This is, without a doubt, a thankless job. Being a native speaker at a Korean hagwon means being continually frustrated, disrespected, and looked down upon. All that rhetoric they sell you about teachers being respected, honored, and looked up to? Bull. First and foremost, it is essential to understand that the primary function of these institutions is to generate revenue. If, in their subsequent prostrations before the Almighty Dollar someone learns something, well that’s just icing on the cake. Simply put, in the grand style of Paris Hilton and The Jersey Shore, the Korean hagwon is more about cash than class.
This makes the native speaker a necessary evil for every hagwon. Though we don’t speak the language and are unable to navigate even the simplest government bureaucracy alone, the schools have to have us here. And to keep us here, they have to provide our housing, at least make a nod toward making us fairly comfortable, and pay us more than they do our Korean counterparts. We are the pure gold baby of the entire hagwon system because the presence of a native speaker in the classroom allows them to command exorbitant tuition fees from their students. We possess something that is in high demand but short supply, simply by virtue of the fact that we were born speaking English. It is our mother tongue (and only our mother tongue) that gives us any value at all within the Korean educational system.
Save our functions as marketing ploys and glorified babysitters, we are pretty much useless. We can’t communicate on a very substantial level with the parents or students. Hell, half the time I can’t even communicate with the secretarial staff at the front desk. (You would think in a school that teaches only English, the front desk would speak it, but no.) Everything has to be translated for us: contracts, meetings, teacher’s guides, bus schedules, cell phone agreements. The only way I can actually tell mine and Ric’s health insurance cards apart is because I can recognize our birthdates on them. The rest is a jumble of wiggly, elusive Hangul. And frequently, we are paid better and work fewer hours than the Korean teachers who get stuck doing our translating. We are like big, dumb babies to whom everything has to be explained—very slowly.
We move into Korean apartment buildings with the ease and familiarity of Encino Man. The TV remotes and indeed most of the TV channels are in Korean, the Hangul alphabet as familiar as Egyptian hieroglyphs to most American eyes. The washing machine sings unfamiliar electronic tunes and possesses a dial with at least eighteen distinct wash settings, all again in Korean. (But no clothes dryers anywhere in the country—riddle me that, why don’t you?) This closet of an apartment is heated by a strange labyrinth of water pipes under the floor that also heat the water for showers and dish washing. Press the wrong combination of buttons and in July your floor will be hot enough to fry an egg on or your breaker will flip in the middle of a November shower, sending an abundant supply of ice-cold water cascading down on your soapy head. Guess what language the water heater’s in? In short, every aspect of our lives has to be translated, which means we have to rely on our Korean colleagues for even the most basic of tasks.
Case in point: last week. All the native English speakers had to go to a training sponsored by the Busan Mayor of Education. The training was held at the Busan Red Cross Building, which is located off the Bujeon subway stop. Now, Koreans frequently don’t pronounce the first vowel in a pair (Here, when two vowels go walking, the second one does the talking.), so what you are reading as “Boo-gee-on” actually sounds like “Boo-john”, which when spoken by a Korean, sounds a lot like “Busan”, another exit off the same subway line that is completely across town from Bujeon. After repeating the name of the subway stop to me several times and texting us tiny map entirely in Hangul, the foreign teacher in charge of communicating with us apparently decided we were a lost cause. She assigned Woori (pronounced “ooh-ree”), the youngest Korean to teacher, to accompany us there and back. See….babies.
While it can occasionally be comforting to be taken care of, particularly in a strange country, the infant treatment comes with a heavy price. We are spoken to in simple, slow sentences. Eyes are rolled when we ask questions that should have obvious answers. We are treated the way I imagine people treat the wheelchair bound or disabled—as if we’re not quite right upstairs. Whatever the situation, we are expected to screw it up.
Every day I want to scream at my coworkers: “I have a Masters degree! I speak beautiful, fluid Spanish! At home, I am perfectly capable of operating my television remote control, figuring out how to work my heater, and running a washing machine because the directions are in English, dammit! Stop looking at me like I’m a lame puppy!”
But, alas, most of my coworkers wouldn’t understand even half of the rant. They’d just smile, nod placatingly, and avoid making any sudden movements around the crazy lady who doesn’t know which compartment to put her laundry detergent in and doesn’t own anything with Hello Kitty on it.
Don’t get me wrong, people–it’s not all bad. We have zero responsibility, and once a month we are paid handsomely for about thirty hours of work a week. We grade no papers and do no paperwork. No one observes us teaching or asks us to participate in any curriculum decisions. Nothing is expected of us. Two weeks ago, I amazed my colleagues by knowing how to print out a PowerPoint presentation in handout form. The head teacher smiled up at me from her Hello Kitty desk chair with its pink laptop, patted me twice on the arm, and said, “Smart Teacher.” Smart teacher, indeed.
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