On the last blog entry I didn't get an opportunity to talk about my job, teaching English to first, fourth and sixth grade students at Geumbok Elementary School in Dongtan. Both Paul and I work as ESL teachers for the GEPIK programme, which covers public schools in the Gyeonngi Province, the area surrounding Seoul. Any public school programme is South Korea is very competitive to get into as the conditions are much better than Hagwons, the private English schools.
I was pretty surprised when I turned up at my school on my first day to discover I was to receive no training. Instead I had one day of observing classes before standing up in front of a class of forty kids the following day to teach! Gulp! However, I have a Korean co teacher in the class at all times to help communicate the lessons to the kids and deal with classroom management so it wasn't too bad.
I have struck it very lucky with my co teachers, Yun-ok and Hae-kyoung. They are both lovely people, very laid back and supportive. As I teach most of my lessons with Yun-ok as well as sit beside her in the office, not getting along with her could have made life very difficult. Thankfully, she is great. She even visited Edinburgh a few years ago so she loves looking at photographs of back home.
Geumbok is a big school so I only actually teach around five lessons a week to different classes. I am pretty lucky in this sense as it means I only have five lessons to prepare. The actual content of the lessons comes from the English textbook which is generally very boring so it is up to me and my co teachers to come up with games and powerpoint presentations to make it a bit more interesting for the kids. There is no textbook for my first grade lessons on a Friday so I have to come up with the material from scratch, a task I found very daunting at first. When I asked Yun-ok what to do with the first graders she gave me a few songs to sing with them and told me that was enough. Twenty minutes into the forty minute lesson, I had sung all the songs with them several times and was beginning to break out in a cold sweat. For the next set of classes I used some materials online along with Paul's first grade book to come up with some presentations to show them involving numbers and sums.
At the moment, my main challenge with teaching is classroom management, particularly the first and sixth graders. The first graders are cute but they get bored very easily and it is hard to keep forty six year olds sitting in their seats, listening to what you are saying. The sixth graders are around eleven years old so they are practically teenagers, which means they can get very rowdy. It's okay at the moment because my co teachers do all the disciplining but I am very aware that without them, I would be screwed.
In general, I am really enjoying my job. I can't imagine any other position I could be in where I am greeting with enthusiastic waves and cries of "hello Maureen teacher!" every time I walk down the corridor. I am making sure I savour every minute of this incredible experience.
2010년 4월 24일 토요일
Annyeonghaseyo! Hello and welcome to my blog.
My name is Maureen. I am 25 years old and currently living in South Korea where I work as an ESL (English as a second language) teacher. I feel a bit silly saying this as most people who read this blog will know exactly who am I and what I am doing but I suppose I better clarify these facts incase it is read by strangers.
I have decided to keep a blog for several reasons. Firstly it is more convenient than e mailing everyone with my news and photographs. Secondly, when I was back home in Glasgow, Scotland, pondering the idea of moving to South Korea, I frequently scoured the internet looking for insight on what it is really like for a Westerner to live and teach here. I couldn't find anything particularly useful so I decided that, if I did take the plunge, I would keep a blog for other potential teachers to take information from. In retrospect I don't know where I was looking because practically every foreign teacher I have met out here keeps a blog. I am hoping that including the words "teaching ESL in South Korea" in the title will make it easier for people looking for information on this subject to find me.
So, where to begin. This Monday, I will have been in South Korea for three weeks. So much has happened already. I have more stories from the last three weeks than I do from the last ten months living in Scotland. I have been so busy I haven't had a chance to sit down and let my friends and family back home know what I've been up to. I suppose I better begin with a bit of background information about me and my boyfriend Paul, who is also out here with me working as an ESL teacher,
Paul and I met at university in Glasgow, our home town, in 2003. We were both studying English, Journalism and Creative Writing. After graduating, we worked as journalists for a year and a half but dreamed of travelling the world. Slowly but surely, we managed to save up enough money to fund the trip of a lifetime and, in January 2008, we left Scotland to make our way round South East Asia, New Zealand, USA, Canada and Central America with a six month stint of working in Australia in the middle. We returned in June 2009 with tons of great memories, satisfied our itchy feet had been scratched for now. Immediately we began to apply for jobs and planned to settle wherever we could find work.
