Early In The Third

 It was my birthday a few days ago. 55. I was supposed to be free by now. You know, freedom 55? Ever see those commercials? But I don't consider "freedom" to be not working. Not any more. I have had a bit of a revelation since Covid. I reckon I can work till I die now if it's online. I don't mind the online teaching gig. In fact I might even prefer it over the face to face teaching gig. One thing you got goin for ya is you don't have to wear a tie. The struggles I have had over my ESL career with ties!!! Especially in Japan. Wearing a tie to play with little kids. What a joke! My neck was a mess! Kids pulling my tie all the time. Shirts that were about 5 neck sizes too small but I still had to hold my breath and force that top button through the hole. Then partially hold my breath the rest of the day. GOD it's nice to not wear a tie! Pants are optional too. Gotch, I gotta wear.  Just in case I stand up for some reason. And a decent shirt. But no tie, never, never. 

If I wax philosophical on yo asses, I figure I'm early in the third period of my life. In philosophical hockey terminology as all those deep thinking hockey guys might say. So 27 1/2 being a third of my life, what was I doing when I was 27 1/2? I was just graduating university. That was the first third of my life neatly packaged all in Canada. Okay, I was 29 when I packed up and went to Korea so I was spinning my wheels in Canada for about a year and a half. But the next third of my life has been spent in other countries mostly. There were a couple stints of over-optimistic attempts to get myself a decent job back in Canada, but by and large, the second period has been all Asia. I'll be here at least a couple more years so it'll work out more evenly. 29 years for my education in Canada, 28 or 29 years of teaching ESL mostly overseas for mostly survival wages... and then what? 

More to the point, 29 years in Canada getting my BA and finding out it won't get me a good job. 28 or 29 years in Asia finding out that BA will get me a better job, but all the good places want master's degrees and all the bad places are the ones that'll take me. Yeah, 26 years or so to this point banging my head against the wall hoping to find a good job in Asia with just a BA. If it was possible, I didn't find it. Although, I had no choice since it'd cost at least 50 grand to get a master's and I have never had that much dough just lyin' around. So with the lack of money came the excess of hope. And that was crushed not long into every contract. 

But then came Covid. I learned, like so many, to work online. It was a steep learning curve, but I pulled it off with a lot of help from people who upload instructional videos on YouTube for guys like me who don't know how to record teaching vids, then upload them to the school LMS (learning management system) or use the school portal to upload grades, or navigate Zoom, use the breakout rooms, make different IP addresses for each of your classes, transfer tests from class to class etc., etc., etc.... It was a LOT of learning in a little time! But I powered through. I got lots of help from my work colleagues too, especially Mike. Thanks, Mike. 

During that time, I learned to teach online and I learned to like it. I had some savings from my time working at SK Hynix and I had given consideration to an online master's too. In fact, the above Mike and I had a couple chats about that. We were both master'sless and realizing that the pickins were slimmer and slimmer for fellas like us. Then another friend, who I've blogged about so often, you should know her by now, Heather turned me onto a university in California called the University of the People where they don't charge tuition. I didn't look much into it at the time, I just told Heather I would. I had signed on for another year of work at Gongju Dae even though it was the shittiest contract I'd ever had in all my years of teaching ESL in Korea. 

Well, then things started happening that made me pretty sure the people at Gongju Dae were going to make the contract suck even more than the already worst contract in Korea that it was. They were gonna reinstate the full 40-hour week with any non-teaching time spent pulling pud in an empty office. They were going to make horrendous schedules for me where I start early in the morning and finish late at night with long breaks in between I go home for. They were going to add Korean students to the already bogus international counselling I was responsible for for the international students. They were going to have the counselling, and probably the teaching, in person, in a new building where all the bosses are, possibly air conditioned, possibly not, while wearing a mask... for the lowest salary in Korea. AND, they'd find a way to fuck me out of my severance again too. I couldn't imagine anything I'd like to do less! I tried to negotiate, but it was useless. I looked more into the UoPeople and it seemed like the thing to do. I can't say I didn't enjoy fake negotiating with Gongju's representative like there was still a possibility of my staying. I even had her offering to remove all the bogus counselling. But I had already made up my mind by then, I was just enjoying watching her sweat. (Don't think I'm cruel, she totally deserved it! She was lying and cheating with every word she said to me) It was actually nice to have the money to not care. Hooray for money, eh?

