elementary school in Seoul. And without exaggeration, remains the worst co-teacher I've ever had and by far one of the most petty, pathetic, and bellicose human beings that I've ever met. She had a manner of dressing that suggested poor personal hygiene. She wore long stringy hair, that seemed aggressively oily, and wore her bangs blunted and long on her falsely affected forehead. Her face painted with make-up so egregiously, so unbecomingly, that one could easily place her in a mental hospital with the crazies who dress in pajama bottoms and wear bright exaggerated "cheery" shades of makeup. Eye shadow (on a 50+ year old elementary school teacher), rouge (rouge? is this Victorian England?), and lipstick ever so slightly smeared beyond lip borders as a dead giveaway to a routinely disrupted psyche. Her mannerisms suggested a frailty and brokenness that she barely managed to hide behind her many masks of in-authenticity. She would often become frozen in awkward incongruity in conversation, not knowing which way "to be" after an interlocutor (me) asked her any sort of semi-savvy passive-aggressive questions, exposing her unsavory ulterior feeling or motive, leaving her true mask-less self naked. This often left her wearing a demeanor that could best be described as witch-like, which is ironic in that she could often be seen praying before lunches in the faculty cafeteria before her erroneously painted face would begin to masticate on the plated portions of nutrients directly beneath her ugly wooden countenance. Our first meeting is where I took down this observation, after she, uninvited and unwelcome, decided to accompany me to my lone table, sit across from me and interrogate me with incessant, inane, socially awkward, adolescent, and rude questions regarding my employment and housing situation, my teaching methodology, and other more intrusively personal matters. At one point she asked me if I could speak Korean and what my favorite sentence was, to which I tactfully declined (i.e. scoffed at) to perform for her. She was placating me to the point of indigestion and nausea. About a week later, during another lunch break, after I thought that I had given her the shake by heading to the faculty cafeteria early to eat in blissful solitude, she begrudgingly popped her head up to greet me behind the glass lunchroom door as I looked right over shoulder while serving myself up a tray of food alone in the room. Despite my obvious disinterest in socializing (oblivious to her), evidenced by my laconic terse mono-syllabic responses to her unwelcome visit, she nevertheless accompanied me to a table again and began, without any pretense, proper cadence, gracefulness or social awareness to give me unsolicited advice about my teaching style, my manner of eating in the cafeteria, and other such affectations, trespassing any border of personal decency, and bereft of basic table manners, or social decorum, continually ignoring each of my consecutively terse comments and mono-syllabic responses to her forward pressing unsophisticated attempts at interrogation - which was done loudly in English, so loudly in fact, that by this time, the entire faculty lunch room which was now full, hushed to the measure of a whisper to eavesdropped on what secret feeling the foreign pariah might potentially release to the present Confucian commonwealth - putting me so uncomfortably on my heels that I inhaled my lunch at such a quick pace that I gave myself a drastic blood sugar migraine and post meal reactive hypoglycemic spike - the fucking stupid bitch.
"Ryan when you are peaking in da classroom you should use da full sen-ten-sez. You should all-ways use da full sen-ten-sez. Students need speak in da full sen-ten-sez."
"Can you speak da Korean? What your favorite sentence-uh?"
"In Korean culture is is very rude to eat fast. You need to slow. I watch you. You eat so fast. Too fast. In Korea that is disrespect."
Another encounter that I had with Mrs. Young Hee "the witch" was regarding my song selections for the 5th grade classes. She chastized me for playing two famous American pop song for my students. The first criticism came after she witnessed the students (who yelled excitedly for me to play) enjoying the song "Sunny", originally a 70s funk song done by the artist Bonny M. The music video that I used in class for the song features scenes from one of the highest grossing Korean movies of all time, and also of the same title, "Sunny". At the song's conclusion, Mrs. Hee admonished me with her disapproving countenance and deeply troubled spirit. I was told that the movie has a PG-13 rating. I wanted to slap her ugly face. The movie scenes featured in the music video are without question innocuous to the point of non-controversy and boredom for most viewers - pre-pubescent, adolescent or otherwise, but for approximately a second and a half you can see a Korean woman (of age) smoking a cigarette out of an upper story apartment window.
"Ryan, we need to protect the children. It is our job. You are a teacher. This is bad. This is not okay," shaking her head in abject consternation and dismay at the audacity and overall lack of educational discernment I showed in selecting such controversial, taboo subject matter for my impressionable little kimchi angels to consume while under my watchful eye and elegant guidance. Never mind that these very same Korean angels can be seen the country over from the 3rd grade to the 6th grade and all the way through high-school playing the most gory, violent, and bloody of first-person shooter video games: Sudden Attack, Minecraft, etc. on their smart phones in the school hallways daily or spending night after night skipping their academy ("hagwon") sessions, and neglecting their homework and staying at a PC room until all hours of the night. This is a very real phenomenon and is in fact such a serious societal ill that some social scientists and others have just begun to seriously address for the country's youth. But never mind all that; no, it is I that have corrupted these youth with my innocuous transgression of playing a pop song set to scenes from a popular PG-13 Korean movie! And never mind that any of the school's many hallway bathrooms feature the prominent display of terrible pre-pubescent hieroglyphics and penmanship scrawled across stall doors, tiled walls and floors, attempting to crudely explore the idea of "sex" or "shit" or "penis"... (you get the idea). No, it is I that have corrupted the youthful angels of East Asia's peninsula of the morning calm!
