Korean Job Discussion Forums

[KHerald]

Hey guys and gals. I invited The Marmot's Hole, Brian in Jeollanam-do, The Metropolitician, and Korea Beat to give me their top 15 blogger stories of 2008. I didn't have any input in their decisions.

Some are teacher-related, so I thought you might be interested.

http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/weekly/ExpatLiving/herald.asp

Matt
([email protected])

[bassexpander]

Would love to read some of those, but have wasted too much time finding links.

[Arthur Dent]

Hi Matt,

Thanks for those. I read the whole thing this morning in the hard copy paper (down with a cold) and thought it was a good summation of what had occupied my attention over the last year - at least in terms of the foreign community.

Although there were many - and separate - valid issues involved in all of these stories, if I had to choose one word to describe the year it would be "sensitivity," including the lack of it, on both the part of some expats and on the Korean side as well. Perhaps "an inability to understand the other" might be more accurate, if less succinct.

There were a couple of stories I seem to have missed: Foreigner harassed in Restaurant, and Media Targets teachers, as well as I got arrested, seem to have slipped past me.

Perhaps now would be a good time to consider what we can do to address some of these issues over the next year in the hopes that it will be a better, safer year for all of us.

A less reactionary response to some of these issues might make our lives more livable here, for starters. Despite the inconveniences, unfairness, and at least perceived wrongs, as well as the obvious unnecessary tragedies we have witnessed over the past year, this strategy of dealing with it is clearly not working well here.

I invite others to offer well thought-out responses. There are clearly aspects about life here which we are next to powerless in our ability to affect change. Nevertheless, perhaps within our own communities we can make adjustments which will improve our quality of life as well as improve how we are perceived in the eyes of others.

Here's hoping.

Matt, Robert, Michael, Nathan, and Brian, I hope the New Year proves to be less 'eventful' in certain respects for you as well as all of us. Thanks for helping to keep us all informed and for providing venues for discussion.

Best Wishes for the New Year.

[wylies99]

The Marmot`s Hole


1. Foreigner harassed in restaurant
June 9


Gabe Hudson, a creative writing instructor at Yonsei University, gets harassed by a middle-aged Korean man in Insa-dong because he was eating dinner with a Korean woman. Hudson is American.

The piece of news generated over 300 comments, so it apparently touched a nerve with a lot of readers.


2. Tragic death in Daegu

May 15


The death of young Michael White in a Daegu-area sauna caused a stir in the expatriate community because of the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death. Obviously, it`s tragic when a young person dies, and this tragedy came with a lot of questions attached to it.


3. "Kickin` It in Geumchon" video

March 23


The band EV Boys` music video "Kickin` It in Geumchon" was clever, and every foreigner in Korea has seen it.


4. Donations for severely injured teacher

March 5


William Kapoun tragically passed away after being caught in a fire in his home in Seoul. Fire safety was brought into the spotlight. Again, it`s big news whenever tragedy befalls anyone in the foreign community. This tragedy, however, prompted an impressive online campaign to help.


5. Teacher enrages netizens

May 13


Korean netizens were enraged after a photo of a young English teacher with his students is juxtaposed with a photo of the same teacher at a club in the embrace of three Asian - possibly Korean - women find their way onto the internet. As sure as the sun rises in the morning, English teachers will be garnering media attention for doing something stupid.


6. Wacky Chinese demonstrators

April 28


Chinese students riot in downtown Seoul during the Olympic torch relay. This was major news involving Korea`s foreign community, specifically, the Chinese student population.


7. Right wing media takes on illegal immigration

March 24


This not exactly PC article attempted to challenge Korea`s illegal immigration issue, and caused a stir in the foreign community here. This is the other side of Korea`s growing multiculturalism - illegal immigration, crime, media backlash and public debate.


8. Incheon-area foreigner drug bust

Jan. 9


20 people - 12 foreigners, including an American identified as Mr. W, and eight Koreans - for allegedly not only smuggling and selling pot and hash from the United States and Egypt, but also growing it here in Korea.


9. Hanguk Ilbo: Foreign boyfriends are cool

Sept. 18


Daily Korean-language newspaper reported on the latest fad sweeping the nation: Korean women with foreign boyfriends. Asia Today, another Korean-language paper newspaper, reports on the outraged male netizens.


