Regular readers may have recognized the reason for my recent reticence. The persistent postlessness is a product of prodigious professional peon-esque occupation preoccupation. A couple apologetic bouquets of alliteration for you all!
The new job has kept me hopping for over 3 weeks now. I'm in week 4 of work even though I've been employed by SPEP since October of last year (officially Nov. 1 though). It's nice when you get a 5-day weekend in your first month of full time work (Lunar New Year here). For two months I was receiving more and more training until finally they just had me working full time hours even though the agreement was no full time hours until Jan. 3. I was doing training at the SPEP office (don't ask me what it stands for, they are in love with abbreviations, which they erroneously call "acronyms" because in modern English language usage, which is becoming more about impressing than communicating, it's better to go ahead and use a fancy word than look it up) and I was pencilled in for telephone teaching 8 hours at a time, 10-minute call at a time - which adds up to 48 phone calls without even a piss break in between. Two weeks of that, with 4 hours of commute time added on kinda hampers the old studies, which they knew about and assured me would not be interfered with until the new year.
Just LOOK at that paragraph! Warning signs all over the place. It's a miracle I have done ANY work for this company! And you haven't heard the half of it! But let's just skip over the half I haven't told you and get to my day shall we? I was told I'd be working in Namyang, which immediately made me wonder why in 2 1/2 months of apartment hunting Namyang was never an area we did any of the said hunting. I think I was found an apartment in Jukjeon because it is a fairly central location amidst all of the various SPEP job locations while being close to exactly none of them. So I was told I'd work from 10:30-7:00 at the Hyundai/Kia compound in Namyang. I guess I was meant to cream my jeans that I was tangentially working for a huge Korean company, like pretty much any Korean would. For me, the employer I am employed by is the important thing, not the client. I would still be working for SKhynix if I did not have to work for them through the horrible middlemen at Carrot. This I expected to be the same and so far I expected right.
10:30-7 is more than 8 hours a day, a long day to be sure for an ESL teacher but I was fine with it since the past half a year of studies has drained the old bank account. Also, I was told we'd be getting a long lunch every day. Not a bad deal. But, as has been the pattern with this and all other Korean employers in my career, they left out a few important deets. You see because I'm not in Namyang, where I'd pay about 500 thou a month for a bigger place, but in Jukjeon where I pay 850 thou a month for a smaller one (I guess I'm meant to cream my jeans because I'm close to Seoul like pretty much any Korean would. For me living in a bigger place in the country has proven to be preferable in almost every way.) there is a considerable commute. I walk to the shuttle stop from 8:15-8:40, so a little less than half an hour. I can also walk - subway - walk and it takes the same amount of time and somehow ADDS to the walking. The shuttle picks me (and Jess a co-worker who lives nearby) up and takes about 50 minutes to get to the compound in Namyang. We get there around 10 and have time to get to our classes and set up by 10:30. Then we teach 25-minute classes (and a few hour-long classes) until 2. This is lunch time. We have 1 1/2 hours for lunch, which is long, but the cafeterias are not open at this time. I have been packing my own lunch for most days so far. Then from 3:30-7 we do more classes. After that it's another hour and a half of commute time and I'm home by 8:30.
SO, rather than 10:30-7 with a long lunch, I am working closer to 12 hours with a long lunch. I consider the full commute to be "work" although I doubt I'm paid for all of it if any. It's a rather large difference from what I was led to believe. But, as I say, this is nothing new and I was fully expecting something like this. It softens the blow when you fully expect cheap chicanery from your Korean employer.
Now for the reasons I haven't told SPEP that unless they're saying spep, their name, and a ton of other abbreviations they seem to fancy as legitimization, are not acronyms, and, oh, by the way, you can Johnny Paycheck this gig! 1. As mentioned, I need the dough. SPEP pays. They've shown that. So at least I've got that going for me. 2. I've been getting over 10,000 steps a day on my pedometer since starting this prolonged intensive camp. I can't tell you if I've lost any weight or gut girth, but I do feel better. 3. The sugar numbers are plunging. I haven't changed my eating habits much. If anything they're worse eating dinner at 9 every night. But I have broken my record a few times since starting, and I've dropped my medicine dosage. 4. So far I like the co-workers and the students. That's always the best part of the job for me. And all adult students is a nice thing.
So this job will be good for my financial and physical health although it will be a constant strain on the mental health. What I haven't told you yet is that there are even MORE hours to this job. Any teacher will know this. Even for an hour long class, it's important to do your prep. For intense 25-minute lessons, it's even more important. With short lessons you get even more students. Double actually. And that almost doubles the prep time. It certainly consumes a lot of extra time if you want to be a GOOD teacher and differentiate! I have over 50 students, most one-on-one, and I am trying to tailor lessons to their specific needs. This is done by giving them feedback at the end of every lesson that includes new vocab, pronunciation coaching, achievements/improvements, about 4 sentences from class that include errors for them to correct, grammar suggestions, and any other feedback you can give them. Then, we are responsible for their online attendance, which is sometimes a challenge since there are lots of tricky (and inexplicable) nuances to it. To name one, if a student has missed class due to a meeting, a common occurrence, there is no M for meeting we can use for their attendance. We can't use A for absent or W for work, we enter it in as Business trip domestic. On the same app is LPE (again don't ask me what THIS acronot stands for) where we have to give each student, most of whom we see for 25 mins a week, running grades from one to five on: 1. punctuality 2. class preparation & homework 3. speaking effort 4. attitude and motivation 5. Concentration 6. English-only policy 7. Book/no book 8. Listening comprehension 9. Grammar Usage-SVA (some vacuous acronot) 10. Grammar usage - verb tense 11. Grammar usage - Prepositions 12. Grammar usage - conditionals 13. Vocabulary Precision 14. Pronunciation 15. Application 16. Overall comments.
As you might have surmised, I have taken a leave of absence from my studies. I somehow managed to get my third 4.0 in a row even though I wasn't able to put as much effort into my studies as I'd have liked to at the end of last semester due to the unexpected work from SPEP as well as the holiday season. I actually just didn't do some of the assignments like marking fellow students' papers. So my overall CGPA went up.
Not bad eh? But half a master's and a token gets you a ride on the bus eh? It's worthless until it's finished no matter how impressive the grades are. Tell you the truth, it's been a lot more expensive than I'd calculated. Not so much the tuition, but the survival without work. That's why I'm subjecting myself to the SPEPian water torture described above. This is the way I had to get my BA. It took a long time, but I got it. I'm sure this will be the same. I'll keep my eyes on the prize and soon I'll have enough to go back to studying. The harder the work, the more I appreciate the studying days. Even though I read the equivalent to a book a week, write for hours and hours, and have the frustration of doing group projects online with people all over the world while studying, it's like a holiday from work. From THIS job it'll seem like Easy Street! My LOA (as SPEP calls it) has been approved till June. My contract with SPEP ends in the GLORIOUS month of October. I'll have to see what transpires in the mean time. Of course I'd love to make it to the end of this contract and get the severance pay and have plenty of dough to get back to my studies, but who can say? Maybe I'll get an offer from a uni that will give me a sweet schedule that would allow me to work AND do my studies part time. Maybe SPEP will fire me. Maybe I'll quit. Anything can happen between now and October. I likely won't be posting a lot to keep you updated, but if not, just assume I'm still working. I'll let you know if there are any major changes.
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