However, things didn't quite work out that way. We returned bang in the middle of a recession, unemployment in the UK a record high. The internet was well and truly finishing journalism and reporters were being laid off left right and centre. We realised it would be daft to move back into the industry so we applied for press officer and communications roles, competing with every journalist in the UK who was desperate to change careers. In ten months I got a grand total of two interviews. So did Paul. I haven't actually counted how many unanswered job applications I have in my e mail sent box but lets just say there are a lot. I joined a recruitment agency but even office temping work was few and far between.
Probably the turning point for me was when I temped as a receptionist at a flooring company in Govan (extremely grim area of Glasgow) and the manager told me to apply for a role as an administrator. The woman who previously did the job began to lecture me about how stressful it was and how the company needed someone particularly skilled and intelligent to manage the customers and delivery men (implying all the while that I wasn't quite talented enough to manage this dynamic role). I suddenly had a vision of myself in Govan spending my days stressed about laminated flooring. I had began to consider South Korea as an option at that point and I think that conversation just cemented it.
Paul's "aha" moment came when he went for a job as an administrator at a law firm and he said the interviewer could barely string a sentence together due to her lack of brain cells. He didn't get the job as she said there were better candidates.
I would like to point out that our lack of luck in finding at job for ten months is not a reflection of our experience or ability. I walked into a journalism job straight after uni with no experience, as did Paul. Instead, it is a reflection of the truly grim economic situation in the UK.
So that is why we decided to become teachers in South Korea. No, not because we felt the need to become better people. Not because we felt we wanted to inspire a generation (some actual answers we heard from fellow teachers at our orientation last week). However, in all seriousness, although our decision to move here was inspired by our employment situation back home, when Paul and I worked as journalists, we often said we wished we were doing a job that actually made a positive difference to people's lives. Journalism sometimes did but more often that not it was a negative effect we were creating.
So South Korea it was. We sent off our cv to several differenct agencies but the only one that really pursued jobs for us was "Reach to Teach" based in Taiwan.
The application process was extremely labourious. I can't remember every detail as I appear to have blanked it from my memory. Let's just say it was long (we originally got in touch with our agency in October 2009) complicated and expensive, requiring lots of trips to the post office. We needed our original degree certificate, an official copy of every class we took at university in an envelope sealed with the university stamp, a criminal background check which had to be sent to London to be apostilled, two detailed sealed letters of reference and loads of other things I can't even remember. Of course, bureacracy made the whole process much more complicated than it should have been and there were many frustrating moments along the way (probably the best moment was a man at the passport office in Glasgow telling Paul that because his passport is quite tatty, he could potentially be arrested at the airport.) But we got there in the end and were eventually offered jobs at GEPIK, the public school system in Gyeonggi, the province surrounding Seoul.
Our recruiter Gillian from Reach to Teach (anyone reading this who is thinking of using this woman's services please DON'T) told us that because we are not married we could not get an apartment together. However, she assured us because our application was a joint one, our schools and apartments would be so close together we could easily live in the one place. She told us that is what all ESL teaching couples out there do and it wouldn't be a problem at all.
As we grew nearer to our leaving date, we asked over and over for the addresses of our apartments and schools. Gillian said she couldn't give us them then told us they were twenty minutes apart. Ok, twenty minutes, we thought, We could handle that.
So, on April 4 2010, we packed our lives in a 20 kg suitcase and boarded the flight from Glasgow to London Heathrow to Seoul., Paul worrying all the while about the state of his passport. As I mentioned before, it was pretty tatty and had not scanned in the last few countries we had visited. He was advised by Gillian not to get a new one though as his passport number was on all his visa details. However, we had not actually been knocked back from any of the countries we had visited with it and his teaching visa was stapled on to it so we thought we would be okay arriving in Korea.