10. Korea Herald editor gets stabbed

June 17


Mattehw Lamers, editor of the Expat Living section in English-language daily The Korea Herald got stabbed. His public comments sparked a voracious debate among expats in Korea.


11. Media targets teachers

April 17


In the first episode of season 2 of CGV TV`s "Sexy Mong" series, the Sexy Mong girls head to that den of inequity known as Hongdae, where they witness foreign men and Korean women doing the "bubi bubi dance" and hear the tale of one women who`d recently fallen victim to the evil deeds of a foreign man.


12. English teachers need a stake in system

April 1


Gimhae Foreign Language High School teacher Dennis Yang wrote that for the English education system to improve, foreign teachers need to be given a stake in the system. Good comments on the problems of the English-teaching system.


13. Mongolian woman becomes immigration official

July 9


A Mongolian-born Korean national has become the first naturalized Korean citizen to become a government immigration official. Foreigners actually making good, showing they`re more than just police-blotter material.


14. E-2 regulations lead to teacher shortage

Feb. 1


The Kyunghyang Shinmun`s Newsmaker magazine ran a piece on how the new E-2 visa regulations are driving up the price of foreign English teachers in Korea.


15. Lee Myung-bak wants more foreigners

Jan. 19


In a meeting with leaders of the Democratic Party, then-President-elect Lee Myung-bak said he would push for changes in Korea`s civil service law to allow the government to employ foreigners as civil servants in important policy making positions.

By Robert Koehler



2008.12.30

[wylies99]

Brian in Jeollanam-do


1. Legacy of Christopher Paul Neil

The biggest story among the expat teaching community was the legacy of the arrest of Christopher Paul Neil, a pedophile arrested in Thailand in late 2007. Though Neil committed his crimes in Southeast Asia, that he taught for a time in Korea spawned all kinds of on-again off-again visa regulations and another round of xenophobic yellow journalism stories. While some media outlets threw every derogatory stereotype at us, foreign teachers started leaving and schools found it harder and harder to fill vacancies. Given the bad economy, the bad test scores, and the bad vibes, more people are asking not "can I get a job in Korea?" but rather "do I even want to?"


2. Down goes the won


Or up, as the case may be. The won took its biggest hit in ten years as the global financial crisis hit everyone, well, globally. It`s worth pointing out that with imported teachers no longer able to save as much money - long considered the advantage Korea held over other Asian countries - it will be interesting to see just how many native speakers local schools will be able to find.


3. Confusing visa regulations


Right from the get-go, the new visa regulations for English teachers were a big problem. They were targeting only E-2 applicants and not other visa categories and not ethnic Koreans. They were requiring costly trips back home for five-minute embassy interviews. They were applied differently by each immigration office. And they were changing every few months without any discernible reasoning. Most recently, immigration announced a mandatory Vulnerable Sector Screening for Canadian applicants. That was news to us, and news to the Canadian Embassy, too, whom the Ministry of Justice hadn`t yet told.


4. The death of Bill Kapoun


Bill and his girlfriend died in an apartment fire earlier this year. Not the first foreigner to die under suspicious circumstances in recent memory, and not the last, though it was perhaps the first so widely-publicized among the growing foreign teacher community. It was also perhaps the first time said loosely-defined community came together in a time of tragedy, and used internet sites like Facebook, blogs, and teachers` forums to do it.


5. Korea Herald editor gets stabbed


Expat Living editor Matt Lamers was stabbed with a bottle in Hongdae this June. Thankfully it wasn`t premeditated or provoked by anything he`d covered in the paper, but that it was an apparently random attack was a sign of the slow but steady increase in violence and resentment against foreigners. Since one of 2008`s themes was atrocious police work, and since foreigners never get a fair shake from the authorities, that he chose not to go to the cops was and is a topic of some debate among the community.


6. Foreigners go mad over Mad Cow


While the Mad Cow panic of 2008 isn`t really an expat story, the weeks and weeks of protests provided endless amounts of material for my blog, and dominated the headlines on others. What kept this business in my mind wasn`t so much the shouting, the regularly-scheduled protests, the child endangerment, and the banners on every street-corner: it was spending the summer answering all kinds of questions from students (and teachers) about "krajie kow."


