Korean Job Discussion Forums

[ceesgetdegrees]

I don't know about this country sometimes. I took a bunch of kids out to insadong on the weekend to hunt down foreigners and accost them on the street. It was the job of the kids to act as "ambassaors" of Paju city and hand out information and the like to any foreigners we saw, yep...it's a bit embarassing and a pretty ill conceived idea by the gyeonngi dept. of education but it pays 100 000 won and lunch is thrown in so i'm willing to suck it up. One of the ajosshi teachers with us was the videographer/photographer guy, he didn't say a single word all day to me or the other foreign teacher with us, he seemed like a real *beep* actually but when it came time for him to shoot his footage he was all smiling at whatever random waegook we had entrapped and taking his video and photos of the "event".

Something about this guys attitude struck me about this place, here's a guy willing to capture a "meeting of cultures", east meets west type thing showing the dynamism of gyeonngi kids interacting with foreigners when he himself wasn't even willing to go out of his way to even introduce himself. I have a few teachers i work with who have the same kind of attitude, a simmering type of resentment for whatever reason at foreigners being here. Maybe they should cut out the freaking konglish and learn to speak the subject that rates so highly in the korean education system.

I've had a real communication breakdown at one of the schools i work at lately, i find the attitude of some of the staff really frigging annoying and i can't be bothered talking with them about anything. whats with this simmering resentment towards foreign teachers? am i the only one feeling it? It's not all but it's definitley there and it pisses me off to no end especially when i try to do well by my students.

The nice thing is that i won't care either way soon as i have vacations coming up then not long to go in my contract. i don't hate korea but i do find some of the people in it so mind boggingly xenophobic that i sometimes think we should just leave these little people to their own devices and see how they get on.

Rant out.