First Month and First Impressions
On September 30th I completed my first month of work. Hagwon work certainly isn’t everything I had thought it would be. For one thing I find sometimes that communication can be an issue. I know, I know, communication issues for a english speaker in a non-english country half-way across the world (DUH!!). But actually what I mean here is that things seem to be done in a last minute manner. On Friday about an hour before I am to start teaching, I find out I am supposed to be giving tests because it is the end of session. Well I must say, there is nothing like half-assing it. Also on Wednesday I was told that I needed to have around 70 report cards finished for Friday!! So I came in 10:30 in the morning on Thursday, but the server was down and of course you can only access the server from within the school. Never mind that work didn’t start for me until 4:30!
On Friday when I start at 2:30 I come in early again, this time 9:30 and for about a half hour I am getting good work done. Then the server is overloaded and before I know it another day is gone. So I come in on Saturday at 11:30 even though I my classes begin at 4:30. Tommorow I bring in Chocolate because a holiday is coming called Chu-Seok which is sort of the Korean version of Thanksgiving. And believe me I am thankful to have some time off. I’m also thankful because I’ve met some great people out here and this is shaping up to be a terrific experience for me, and finally…. I am thankful that K arrived in Korea and is going to be teaching along with me.
She arrived on Wednesday, and at work on Thursday I got an idea of how I must have looked on my first days, tired and terrified. At least K will have the benefit of my first month experiences so she will do much better than I did, she won’t make half as many mistakes. She’s also recieved some proper training and orientation which personally I wish I had gotten. We’ve spent our first few days together with me playing a sort of guide to her tourist. Today we did some hiking (I will go into detail here about the hike in a different entry) and we also went to my apartment and got all my stuff packed. We cleaned the place out for the teacher taking my place and came back to the hotel, which leaves me here, blogging away at 1am while I drive off those bloody sodding report cards.