"Fuck off!"

Catchy title don't you think? But this is a well used phrase in the English language, the importance of which is often undermined. I have used it in my lifetime. Not as often as some but it has its place. Mostly amongst friends. It's a little more emphatic than "No way!" or "Get out!" or "You're kidding!" Kinda packs a verbal, (or even written), Elaine-esque push with it. For those who don't speak Seinfeld, it's more emphatic.

I've often used it to address inanimate objects such as video games, computer screens, alarms etc. And I like it when anonymously telling off bad drivers, bad athletes on my team or good ones on the other, bearers of bad news or things like that. But I rarely use it to directly address a person in anger. That person would probably have to be someone who had previously done some pretty hard work to lose my respect and they would have to be doing something previous to my using the phrase to piss me off.

Well, I told my supervisor to fuck off this week. Yeah, my special season's greeting for her alone. And man, you know at this time how they say it's better to give than to receive? Well I'm feeling that!

I'm not going to rehash all the trouble I've had with her. It would be a huge entry. In fact you can read about some of it in previous posts. I'll just sum up the major stuff: She lied to me repeatedly about the initial contract which cost me a vacation, caused me a lot of unnecessary trouble with immigration and screwed me out of two camps that would have gained me about 6 thousand bucks. She also made me cancel for the second time with the camp I got screwed out of by my PREVIOUS supervisor in the same way. This makes me look pretty undependable. She's also, in tandem with another worker, Dumb and Dumber I call them, caused more stress than enough with her office politics.

But it's the end of the year. I was this close to being finished and never having to see her again. All I had to do was input my students' final grades into the HUFS website, hand in exams, attendance etc. and I was done. So I go to the website and it doesn't work. I had asked my supervisor nicely if the site would be any different since it had been changed mid semester but she assured me it would be the same as usual. She was right. Last session it didn't work when we tried to input marks either. We had to wait until the website workers TURNED IT ON. How stupid is that? Well I just assumed this was the problem again. I called Mee Sook, my supervisor. She didn't answer. It WAS late so I didn't blame her. I waited till the next day. I called during office hours. It was a Friday and I figured she'd be at work. She actually opened her cell phone and closed it. Effectively hanging up on me in the modern style. She has my name on her phone so she knew who it was calling.

So I texted her and asked when we could input grades. She texted back the dates which included the day this took place. I texted again, "So I can input grades TODAY?" She texted "YES". So I called her. This time she answered. What followed was what I was expecting. She instantly assumed I was the problem and asked if I had gone to this area of the website and then to that area, then clicked this or that and I said, "Yes, yes, yes, yes..." I was very patient. Then she started suggesting every possible thing that I could do, none of them in the best interest of anyone but her lazy ass because she knew that what needed to be done was something only SHE could do. I.E. WORK for her. And she knew that once again I had caught her telling me what she thought it was I wanted to hear, not the truth.

She said I probably had a problem with my computer, I should go into the school and use one of theirs, I should wait till monday, I should ask some other teachers, (which I had and found that I was the first one inputting marks. Only one other teacher tried and had trouble), talk to office workers, she even suggested that I go talk to the people in charge of the website, (who only speak Korean), and ask them what's going on. And this whole time her voice is in a high-pitched, whiney, yelling tone because she doesn't like it when I point out her incompetence but still blames me for the problems she brings on herself. So I ask her why SHE doesn't call the website guys and see if they've got the site turned on. I can't do it cuz I don't speak Korean. Well then she started really yelling. All the same stuff. Why don't you why don't you why don't you blah blah fucking blah. So then I started raising my voice. "Why are you yelling at me? I am just trying to get my marks to my students as soon as possible. This helps the school, the other teachers and even YOU!" She kept yelling. "I'm not in the office. I'm on the street. Why don't you (same shit same shit same shit)?" So I just said, "Oh, fuck off!" and hung up on HER.

Shortly after the phone call, like maybe 5 minutes, I got ahold of another teacher and asked her if she'd had any trouble. She hadn't started plugging in marks yet but was in front of a computer so she did exactly what I'd been trying and I did it for about the fiftieth time. Suddenly it WORKED! The website was on.

