Part Twenty-Three: Out of Service
January 31st, 2024
Like my life, this week’s post will be less exciting than the last few weeks.
I got back to Korea early Monday morning, then went to work that day. My students’ last week of school was the first week of January, and they have been on winter break since then. Their break continues until the beginning of March, but despite not having teaching responsibilities for the next several weeks, I am required to be in school anyways. Most of the other teachers have the vast majority of the time off, but the foreign English teachers are required to go to school every day to ‘deskwarm.’ I believe the reason for this silly ritual is that foreign workers are required to ‘work’ for a certain number of days a year to get their visas, although I’m not sure about the details.
So essentially, I come in to work every day and sit at my desk. While my friends at other schools have very few other people around, with some being the only people in their building, there are actually several other teachers here with me, along with the vice-principal and principal. Because there is no school lunch these days, at lunchtime I leave the building to either buy food or go home to make lunch. While it’s not as tasty as my school lunches, I have enjoyed the autonomy over my own meal. At home I’ll often have an egg sandwich or a peanut butter and jam sandwich with broccoli on the side.
I’m not sure if I am supposed to be leaving the school for lunch. Technically, my contract says I have to stay on the school grounds, but the other teachers sometimes leave too. Luckily for me, if I am breaking the rules, none of the other teachers speak English well enough to let me know.
Last week was the only week of my deskwarming period where I was expected to do something. Most of my friends at other schools ran an English camp over the break, where they would have a theme (like Harry Potter or the Olympics) and play fun English games with the students. For some reason, my school doesn’t do English camps (which saves me some planning) but instead does a “phone camp.” For this “camp,” I am given a list of students to call and chat with for 5-7 minutes per day for a week. While sign-ups were initially very low, one of my co-teachers pressured students to sign up because she told them that I am very smart and can give them personalized feedback on improving their English. This definitely put some pressure on me, as I’m not sure how to give great actionable language advice other than just practice some more.
In the end, 12 kids signed up, but for a variety of reasons, I only ended up having 33 conversations over the course of the week, meaning less than 7 per day. Many of the conversations were cancelled for various reasons. Some kids got busy, some didn’t pick up the phone. One kid’s number was out of service.
The conversations were mostly pretty boring. A lot of the time it was pretty one-sided. I used a list of questions each day, and many of the kids would just answer the questions in as few words as possible. Some kids were more enthusiastic though, which made for better conversations. I did my best to relate to the kids, which was sometimes easy, if they talked about Harry Potter or sports, and sometimes hard, if they talked about K-Pop. I did my best, and even used the K-Pop term “bias,” which I recently learned from my friends, in a sentence. The kid seemed to know what I was talking about, even if I didn’t.
I often felt bad for the kids. When I asked them what they were doing on a given day, the typical answer was that they would go to a hagwon, meaning a supplementary school. Many of them are spending even more of their vacation studying on their own. Although the students I spoke with on the phone are not necessarily representative, the educational arms race that takes place in Korea and other east Asian countries is really sad. The kids work hard throughout the year and deserve a vacation. It also seems like everyone recognizes the system is bad, but no one can do anything about it without unilaterally disarming and risking their child falling behind.
Something that surprised me is that when I asked them about their favourite restaurant, two of my students named Outback Steakhouse. I guess they just don’t appreciate Korean food like I do.
A difficulty of the week was that for most of the time, none of my English-speaking co-teachers were there. If I had a question, it meant I either had to use PapaGo (the popular translation app) to ask my vice-principal, or I had to figure out what to do myself. Mostly, things went okay.
Outside of school, I had a nice time seeing my friends again. On Tuesday, I got to meet my friend David’s girlfriend who was visiting from California, and on Wednesday ate jjimdak to celebrate my friend Brandon’s birthday.
On Thursday, I was reunited with my favourite mazesoba restaurant in Daegu. Even though I had eaten mazesoba multiple times in Japan, it still felt like it had been too long. I’d like to learn how to make mazesoba so that I don’t have to go without it when I go back to Canada, but this could be a little bit tricky. The seemingly simple bowl of noodles is supposed to have 64(!) ingredients, including raw egg, which is something that is safe to eat in Japan and Korea but not so much in Canada.
Over the weekend, I went back to Busan, where I went to the monthly English-language comedy show and hung out with some of the friends I have made there, then went back to Daegu to relax.