So we were pretty shocked when, going through customs, Paul was hauled into another room for about 30 minutes while I hovered around outside anxiously. Apparently the guy just tried to scan his passport again and again. Eventually he let him out and we made our way downstairs to collect our luggage.
We were then met by two different men, one holding a board with my name on it, another holding a board with Paul's name on it.
Eh? We tried to explain to the men that we were here on a joint application and should not be separated but they couldn't speak a word of English. One of them phoned someone from Paul's school who told us to go with the two different men for now then we would meet up later.
I was then driven to my apartment and met by a Korean woman and a Korean man. The woman turned out to be a teacher at my school and the man was the manager of my apartment block. The first thing I asked the woman was where Paul was.
"Balan" she replied.
"Where is that? Is that near here?" I asked her.
"No," she laughed. "It is one hour and twenty minutes on a bus."
Needless to say, the rest of the evening was one I would rather forget. I had no internet, no phone, no idea where I was and no idea where Paul was. I hadn't slept in 24 hours. The teacher woman (whose name turned out to be Hyo-Jae) took me to a nearby department store called Homeplus and told me I had better buy things for my apartment. I wandered around in a daze putting duvets and pillow covers in my trolley. Paul's co teacher, who was with him, then phoned Hyo-Jae, so I finally got to speak to him. He said he didn't have a clue what was going on but was about to go out for dinner with his co teacher and another South African guy who also teaches English as his school so he would try to get in touch with me later.
Paul then told me he was just shoved on a bus by himself from the airport to his school and told to listen for the driver shouting "Balan". He had no idea where to get off. When he did, he was standing in the middle of nowhere for ten minutes before the South African and another Korean guy at his school turned up.
After I went back to my apartment, I knocked on the door of a Canadian girl across the hall who I had seen earlier on. She was very kind and let me use her internet. Paul still wasn't online so I sent him a message and told him he should just wait until the next day before coming over.
The next morning I got up early and was taken into my school by Hyo-Jae. Firstly I met the Principal and gave her some shortbread, whisky and a Ki Sung-Yong mug as a gift. I then watched some English classes taught by Hyo-Jae and the other native English teacher, an American guy called Chris. I was then taken to a health clinic for my medical which involved a blood sample, urine sample and chest x-ray. I had only had a few hours sleep in two days and still hadn't spoken to Paul. It was very bizarre to say the least.
After the medical, I was driven back to my apartment. I used the Canadian girl's internet to find out that Paul and the fellow native English speaker at his school, the South African guy whose name was Willem, had my address written in Korean and were planning to come over to see me. So I went back over the hall to my apartment and sat by the window looking out, just in case the taxi dropped them somewhere else in the street. They arrived a few hours later and told me it had taken them ages to get over; forty minutes in a taxi to neighbouring city, Suwon, then a subway stop to where I was. Paul said he was just going to stay the night at mine then get a taxi to school the next morning.
Needless to say, it was a grim night. Our schools appeared to be miles apart. It didn't look like it was possible for one of us to commute. Our only hope was a bus Paul's co teacher had told him about. It went from my apartment to his school but there was only one an hour and we weren't sure how long it would take. If it wasn't doable, we were going home to Glasgow to face ten more months of unemployment or maybe even more. Not to mention the fact we would lost the money we had spent on our flights as you have to be employed with GEPIK for six months to get the tickets refunded. Grim, grim, grim. I don't even like thinking back to those few days because they were among the most stress filled I have ever had.
We were absolutely furious with Gillian from Reach to Teach for lying to us and assuring us we would be placed close together. We spoke to our GEPIK coordinator who told us she informed Gillian and some other toe-rag called Jason from an agency called Asknow, that our schools were far apart but they assured her Paul and I knew this and were fine with it. Absolute bullshit. It emerged that Gillian had simply plucked the "20 minutes" figure from her head.
