I started a new job at the beginning of October. I now work at a church kindergarten in Bundang. As an atheist and humanist this is not my ideal environment, but the opportunity came along just as I was finishing my previous job – as a part-time temporary replacement at a couple of hagwons in western Seoul – and, with no other offers on the horizon, I felt I couldn’t turn it down.
There are various pros and cons to this. Earlier this year, I collected the requisite documents for getting an E-2 visa, the 12-month visa for English teachers in Korea; this school, for some reason connected to its church status, cannot sponsor visas, so getting these documents was a waste of time. I’m being paid ₩2,200,000 (£1,230) along with a ₩400,000 (£224) housing allowance – in full, in cash – no tax or insurance deductions. The lack of insurance is a bit annoying, as I have ongoing medication for my colitis to buy.
The job is also a fair distance from where Habiba and I live – it’s in an area to the south of Seoul. It takes me about an hour each way, taking an express bus from Seoul (about 35 minutes) and a local bus in Bundang (about 5 minutes). If I’m lucky and both buses come along quickly I can get to work in under 50 minutes. Actually the trip back home takes longer due to traffic. A little while ago I fell asleep on the express bus and missed my stop, which made me about 50 minutes late.
I work nine to five. At nine-thirty I have ‘circle time’ with my ‘homeroom class’ (these terms seem very American to me, but it’s been a long time since I attended primary school, so I wouldn’t know for sure). In this half-hour period, the kids – I have nine ‘seven-year-olds’ (this is in scare quotes because Korea convention means that people’s age can be a year or two higher than the number of years since they were born) – the kids have a snack and I’m supposed to play them a piece of classical music, show them a work of art, talk to them about some bible topic (I’ve managed to avoid doing this one so far) or practise the sentence of the week.
Then there are five periods for classes throughout the day. I’m the science teacher and I teacher three or four classes a day. After the kindergarteners finish at 2:30 or so, I have to clean the classroom and, three days a week, teach an after-school class for a small number of elementary school children. There are five classes of kindergarteners, fourteen ‘five-year-olds’, two classes of six-year-olds (eight who studied here last year and 12 newer ones), and two classes of seven-year-olds (ten returnees and nine new kids (my class). There are three classes of older children, of two to six students each.
The first few weeks were pretty hectic, confusing and generally stressful, but now I seem to have settled into the job more. There was a period where we had lots of stuff to do all at the same time – preparing for a father’s night demonstration class, writing student reports, writing and carrying out tests of all the students, and writing and giving out the fortnightly homework.
The job was not made easier by the complexity of the timetable. There are two official timetables: one showing what subjects the five classes have each period every day, and one showing what topic each group has for each subject. I made my own timetables: one with a general overview that doesn’t need to be updated, one that I update every week to show me what to teach.
Additionally, the scheduling of each of my science classes – scheduling that I inherited from the previous teacher – seemed very random; some classes would have a certain topic, and others wouldn’t, or some would have it one week, and others would have it the following week. Once-monthly field trips, occasional mini-field trips and special occasions like the monthly birthday party and Halloween confuse things even further.
The November timetable that I made (more work that I had to complete during the busy week) is more regular – all the children do the same thing each week (at least, that’s my goal), although I need to adjust the topics for the different ages and abilities.
The school gets a monthly box of little science kits for the kids to do. They come in three varieties, ‘Step 1’, ‘Step 2’ and ‘Step 3’, but they’re all fairly similar in difficulty. They’re OK – some can be pretty good – extinguishing a little candle by creating carbon dioxide – or pretty mediocre – pressing a leaf in a piece of paper then pouring a solution on the paper to highlight starch or something (this one didn’t work very well, and, as the instructions are all in Korean, I didn’t really know what was going on).
The people I work with are generally pretty nice. I have a Korean co-teacher/assistant, whose job is to look after the homeroom class, rather than teach. She’s sweet-natured and reasonably competent. There’s a Canadian woman who started at the same as me, three Korean teachers (who teach actual subjects; one of whom – an opera singer in her spare time – also started along with me and the Canadian at the beginning of October), other assistants for the other classes, the principal; in addition, there are a couple of teachers who come in to do ballet and violin classes.
The religious aspect of the schooling is only evident in a couple of areas: the children are supposed to pray before their morning snack and before lunch (if I try to eat something before they’ve done this in the mornings they all say, ‘Teacher, why no play?’); there’s also a weekly mini-sermon that the teachers are supposed to attend, but we don’t have to do anything for it. Oh, and there’s also the fact that the kindergarten is in a huge church building that contains guest rooms, conference halls and I don’t know what.
So far things are going OK. Getting up at about 7:15 every morning has been a challenge, but it hasn’t been as bad as I feared. If I can get to bed at about 11 o’clock the night before, it’s not too bad – unfortunately, this is the real challenge, and one that I don’t do as well with.
As Habiba and I are planning to leave the country at the end of February, I’ll only be working there for five months in total – which I’m sure will be more than enough. With a following wind, I should be able to save enough money to pay for my share of our trip.
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