Teaching English

I have talked a lot about my social life and what I do with my free time on this blog. But I haven't talked about my job very much. Part of that is because I don't think it's a very interesting topic. However, since it's the reason that I am here in this country I guess I should give it more attention.
In general my job situation is pretty good. I have a 33 hour work week from 3:30 until 10:10 Monday to Friday. For which I am paid a very good salary. I have my mornings free to shop, explore the city, and socialize. However, that does not prevent my from feeling frequently frustrated with my work. Hogwan jobs in Korea run the gamut from truly horrible to fantastic. Mine is on the good side of average, but there are still some problems which I deal with every day. One of these is the conservative attitude of the management at the school. Like many business people, the management is adverse to change. Unfortunately, the textbooks at Unium are often substandard. We started a new term on Wednesday last week. This term the text books have actually improved quite a bit. Last term we were using books which the management of the school had put together themselves. The books were created from two different sources. All of the TOEFL level courses alternate between a speaking and a writing class. During the writing classes the textbook material was frequently dull and the explanations of grammatic rules was far too dense for the students to understand easily. However, it was usable. But during speaking classes the material was taken from a different source and it caused me endless headaches. The biggest problem was a lack of source material. The class work generally consisted of taking a topic from the book and using it to develop a discussion or debate. However, numerous times the topic was on the lines of "take the reading from Peter Pan" or "look at the pictures from X and discuss their meaning" But every time this happened the management hadn't included the pictures from X or the excerpt from Peter Pan. The worst one was when I was supposed to have the students listen to a song from the movie "Pretty in Pink," fill in the missing words from the lyrics in their textbook, and then discuss the meaning of the song. Now here is a lesson I might actually create an interesting discussion with, right! Wrong! wouldn't you know it, there is no song to listen to. If the entire lesson is based on listening to this song, what kind of mongrel offspring of a mentally deficient orangutan puts it in a textbook without ever even looking for the damn song! Seeing as I am more intelligent than my bosses I got creative and found the song on Youtube. But my own ability to improvise not withstanding, I shouldn't have to deal with such deficiencies on a daily basis. When I pointed out this particular problem with the textbook they asked me to photocopy the offending lesson and any others with problems and they would look into it. I gave them a copy and nothing happened. So I have decided that my time is better spent finding ways to improve my lessons rather than trying to show them the numerous problems in the book they made.
Thankfully, like I said before, the new semester has brought different textbooks which are a big improvement on the old ones. Some of you must be wondering how I could consider this Hogwan to be on the good side of average. There are many positives at Unium, which so far out way some of the negative. For example, we get a week of holiday (when the middle schools have exams) every two months. I don't know of any other Hogwan where the teachers get so much holiday time. Another plus is that we all get our own classrooms instead of having to travel around the building like teachers do at most schools here (including public schools). Another big plus is that their are no cameras watching the classrooms. This has become quite common here. My friend Ian Stotesbury has cameras at his school. Anyway, without cameras I have more freedom to modify lessons when there is a problem in the textbook, or when it is my final (9:10-10:05) lesson of the day and I finish the last 15 minutes with a game because the students are exhausted and can't focus anymore. Of course, the big plus about Unium is that I am earning 2.3 million won a month, when the average here is 2.0.