It's pretty obvious that Mee Sook had called the website workers and told them to turn on the website. I wonder if the Korean teachers have to be told to mark their exams after they give them. Like do these people not have the ability to think for themselves? And rather than tell the website workers to open the site for teachers to input grades after every exam session, Mee Sook probably thinks the only option is to tell them every individual time. She's got a Ph. D. remember.

Most likely what happened is she called and asked if the website was on. It wasn't on but they said it WAS. Then they turned it on after hanging up. So Mee Sook will lie and say she knew it was working all the time, (like she had lied to me and told me), and she'll lie and say she never called to tell the website guys to turn it on. The website guys will lie and say it was always on. And the only guy who didn't lie, ME, will look like a big asshole for telling her to fuck off. That's Confucianism at its best. Acting, lying, showing fake respect to people who've long since lost it... FUCK OFF!

So maybe in fact I wasn't directly telling Mee Sook to fuck off, I was telling the part of this culture that encourages deception to fuck off. This is new. I don't know if I've used this phrase to personally address a philosophy or social conviction before. See how useful it is?

Foreigners Acting Like Koreans

What you are looking at is the best pic I could take of the stupid "common final" exam we had to give to our kids. It was Dec. 10th. I had about 135 kids jammed into one room like a rush hour subway and at the exact same time every other teacher was doing the same. In their wisdom the management of HUFS even decided to combine three of the teachers' classes into one big auditorium so they probably had about 3 or 4 hundred in there. I would show you the movie I took with my cam and give you a better idea of what we were working with but I always have trouble trying to put movies on here. I'll just say that HUFS is supposed to be one of the top schools in Korea for ESL or EFL and this testing style brought me back a coupla centuries.

Just one of the reasons their "education" system here is lagging so far behind the rest of the world. The irony is that Koreans are literally fanatical about education. They want so badly to be educated but they can't get beyond the obvious idea that they have to abandon their antiquated methods and start using ones that have been tried, tested and found far more effective.

It's kind of a catch 22. They get people who are trained with these old methods in positions where changes can be made to these old methods, but a huge part of the subject matter doled out to students through the old methods is how great and wonderful everything about Korea is, including its educational techniques. So they end up with a choice between what is right and what is Korean and this, unbelievably enough, is not much of a choice. We'll do it the Korean way!

Because this country is so fanatical about education to be an "educator" here is a HUGE badge of prestige. For this reason there are all kinds of people, many absolutely NOT educators, scrambling for the positions in which they can be seen as "educators" and I dunno, get laid at social functions or have people fake bow a little lower to them. People who are educators and who may have heard something about proper teaching techniques never seem to end up in the positions to implement them in Korea because the prestige hounds want it just a little more. And, again the genius of Joseph Heller, the catch 22 is that because the Korean "education" system is so messed up people can do things like bribe their ways to false doctorate degrees, commission smart people to write some smart educational literature and put their names on the books even though they understand none of the content. In this way you can make yourself appear to be an educator when you actually are just a guy with lots of spare change using it to buy some phony respect.

There are only a few things that can score you even more prestige in Korea than being viewed as an educator. You can always badmouth the U.S. or Japan. Never fails. Around election time people seem a bit less friendly to me because they support the platform of their preferred candidate, which, as the election draws nearer and he falls further behind the front runner, is becoming less about the real issues and more about "Yankees go home." But another sure way to get Koreans on your side is to be blindly patriotic. Using antiquated educational methodology because it is KOREAN trumps any reasoning supporting alternative methods that are better. Why? Because of the way they are "educated" here.

Another example of Korean methodology being employed at HUFS is the "no calling in sick" rule. It's against the law in Korea to fire someone if they miss days because they are sick. But they can sure make things difficult for you at work. Giving you bad schedules, bad performance reports etc. And if you're under contract, they can certainly choose not to re-sign you. We've recently had a rendition of this rule drawn up and circulated amongst the foreign staff at HUFS. It took this school several months to draw up new contracts with an amended pay scale for the employees here. In fact they couldn't even have them ready before the workers were hired. All us teachers are actually working under the old contracts. Now they are trying to decide which teachers to re-sign and which to get rid of and it's taking them forever. The Yong In campus of HUFS told their teachers who will be re-signed a couple months ago.

