One interesting difference between teaching in the US and Korea is the attitude towards discussion of teacher recreation with your students. It is perfectly permissible to discuss boozing in front of and/or with your middle school students (within reason, of course (i.e. it's okay to say "I drink soju", but I tend to shy away from mentioning things like "So I suddenly I found myself in a taxi with some Irish dude at 7:30 in the morning.")). So it wasn't a problem that Brian (the crazy guy depicted in the last blog) was telling the entire school we were going out for makoli on Friday night. (Makoli is fermented rice milk, about 6% alcohol, and costs about $1 a liter.) We thought it was a little different when Brian was boozing a tall boy in the hallway on our way out when a bunch of kids from the hagwon next door came rushing out. Our fellow teachers and boss assured us that it was totally chill.
Soon enough, we were neck deep in makoli and questionable side dishes. Makoli is always served from a purposefully dented copper kettle, and you drink it by the bowl-full. The taste is not nearly as objectionable as you might guess. The side dishes were a truly new experience (even after almost 5 months in Korea), and included raw cow liver and stomach, and what was described as chicken "pieces" (very cartilageneous). We were all soon ripped to the gills, and moved on to the next spot.
"The next spot" was a No-Rae-Bang (for new readers, karaoke room) next door. Now, I'd always heard about hiring "girls" when you go to the no-rae-bang, but had only had a moderate encounter with this. We walked straight into a room full of eight women in short skirts. This encounter didn't last long, however, as my boss barked several phrases in Korean, and soon we were back on the street. Once outside, he declared that those girls were too "homely". I couldn't really argue with him.
We dipped into a billards hall to play a game. Korean people love to booze, but the one place you would think would be a booze house (the pool hall) is actually alcohol free. It was about 10:30, we were all shredded, and everyone else in the hall was a serious and sober pool fiend. I don't think our presence was appreciated. I was on a team against our boss, and soon he was talking shit about $100 being taken out of our pay check if we lost; a bit of a wager. After I sunk the 8 ball, the obvious question was "when will I get my hundred bucks?" The answer was that it would come out of my fellow employees' (his teammates) paychecks. As we were walking out, a strange song began playing in my head:
The Story of Donn-i the Daegu Dude
forty bucks
forty bucks
too much to pay
for a love hotel
in this town
gyeongju
two thousand years old
a city but sooo cold
and the round hills rolled
over the old dead kings
fourteen kilos of raw oyster
and seasnail
good for health
washed down in soju
no-rae-bang
whiskey splash beer
the girl so awkward
next to taylor
at the end of the table like
snoop dogg
forty bucks
forty bucks
too much to pay
for a love hotel
in this town
The song faded away as we snuck into another no-rae-bang. We went into a room that was girl-less, and started singing. A pack full of girls was sent in after not too long, but of course Donn-i sent them away, demanding a less "homely" bunch. I was halfway through "Dancing in the Dark" when the second group showed up. I had imagined that the girls just kind of came in and hung out with the group of dudes. Not quite how it works. Everybody gets their own girl, who sits with you, talks to you (awkward when this just involves her talking at you in Korean), hands you your drink, and dances with you when you sing. Extremely odd and interesting.
There was much Korean singing, wasting, and I even tried my hand at a Skid Row tune I hadn't heard in ten years. All of a sudden, our time was up, all the girls darted out of the room, and it was time for us to go. We were all about ready to go by this point, and one of our party had even slipped out to nap on a bench in the hallway.
Brian and I headed downtown in a cab with the deskman. We were ecstatic about the fact that he might join us at the western bars. No such luck, he cut us loose and headed home. I ended up at SugarWatermelon, packed in against the Koreans. At least I made it home before 7:30 in the morning.
1/22/07
1/18/07
one down
One of my best students has been in the hospital all week with pneumonia. She blames the illness almost exclusively on our hagwon, but apparently she wants to do her homework while she's there. In a show of unfortunate timing, the above photo was posted on our school page the day before we found out Yoon Hee was in the hospital. The funny thing is, nobody (including hospital girl) seems even the slightest bit offended or upset.
You can't make this shit up.
1/10/07
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.
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.
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