So, with a little morsel of hope not yet hammered out of me, I have triumphantly embarked upon an adventure that may be rocky, it may be risky, but it may finally land me that job that will allow me "freedom AFTER 55." Or at least partial freedom. Incredibly, I have Covid to thank for this. Covid and the University of the People. See, I complained and whinged about having to spend my last 4 vacations in a row here in Korea, but the money I saved not going golfing in some other country, or sightseeing or kayaking into a mountain or hiking up a volcano, or drinking and "helping" the band at a live rock bar, or just relaxing at an outdoor pub with friends (sssiiiiiiggggghhhhh I really miss those things) is what's paying for the time off! I've been off since the end of Feb. but only 2 weeks into my course.

At the 2-week point, how am I doing? Well, let me just check to verify this... I am taking two courses, EDUC 5010: Education in Context, and EDUC 5210: Learning Theory. I've been graded on two papers, two significant comments, evaluations of 6 fellow students' comments and evaluations of 6 fellow students' papers, and two portfolio entries so far. There are a bunch of numbers posted and my profs are congratulating me, but I can't for the life of me figure out the grades I'm getting! They seem to be good??? That's all I can say for now. But I will update you when I can make sense of this whackadoo grading system they have. 

I have resigned myself to Tuesday and Wednesday as my weekend, and only if I get all my work done by Monday. So far so good two weeks in, BUT, week three we add yet another duty, the group project, which will be a pain in the ass since group members will be from all over the place and we'll all be sleeping at different times. I have settled into vampire mode. I find it easier to study all night long. Right now as I type, it's 7 in the morning and I've been up all night. Got a lot of reading and writing done too after waking up at 6 PM from my nap. It's a complicated schedule, but I think it'll be the best way to do this.

My first week was a little rough. I didn't have the tech I needed for this gig and I think I lost marks for not complying with APA citation regulations. You know like not writing "References" in the center of my page above the references. Not having one inch margins on all sides. Honestly! But Heather helped me out a great deal with that. I had a fake MS Office program called Libreoffice, which the UoPeople had suggested for students to get. I watched vids to learn the APA guidelines for citations and such, but it was all on MS Word and it was different. So Heather said she might have another guest spot on her MS Office online acct. She did, but I was unable to download it. It was bizarre! I got the exe file, I started it, it said, "Getting things ready..." for an insane amount of time, then it just stopped. No welcome to MS Office, let's get you started or anything. I had to search my computer to find it. Well it was there, but when I tried to start an MS Word document, it sent it to One Drive and I still couldn't open it. I tried for hours restarting, downloading again, and all the stuff you do, but it didn't work. There was a point when I could open documents on Notepad, but MS Word never arrived. I figured it was because of my slow internet. I'd try again at a coffee shop.

Heather suggested I do it with a VPN on. I had recently nuked my VPN for trying to renew my one-year subscription without asking me if I wanted it,  (don't use Nord), but I had downloaded a free one. Unfortunately THAT day my "free" one, Windscribe, had told me I was out of data and wouldn't get any more till next month. UNLESS I upgraded to a pay version. I kept the exe file for MS Office and just got rid of everything MS Office and Windscribe, then RE-downloaded Libreoffice so I could do my writing for the night. That's what I had to hand in for the first week.

But, I found a new VPN, tried again to download my gift MS Office from Heather and it worked. It was just Korean censorship that was the problem. Even when downloading the VPN I got a message that a "gomicrosoft" file was unable to download. They have always had a very weird relationship with Microsoft here in Korea, and it's nigh onto impossible to get a legitimate copy here. For years every computer you bought here had Windows on it, but not a legit copy of it. And I tried a few times to buy one, but failed. So, this is pretty much what happens to me every time I try to do anything tech. 

The upshot is, I now have MS Office and this week I did all my writing on MS Word using the APA guidelines I'd studied and written down. So I won't lose any points for that this week I hope. Heather also gave me a program to help with formatting or maybe APA stuff but I haven't figured it out yet. Perrla. Heather's been hard at her Master of Education from a different U.S. university for a while now. So she's given me lotsa good pointers and, if I ever get the time, I have a bunch of her A+ papers I can read and probably get some good stuff from. This week my study topics were education systems from 9 countries around the world including, Iran, Japan, Uzbekistan, India, China, Africa, Afghanistan, Vietnam, the Philippines and some others. I had to compare a "western" and "eastern" education system that was not where I work or where I am from. So I chose Africa and the U.S. I love the African "Ubuntu" pedagogy and used that as a central idea because it's being abandoned in favour of western ideas in Africa, and I think it is exactly what is missing in western ideas of education. It's a beautiful concept.