I had read lots of warnings about recruiment agencies online, about how they are all complete liars who will tell you anything. However, I had only read positive things about Reach to Teach and at the beginning of the process they seemed to be the most competent. As time went on however, communication began to get a little shaky. Gillian would suddenly suddenly say something like "yeah so when you go down to London to get your Notice of Appointment" we would respond "wait, wait, back up. London? What's a Notice of Appointment? You didn't tell us about this "then she would say" I most certainly did "etc etc. Things like that happened quite a lot during the recruiment process.
Even more irritating, at our GEPIK orientation last week we met quite a few couples who had got apartments together! We wer assured by Gillian this was not possible unless we were married.
Anyway, back to our initital problem. A couple of days in, Paul got the bus from my apartment to his school. It only took 40 minutes. As there was only one an hour, it got him in half an hour early but it was doable. Hooray! We could stay in South Korea after all! A huge relief for us as we genuinly thought we would have to go home which would have been a devastating disappointment for us.
I better go now as this post is very long and it is late here. The next time I will talk more about my job and our life here in South Korea.
Oh and the title of this blog? It means, hello, goodbye, see you later, nice to meet you .... It is said with a bow as you see a fellow teacher in the corridor, as you leave a convenience store; it fits prety much every occasion. The drawl of "annyeonghaseyoooo" will be one of my overriding memories of my day to day life in South Korea.
That and kimchi. But more on that next time.
I have decided to keep a blog for several reasons. Firstly it is more convenient than e mailing everyone with my news and photographs. Secondly, when I was back home in Glasgow, Scotland, pondering the idea of moving to South Korea, I frequently scoured the internet looking for insight on what it is really like for a Westerner to live and teach here. I couldn't find anything particularly useful so I decided that, if I did take the plunge, I would keep a blog for other potential teachers to take information from. In retrospect I don't know where I was looking because practically every foreign teacher I have met out here keeps a blog. I am hoping that including the words "teaching ESL in South Korea" in the title will make it easier for people looking for information on this subject to find me.
So, where to begin. This Monday, I will have been in South Korea for three weeks. So much has happened already. I have more stories from the last three weeks than I do from the last ten months living in Scotland. I have been so busy I haven't had a chance to sit down and let my friends and family back home know what I've been up to. I suppose I better begin with a bit of background information about me and my boyfriend Paul, who is also out here with me working as an ESL teacher,
Paul and I met at university in Glasgow, our home town, in 2003. We were both studying English, Journalism and Creative Writing. After graduating, we worked as journalists for a year and a half but dreamed of travelling the world. Slowly but surely, we managed to save up enough money to fund the trip of a lifetime and, in January 2008, we left Scotland to make our way round South East Asia, New Zealand, USA, Canada and Central America with a six month stint of working in Australia in the middle. We returned in June 2009 with tons of great memories, satisfied our itchy feet had been scratched for now. Immediately we began to apply for jobs and planned to settle wherever we could find work.
However, things didn't quite work out that way. We returned bang in the middle of a recession, unemployment in the UK a record high. The internet was well and truly finishing journalism and reporters were being laid off left right and centre. We realised it would be daft to move back into the industry so we applied for press officer and communications roles, competing with every journalist in the UK who was desperate to change careers. In ten months I got a grand total of two interviews. So did Paul. I haven't actually counted how many unanswered job applications I have in my e mail sent box but lets just say there are a lot. I joined a recruitment agency but even office temping work was few and far between.
Probably the turning point for me was when I temped as a receptionist at a flooring company in Govan (extremely grim area of Glasgow) and the manager told me to apply for a role as an administrator. The woman who previously did the job began to lecture me about how stressful it was and how the company needed someone particularly skilled and intelligent to manage the customers and delivery men (implying all the while that I wasn't quite talented enough to manage this dynamic role). I suddenly had a vision of myself in Govan spending my days stressed about laminated flooring. I had began to consider South Korea as an option at that point and I think that conversation just cemented it.