It's interesting how things happen at HUFS. I was deathly ill. I had something worse than the normal flu. I had spent two days coughing, blowing my nose, and not sleeping. I felt like I had been used as Mike Tyson's heavy bag. So I call in sick. It was a Thursday. One of the workers at HUFS, J.P., knows that I play pool Wednesday nights and stay out late drinking with the team. I usually just stay up all night and teach my classes THEN go home to sleep. But I NEVER missed a class because of it. The day I was sick Dean asks J.P. where I was. J.P. tells Dean about pool nights and how he figures I was just hungover. I don't blame J.P. for thinking that. I knew that would be a suspicion. Only hours after Dean, (who has been lobbying shamelessly to get on the good side of our supervisor and get appointed to the position of head teacher), heard that I might not actually be sick, I received a text message from the supervisor saying that I had to teach make-up classes for time missed and then we all received the notice of the new sickness policy. Basically we can still get sick as long as we teach while we suffer. Interesting...

And while we're kind of on the subject of Dean Dawson, I managed to find out just exactly what the hell was going on with the lame-ass teachers here. Why nobody would support any action that seemed in disaccord with Dean's wishes. He's responsible for hiring many of the teachers here. Enough of them so that he sort of has a majority government at HUFS. They are under the impression that he hired them and he can fire them. So they don't want to oppose him in any way. They're all just his rugby buddies. I doubt any of them has been in Korea or teaching for as long as they claim. It was curious to me how we never talked about that or about their rugby playing.

So now we're all suffering through the marking of this test he forced on us. It is taking forever to mark. It's rife with weak questions that the students are not getting wrong because they don't know the answer but because they can't understand what the question is asking them. These are questions he left in after being advised by better teachers, (including me), to remove them. I have had to adjust my marking because of them. I'm just adding one mark to every student's test because of the one question that I gave several reasons why it should be removed. It was edited and made worse, but not removed. So they all just get it right. It's the only fair thing to do. And they all know the answer anyway, which was one of the reasons why I thought it was unnecessary in the first place. What is expected is for the students to complete a quote taken directly from the text explaining a language point. Their knowledge of the text, NOT the language point, is what is being tested. And if you show this test to 100 people I doubt even one of them would guess it's an ESL or EFL test. It's just a test of the content of the book.

It's odd but when you look at the situations of Dean being in the position he's in and the management of the schools here in Korea it's practically the same thing. He doesn't deserve to be head teacher. He certainly fucked up everything he's done from his self-appointed position of leadership to this point. But he seems to want it more than anyone and he's lying, cheating and stealing his way there. I'm sure he's already bought the brass desk plaque and addressed his Christmas cards as Dean Dawson Head Teacher. Maybe he'll be president of HUFS some day.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll look at that picture in the future and remember how great the students were at HUFS. They were the best part about this job. I've never had better students. I never have a problem with the students anywhere I work. They usually ARE the best part of the job. But HUFS students were just a bit better. And I'll miss them. I certainly won't miss anything else about HUFS though. The management is on a course that is in my opinion the opposite of the direction they should be headed. They are making things more Korean, (bass ackwards), every day. I don't want to see that continue next year. And as for the teachers, they can bend over and take it up the bass ackwards from the management and Dean all year next year too for all I care. I'm not gonna be a part of that. I may be asked to return and I may say that I will, but I am not planning on it.

I'll likely end up back in Gwangju at a school where I worked before and actually had a good experience. It was the one place I wanted to stay and the only place that couldn't keep me. But that's the way I roll. Luck is only with me in the casino it seems. I got downsized by them and that was the reason I ended up where I am now. But it appears as though they might have enough of a budget to UPsize me back in for this coming year. That would be nice. Even if that doesn't happen, I'm sure I'll find a place that'll take me. And I'm pretty sure I'll find something to complain about at THAT new place too. So you blog readers have that to look forward to. YAY!