Answer me this: If you're at the grocery store and you go to the milk section cuz you need milk and you see one carton with an expiration date a week from now. Underneath it are a dozen more with expiration dates TWO weeks from now. You love milk and you KNOW you'll finish the carton in a few days. Do you a) take the carton that expires in a week or b) take a carton from underneath it? More interestingly, why? I think it's got a lot to do with how we're socialized, but also how we're educated. You can say it in positive sounding ways like student-centered education teaching students to be confident and self-sufficient, or you can say that we're taught to be competitive and think of ourselves before other people.

I sometimes wonder if the "Great" Depression or the stock market crash of 2008 would have happened if America hadn't systematically beaten down this Ubuntu kind of cooperative, communal thinking. It's considered indigenous silliness in Africa by a lot of "forward" thinking people. But I think capitalism has subdued any kind of thinking like this all over. Including indigenous people all over North America.

So anyway, that was just one course. The OTHER course I am making contingency contracts with students that contain "fixed interval" or variable ratio schedules of reinforcement... blah blah blah. This is the shyte I was worried most about. Fancy words applied to common sense tactics that almost anybody with half a brain will inevitably employ if emerged into the teaching profession. To give you an idea, a "fixed ratio" is a kind of agreement with students over an amount of responses and the reinforcement it will get them. To be even more childish secret code-like, an FR5 is if 5 people give correct responses, they will receive positive reinforcement. However, FI5, fixed interval 5 means if they don't give those 5 correct responses in a 5-minute interval, they receive negative reinforcement. There are many, many examples like this. Silly. I mean you can't survive as a teacher if you don't learn some of this stuff, or already know it. People have given it fancy sounding names and then claimed it as revolutionary thinking. Now, to be fair, most of these people claiming common sense as their own DID so a long-ass time ago. Before somebody else could do so. And generally, the ones who did so wrote a lot of other stuff, and a lot of that OTHER stuff is really good!

So I'm finding that if you get beyond the obvious stuff that made great educators like Dewey, MLK, Piaget, Horace Mann, and this week Gagne, famous, there is some interesting stuff to learn. I'm pleasantly surprised about that. I was prepared to deal with the Emperor's New Clothes, but I'm enjoying the underappreciated scraps of fabric that I hadn't heard about. It's hard to remain humble when the material for the week is stuff you've already done regularly for many years, just didn't know the name of it, and when the teacher asks you to write about how this "new learning" has "informed your pedagogy." But for two weeks, I've managed. It's really not as bad as that last sentence made it sound either. I AM learning lots of stuff. The nice thing about this course, or one of the nice things, is that we are in constant contact with other teachers. Teachers from all over the world. In communication. I have already learned a lot from them! Collaborative learning like this is something that is only possible online, so it makes these courses a thousand times better than studying with classes full of people who have almost the same educational experiences as you. For a guy who may end up continuing my career in some other countries, this is invaluable experience. And how much have I paid so far for this? Aside from my main expense - staying alive and keeping a roof over my head, I've only paid 60 bucks so far.

 Anyways, I feel SO much better than I would have if I were just getting a subsistence wage from this time! That's all I ever made from Gongju Dae. Instead, I'm losing money, but after each week of study, I feel better, MUCH better, than I would have after every week of teaching. I feel like, in the grand scheme of things, I'm still making money. I just have to postpone the payday for a while.

Not only that, but I'm bulkin' up brain-wise. Reading my weight every week (well, my weight as of last time I was a student) if it were paper pages and not online. Writing more than Stephen King and some is horror actually! The educational environments described by some of my co-students make me really grateful to be in Korea. I complain, but it's a safe, good place to be over here in Asia. You pay for that comfort, and suddenly you pay like 20% more, but it's where I want to do this. And even if I don't get hired on somewhere after the first 6 months of my course, I think I will be able to do another 6 months. So that's what's going on. I type this to inform you but at the same time to remind me of how this time was when I have landed my dream job because of my master's degree and am looking back at the struggle. 

This might be a sweet memory someday when I'm old ER and grey ER.