Paul's "aha" moment came when he went for a job as an administrator at a law firm and he said the interviewer could barely string a sentence together due to her lack of brain cells. He didn't get the job as she said there were better candidates.
I would like to point out that our lack of luck in finding at job for ten months is not a reflection of our experience or ability. I walked into a journalism job straight after uni with no experience, as did Paul. Instead, it is a reflection of the truly grim economic situation in the UK.
So that is why we decided to become teachers in South Korea. No, not because we felt the need to become better people. Not because we felt we wanted to inspire a generation (some actual answers we heard from fellow teachers at our orientation last week). However, in all seriousness, although our decision to move here was inspired by our employment situation back home, when Paul and I worked as journalists, we often said we wished we were doing a job that actually made a positive difference to people's lives. Journalism sometimes did but more often that not it was a negative effect we were creating.
So South Korea it was. We sent off our cv to several differenct agencies but the only one that really pursued jobs for us was "Reach to Teach" based in Taiwan.
The application process was extremely labourious. I can't remember every detail as I appear to have blanked it from my memory. Let's just say it was long (we originally got in touch with our agency in October 2009) complicated and expensive, requiring lots of trips to the post office. We needed our original degree certificate, an official copy of every class we took at university in an envelope sealed with the university stamp, a criminal background check which had to be sent to London to be apostilled, two detailed sealed letters of reference and loads of other things I can't even remember. Of course, bureacracy made the whole process much more complicated than it should have been and there were many frustrating moments along the way (probably the best moment was a man at the passport office in Glasgow telling Paul that because his passport is quite tatty, he could potentially be arrested at the airport.) But we got there in the end and were eventually offered jobs at GEPIK, the public school system in Gyeonggi, the province surrounding Seoul.
Our recruiter Gillian from Reach to Teach (anyone reading this who is thinking of using this woman's services please DON'T) told us that because we are not married we could not get an apartment together. However, she assured us because our application was a joint one, our schools and apartments would be so close together we could easily live in the one place. She told us that is what all ESL teaching couples out there do and it wouldn't be a problem at all.
As we grew nearer to our leaving date, we asked over and over for the addresses of our apartments and schools. Gillian said she couldn't give us them then told us they were twenty minutes apart. Ok, twenty minutes, we thought, We could handle that.
So, on April 4 2010, we packed our lives in a 20 kg suitcase and boarded the flight from Glasgow to London Heathrow to Seoul., Paul worrying all the while about the state of his passport. As I mentioned before, it was pretty tatty and had not scanned in the last few countries we had visited. He was advised by Gillian not to get a new one though as his passport number was on all his visa details. However, we had not actually been knocked back from any of the countries we had visited with it and his teaching visa was stapled on to it so we thought we would be okay arriving in Korea.
So we were pretty shocked when, going through customs, Paul was hauled into another room for about 30 minutes while I hovered around outside anxiously. Apparently the guy just tried to scan his passport again and again. Eventually he let him out and we made our way downstairs to collect our luggage.
We were then met by two different men, one holding a board with my name on it, another holding a board with Paul's name on it.
Eh? We tried to explain to the men that we were here on a joint application and should not be separated but they couldn't speak a word of English. One of them phoned someone from Paul's school who told us to go with the two different men for now then we would meet up later.
I was then driven to my apartment and met by a Korean woman and a Korean man. The woman turned out to be a teacher at my school and the man was the manager of my apartment block. The first thing I asked the woman was where Paul was.
"Balan" she replied.
"Where is that? Is that near here?" I asked her.
"No," she laughed. "It is one hour and twenty minutes on a bus."
Needless to say, the rest of the evening was one I would rather forget. I had no internet, no phone, no idea where I was and no idea where Paul was. I hadn't slept in 24 hours. The teacher woman (whose name turned out to be Hyo-Jae) took me to a nearby department store called Homeplus and told me I had better buy things for my apartment. I wandered around in a daze putting duvets and pillow covers in my trolley. Paul's co teacher, who was with him, then phoned Hyo-Jae, so I finally got to speak to him. He said he didn't have a clue what was going on but was about to go out for dinner with his co teacher and another South African guy who also teaches English as his school so he would try to get in touch with me later.