Work Drama

One week of teaching left here. It'll be a review for my students. Then exam week, input marks into the computer and fly away to the Philippines and San Miguel it all away.

Recently we've had a bit of drama. The management requested that we make a common final that all 8 teachers would use as their final exam. It's a Korean educational obsession to teach everything identically. They still haven't figured out that teachers and students are all different so this is a stupid strategy. (The individuality idea again). But in an attempt to do what management wanted we divided up into teams of two and together submitted some questions from one chapter each. There are four chapters in the book we used.

It was given to us as a suggestion long before the teaching started and a few of the teachers, including me, had questions prepared to share with the other teachers at a meeting we had at the beginning of the session. I was late for the meeting but when I got there it was aparent that one teacher had taken control of it. Dean Dawson is his name. I assumed that before I arrived he was elected or appointed to chair the meeting. He gave everyone a couple of pages from which to compose questions for our chapters. No clear guidelines were given as to how many marks we were responsible for or what kind of questions we could make. We found out later that multiple choice questions weren't allowed. All we had was a shakey plan of attack after the meeting. I thought we were going to leave there with at least a rough copy of the exam to work with while we taught. We probably had enough questions between us to do so. But that was not the plan of the man. So we all walked out of there kind of shaking our heads.

A while later I sent everyone an email pointing out that some of the questions, (the difference between "can" and "can't" and telephone skills), were better for oral examinations and it had been established that this would be a written exam. Plus the pages from which Dean had chosen to make his questions were actually not even part of his chapter. And he had already taught the book a few months previous to this. He was to make questions about garbage and human waste and he chose a cloze exercise on endangered animals. How these two topics could be confused I don't know.

To his credit he said my points were valid and we changed a few things. Nobody really got their questions in until very late in the session. Last week in fact. Mostly because we were all so confused as to what we could and couldn't do. So there were many exchanges of emails and finally everyone had submitted their questions except Dean. On Wednesday of last week he submitted an exam in which he had changed everyone's submissions and added his own. I mean changed like omitted questions, added some of his own. My partner and I had tried to make questions that encorporated all of our chapter. Dean edited ours so that they represented only one exercise from it. And he included a blurb with his exam basically saying that this would be the one we use and we would have to live with it.

So I sent a diplomatic email correcting a lot of the grammar, spelling and typing mistakes and suggesting a few other changes. It was mostly praise for 3 of the 4 chapters. But I asked him to "please" explain his thinking on how he had narrowed down my chapter. He fixed some of the typos and grammar mistakes but ignored my question and changed nothing in my chapter.

The next day we had to work. Every one of the other teachers, (except Dean), expressed to me in the short breaks we have between classes how they didn't like what Dean had done. Every single one of them. But nobody had bothered to confront Dean either through email or in person. I guess because they expected to be ignored like me.

So on the weekend I wrote an email to everyone but Dean stating that he is an equal member of our team and despite the fact that he had presented himself as something different there is no reason why one of us couldn't write an exam that better reflected the efforts of the other teachers. Dean's not the boss of us!

One of the other teachers, Rose, made an exam. It WAS better. She forwarded it along with my message to all the other teachers. Except Dean. I think this was just an oversight. I had asked her to forward it to all the teachers including Dean as a second option. It was not forwarded as an exam we all must use. It was just a suggestion. An option for anyone who didn't like Dean's exam. That was everyone but Dean.

Then the emails started coming in. One of the teachers, a guy I often spend my two-hour lunches talking and drinking coffee with, had engaged me in a long email exchanging session in which he did everything but give me a reasonable answer as to why he didn't want to use another exam. He contradicted a dozen things he had told me in the past month or so of Starbucks lunches and even contradicted himself a couple of times within the string of emails. I was stunned! He was the last guy I expected to support Dean in his power play.

