caffeine and kyul

I know that bloggers who fail to post at least once a week lose their audience. I know this specifically because I have bailed on many a blogger who couldn't keep their shit together. So it is with great dismay that I now realize it has been multiple weeks since my last post. Happy New Year, Holidays, christmas, Kwanza etc. to all. I at least have an intense excuse for neglecting my blog duties in this holiday season. One word sums it up: intensive.

Intensive sessions are what Korean kids do on their winter vacation. Instead of going to their regular school all day, they come to hagwons all day. I think that the hagwon schedule is actually quite a bit more rigorous than the public school schedule, so vacation for Korean kids is actually during the school year.

This is not to say that the intensive schedule is easy for teachers. It is very, very far from easy. Since our regular term ended on December 29, I have been working upwards of 13 hour days everyday, including Saturdays and Sundays. Not that I'm actually teaching that whole time, I only teach from 8:00 am to 7:00 pm Monday through Friday. But Veritas (my employer) has a reputation as the most prestigious hagwon in Daejon, so we've got serious standards to keep up. This includes writing and producing the necessary materials to push my students near the edge of insanity on a daily basis. Daily quizzes, memorization, hours of homework, and handouts, handouts, handouts. If the kids aren't moaning in agony every second of class, the parents call and complain, because that's what they're paying for.

More about how hard we push our students. Last Friday (end of Week 1), our boss came into the office and announced the disgrace that our middle school kids were going to bed before midnight. His exact wording for this was that it was "unprecedented". We all got a scolding for not assigning enough homework. The same day, we also later received a scolding because no parents had yet called to complain that we were assigning too much homework. The students attend 4 hours at our hagwon everyday, and at least that much at other hagwons. On the average, they receive at least one hour of homework per hour of class. In reality, probably much more than that. But, if we don't drive them crazy, we lose our standing as top dog in Daejon. Here's the kicker: my co-worker told me that last winter intensive ten or our students went to the hospital (I'm assuming for stress and exhaustion-related conditions). That's bad enough, but the point he was trying to make was that that was how we got our excellent reputation.

Now, how the teachers work. First of all, we beefed up our teacher force by about double. Our office was already ass-to-ankles, but now it's ass-to-ass-to-ankles. Two of the imported teachers are living with our boss, one of them sleeping on his floor. Not that they ever really go there; as far as I can tell, they are at the hagwon from about 6:30 to 4:00 am every day. If you can imagine not only prepping and teaching all these classes, but grading the intense amounts of homework we are giving our roughly 400 students every day, it makes sense that 20 hour days are necessary. So far, I've escaped the worst of it, and am managing a luxurious 6-7 hours of sleep per night. Some of the ones that aren't sleeping are slowly slipping into deep delirious dementia. We are officially living on high doses of kyul (mandarin oranges) and caffeine.

When it gets late and we are still working, and starting to get really crazy, sometimes the joke comes out that we will be the first hagwon to kill a student with homework. Doesn't seem actually possible, but this is the country where multiple people have died from video games. I'm serious. Imagine what that kind of publicity could do for our reputation.

signing off from official insane-o world.