A farewell to Korea

As I get ready to leave Korea for the fourth time, I feel compelled to reflect a little on my last few days. I know I will miss many of my colleagues and students a lot. Many of my colleagues have left me with kind, supportive messages. I am touched.

I’m not going to miss Seoul at all. My rants about Seoul have been long and far too frequent, so I won’t repeat them here.

After struggling with so many things lately, the end went very smoothly. Apple Tours at the Yongsan USO got me the flight home that I wanted at a great price. The moving company came early (almost unheard of in Seoul) and were in and out in 2 and a half hours. The final cost of shipping was a million won LESS than the original estimate – something that I hadn’t expected – a very pleasant surprise. The movers were really professional. I would definitely recommend Asian Tigers (www.asiantigers-korea.com) to anyone. I got all of my key money back EARLY and my landlord has let me stay in the apartment until I leave. At the bank, there was absolutely no fuss. I managed to get all of my money transferred home and my account closed with no problem. The staff at the Shinhan Bank in Itaewon were great. That took just half an hour. It’s nice to have so many positive things happen at the end.

It was all so good that I thought I would treat myself at the new Hard Rock Café under yhe Hamilton Hotel. The Hard Rock has been under construction for ages, and, after my visit, I can understand why. It’s huge. Inspite of the fact that it’s part of a large commercial chain, I liked it. It’s quite well-layed out. It has several distinctly different dining areas that are all nice, and it has a large, very cool bar. I went in for lunch and it was pretty quiet. I don’t know what it’s like at night. The food is a little pricy but not outrageous when compared to TGIF or the Outback. After my meal, I thought I would buy a Hard Rock T-shirt. Last February, I bought a really cool one for a friend in Abu Dhabi. It had a map of Korea with a huge dragon and tiger superimposed on top of it. Of course, there were none on the shelves. I asked the salespeople if they had any in the back and I was informed that they were so popular that they sold out quickly. “Would you be getting anymore in?” “No.” Hmm. Really popular design. Not going to get anymore. Hmm. At any rate, the rather mundane shirts they had were not attractive, so I didn’t buy any.

This will be my last blog from the land of the Morning Calm – the country I would love to love but just can’t. I should say up front to my family and friends who might be concerned – I will be okay. It was a very difficult year ( I really should have left last year). But, this will pass. At this point in my life I’m reminded of a story that I read in a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn about two Buddhist monks – one young and one old. They arrived at a river to find a young woman who needed to cross but couldn’t swim. The older monk put her on his back and swam across the river. When the young monk crossed, the two monks continued on their way. After several hours the young monk, who had clearly been upset for some time, turned to the old monk and said, “How could you carry the woman across like that? Monks aren’t supposed to touch women.” The old monk said, “Are you still carrying her? I left her at the side of the river hours ago.” As someone who regularly carries baggage that should have been left long ago, I resolve to move forward unburdened. It feels to me as though I’ve been carrying the weight of my dislike for our administrator on my back for a long time. When I leave here, I promise myself that I will not carry that weight anymore.

I got into teaching 25 years ago because I wanted to change the world. I’m a lot less idealistic now, but I still think of teaching as a calling, and I find it galling when people look at it just as a job – a way to make a little cash – or as a way to get ahead. My work-week has always been between 50 and 70 hours. I don’t expect everyone to spend so much time working, but teachers get long, long vacations, and I don’t think that it’s too much to ask that we devote our lives to teaching when we are actually at work. When I look out at a group of students, I see people who have come to me because I have put myself forward as a person who can educate them – as someone who will help them be all that they can be. We, as a group of trained professionals, need to assess their abilities, look carefully at where they would like to end up, and show them the way. When we assess those students, there should be no surprises. The students should truly believe that they are being assessed fairly so that they can say that they have arrived at their goal or they can assess their efforts, make changes, and continue on to success.

So…working in a program that has not been developed through the collaboration of professional language educators, that seems to totally ignore the level of the students, and that aims to teach discrete high level often trivial skills has made me very unhappy. I am torn because I think that a school should have a curriculum – one that has been developed by educators to meet the needs of the particular student body. I don’t think that we should be able to ignore the curriculum, so I try to do what is asked, yet the teachers who ignored the program and taught what they wanted were probably happier and surely did the right thing for their students. Having to go into the classroom every day to sell a program that I didn’t believe in was beyond me, and I feel sorry for my students. I’m pretty sure that I won’t be getting any “Best Teacher” awards for this semester.

My ego has been pretty fragile the past few years, and it really didn’t help to have all of my suggestions and ideas about teaching (developed over 5 years of study for a B.Ed in English and 4 years for an M.Ed in TESOL plus 25 years of teaching in North America, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East) dismissed as out-of-date, irrelevant, or downright wrong. My baby, the online resource center, was deemed to be not useful (in reality, it didn’t support the new program because I don’t know how to create online material for the new program). I had worked on a program that supported the teachers and students so I guess it isn’t surprising that it doesn’t support language teaching theories that haven’t been current since I began teaching 25 years ago.

The result of this has been a slow, steady downward spiral for me. It couldn’t have been a pretty thing watching me crash and burn. I know that my western colleagues, who bore the brunt of my unhappiness, couldn’t have enjoyed spending time with me, and I apologize to them. I really should have gone last year.

It is unforgivable that the university allowed some immature wanktard who was fired from his last job for conflicts with colleagues and complaints from students to take control of what had, for many years, been a pretty good program and replace it with a program that I think is one of the worst I have ever worked with. Unforgivable? Absolutely! We take money and, even more important, the lives of our students (50 hours) and we promise to make them better. We failed this past year. It really does matter what teachers do.

Having said that, I resolve to leave this now and move on. It has taken enough of my life. I hope that my colleagues somehow survive this and that the students somehow get what they need and deserve, but this is no longer my concern. I will finish my grades on Wednesday and my time at this university will be over.

Soon, I will be back in Canada. I’ll have a pleasant relaxing month and a half to hang out with my older brother and to visit with friends and family. Then it will be off to the Middle East. I hope that this will be my last move until I retire (another ten years perhaps) but one never knows. Inshallah seems an appropriate thing to say now.