So I gave him the reasons why assholes can weasel their ways into positions of power in the workplace. They can basically be summed up as, "Because the other workers allow them to." More specifically they are: 1. I'm comfortable with my job. I don't want to rock the boat. (apathy) 2. I'm scared of losing my job. I don't want to rock the boat. (fear) 3. I don't want to do anything to upset the asshole. (intimidation) 4. I can't do anything to stop the asshole, can I? (ignorance) 5. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzz. (laziness)

My friend had sent me many comments in his various emails that were perfect examples of these 5 things. But he just kept skirting the real issues and talking in circles trying to make me think he wasn't an apathetic, spineless sheep and accomplishing the opposite.

Then there is Claire. She was the person who complained more than any other the day after Dean's test. Yet when my suggestion to create an option that was closer to what we had contributed and then decide between the two democratically was sent, and the test was created, she started saying things like how underhanded, sneaky and unprofessional it was. And how we were going "behind Dean's back." I suspect she had a little talk with Dean and he swayed her to his side. But I then sent an email explaining that by alienating every other teacher Dean had turned his back on us. That's why it may appear like we're going behind his back. She also complained that she had already submitted Dean's test for copying even though we have till Monday to do so. I expected Dean to give that as his excuse and really didn't expect the new test to be accepted. But I had to try.

Then I submitted an email to everyone including Dean about how his actions were a strong statement of his wish to abandon team democracy and demand we do things his way. I also explained that I was just acting as though Dean was an equal member of our process and represented only one vote. I said that we would probably have to use Dean's exam due to copying issues, time limit and apathy. Three of the teachers gave the ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz response including one of them who had told me Thursday that he wasn't going to use Dean's test.

Now, a couple of my past emails are perfect defences for the impotence of my fellow employees, (other than Rose). I think a lot of them are in grown up amounts of debt and they don't want to teach this schoolyard bully a lesson because it could jeopardize their steady income that they send to Visa or their bank every month. Also there are some legitimate concerns about new immigration laws here in Korea that would make it very inconvenient to change jobs. So they are desperately hanging on to their jobs despite wanting to slam dunk this dickhead. And it is very possible that regardless of what happens with the exam, this guy will be head teacher next year and they don't want him giving them the shitty schedules or taking away overtime they wanted or whatever powers he might get.

I don't give a shit about any of these things. I have that luxury. So I don't mind doing the dirty work for other people like this. I've done it before. Even at the cost of my job. No biggie to me.

However, I'm starting to wonder who I hate more in this scenario, the asshole who is stepping on his fellow employees for his own gain, or the spineless, ineffectual automatons who bend over and take it up the ass to save their jobs. I think maybe the latter.

Anyway, I only have one week left with these folks. This has made my decision to leave HUFS a very easy one. Enrollment was down this year and when that happens the school normally just offers TOEFL or TOEIC courses. That's about as boring as it gets. I would rather teach in rural China than teach TOEIC or TOEFL. And this school is going in the wrong direction in dealings with the foreign teachers with the management flexing its muscles more every day. So will Dean and I don't particularly want to see that. With these as my fellow employees I don't think I'd be able to protest if they tried to make us all teach in thong underwear. In winter. Outside. Using the snow as our whiteboard and pee as our marker. Teaching rote memorization of the dictionary.

My apologies to Rose who has more balls than the rest of them put together. I'm not grouping her in with the others.

I have some other options and I have recently heard news that immigration is thinking twice about the new regulations so I'm not too nervous about moving. I have a very good shot at working for a place that I was happy at before. Or I could always find work in Jan. or Feb. I suspect there will be a low enough demand for jobs here that I'll look good to any school and I'll have my pick of some sweet jobs. MUCH better than HUFS.

HUFS is one of the top English schools in Korea. It has the hardest level test to get into the English program in Korea. The students are great. I will miss them. But, as usual, the management in the place feels like because of the reputation of HUFS they are bullet proof. So they treat the employees badly and end up with the dregs of the ESL teacher crop. Hmmmm. Do crops have dregs? Holy mixed metaphors Batman.

I hope some of the dregs will get lost in the immigration law confusion.