Paul then told me he was just shoved on a bus by himself from the airport to his school and told to listen for the driver shouting "Balan". He had no idea where to get off. When he did, he was standing in the middle of nowhere for ten minutes before the South African and another Korean guy at his school turned up.
After I went back to my apartment, I knocked on the door of a Canadian girl across the hall who I had seen earlier on. She was very kind and let me use her internet. Paul still wasn't online so I sent him a message and told him he should just wait until the next day before coming over.
The next morning I got up early and was taken into my school by Hyo-Jae. Firstly I met the Principal and gave her some shortbread, whisky and a Ki Sung-Yong mug as a gift. I then watched some English classes taught by Hyo-Jae and the other native English teacher, an American guy called Chris. I was then taken to a health clinic for my medical which involved a blood sample, urine sample and chest x-ray. I had only had a few hours sleep in two days and still hadn't spoken to Paul. It was very bizarre to say the least.
After the medical, I was driven back to my apartment. I used the Canadian girl's internet to find out that Paul and the fellow native English speaker at his school, the South African guy whose name was Willem, had my address written in Korean and were planning to come over to see me. So I went back over the hall to my apartment and sat by the window looking out, just in case the taxi dropped them somewhere else in the street. They arrived a few hours later and told me it had taken them ages to get over; forty minutes in a taxi to neighbouring city, Suwon, then a subway stop to where I was. Paul said he was just going to stay the night at mine then get a taxi to school the next morning.
Needless to say, it was a grim night. Our schools appeared to be miles apart. It didn't look like it was possible for one of us to commute. Our only hope was a bus Paul's co teacher had told him about. It went from my apartment to his school but there was only one an hour and we weren't sure how long it would take. If it wasn't doable, we were going home to Glasgow to face ten more months of unemployment or maybe even more. Not to mention the fact we would lost the money we had spent on our flights as you have to be employed with GEPIK for six months to get the tickets refunded. Grim, grim, grim. I don't even like thinking back to those few days because they were among the most stress filled I have ever had.
We were absolutely furious with Gillian from Reach to Teach for lying to us and assuring us we would be placed close together. We spoke to our GEPIK coordinator who told us she informed Gillian and some other toe-rag called Jason from an agency called Asknow, that our schools were far apart but they assured her Paul and I knew this and were fine with it. Absolute bullshit. It emerged that Gillian had simply plucked the "20 minutes" figure from her head.
I had read lots of warnings about recruiment agencies online, about how they are all complete liars who will tell you anything. However, I had only read positive things about Reach to Teach and at the beginning of the process they seemed to be the most competent. As time went on however, communication began to get a little shaky. Gillian would suddenly suddenly say something like "yeah so when you go down to London to get your Notice of Appointment" we would respond "wait, wait, back up. London? What's a Notice of Appointment? You didn't tell us about this "then she would say" I most certainly did "etc etc. Things like that happened quite a lot during the recruiment process.
Even more irritating, at our GEPIK orientation last week we met quite a few couples who had got apartments together! We wer assured by Gillian this was not possible unless we were married.
Anyway, back to our initital problem. A couple of days in, Paul got the bus from my apartment to his school. It only took 40 minutes. As there was only one an hour, it got him in half an hour early but it was doable. Hooray! We could stay in South Korea after all! A huge relief for us as we genuinly thought we would have to go home which would have been a devastating disappointment for us.
I better go now as this post is very long and it is late here. The next time I will talk more about my job and our life here in South Korea.
Oh and the title of this blog? It means, hello, goodbye, see you later, nice to meet you .... It is said with a bow as you see a fellow teacher in the corridor, as you leave a convenience store; it fits prety much every occasion. The drawl of "annyeonghaseyoooo" will be one of my overriding memories of my day to day life in South Korea.
That and kimchi. But more on that next time.
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