7. The death of Michael White


In May, 14-year-old Michael White was found dead in a Gyeongsan sauna. His whole story was shrouded in mystery, and characterized by substandard medical care and inefficient police work. His mother is still looking for answers, and so are we.


8. I attract some netizen anger


A few articles I had written for local English-language media attracted the attention of a disgruntled netizen, who posted some personal information online and directed readers to "correct" my views by protesting my school and getting me fired, and thus deported. The short-term effects were a few gray hairs and an icy teachers` office, although the episode gave birth to significant questions about a foreigner`s role as critic, the hypersensitivity of some, and ultimately the legitimacy of foreign voices.


9. Testing, testing


The papers talk up Korea`s "unique" test culture, but foreign English teachers seem more interested in the scores. The numbers say that in spite of Korea`s English fever, Koreans earn some of the lowest English scores in the world. Though more Koreans take the internet-based TOEFL exam than any other nationality, their average score puts them at 107th. According to one testing company Koreans ranked 19th out of 20 countries in English ability in 2006.


10. TaLK program introduced


And while that hunt (see No. 11) was going on, and while there was more and more paperwork required for E-2 visa applicants, the government allowed current college students to teach English in rural public schools for reduced wages under the "TaLK program," which stands for Teach and Learn in Korea. Originally it was hoped ethnic Koreans would take one for the team and return to the motherland for less money, although recruitment was well below expectations. By shooing away foreign teachers with one hand and welcoming even less-qualified ones with the other, the program came to be yet another example of the mixed messages sent by those in charge of English education.


11. The hunt for "unqualified" teachers


Another year, another assortment of campaigns against "unqualified teachers," although nobody seems clear as to what that term actually refers. A nationwide hagwon association warned that unqualified teachers were damaging the quality of English education and driving up costs. All this business makes us question what exactly "qualified" and "unqualified" mean in our line of work.


12. Korea`s image problem


A lot of attention was paid to Korea`s image problem and to its apparent inability to market itself to non-Koreans. As the Japanese are still the largest nationality to visit Korea, the designation of actor Bae Yong-joon as tourism ambassador makes sense. Going with the Aquafresh-inspired "Korea Sparkling" as the slogan and the enigmatic, psychedelic "Haechi" as the mascot: not so much.


13. Building international neighborhoods in Seoul


One attempt at helping the non-Koreans already here was the creation of "global village centers" in Seoul, set up around pre-existing foreign communities. The neighborhoods provide local foreigners with native-language information and with assistance on tax and immigration paperwork.


14. Feet Man Seoul goes to Seoul Fashion Week


In a big year for the local blogosphere, the bilingual street fashion site Feet Man Seoul took a huge step for bloggers by being approved to cover Seoul Fashion Week. Not only a significant step for foreign writers, but for bloggers in general, who still struggle to be treated with the same respect, or better, than mainstream journalists.


15. Beautiful foreigners on TV


The continued popularity of "Global Beauties Chat" has been a pleasant surprise. Some object to the premise, and say that it plays into the fetishization of foreign woman, but these women are smart, sexy, well-spoken and cultural ambassadors for countries many Koreans wouldn`t care about otherwise. Plus, whoa, they`re speaking Korean!

By Brian Deutsch



2008.12.30

[wylies99]

The Metropolitician


1. I got arrested

Late 2007-early 2008

"I Got Arrested for Calling the Police" became a slow-burn issue for a lot of people who had experienced far worse in Korean police stations. It was a lightning rod for people who wanted to tell their own stories of unfair arrest or unfair treatment by the police. It drew over 250 comments on just that point alone.


2. "Why Be Critical?"


A post written a while back, but it still gets linked to a lot of other blogs, mostly because I think it clearly articulates the muddy logic of those who bristle at any criticism of Korea and call any such criticism "Korea-bashing" or somehow unfair.


3. Why do males get away with anything?

Feb. 12


After Namdaemun burned down, many people started asking some simple questions. One of the ones I added to the chorus of incriminations was more general - "Why do males get away with so much (bad stuff) in Korean society" and "Why doesn`t anyone get punished in the justice system here?" The tendency to let off men who`ve done atrocious things with a slap on the wrist is endemic to this society.


4. "Tips to Avoid Being Assaulted in Korea"

Dec. 4


There are a lot of incidents that happen, almost all of which are untracked. It probably won`t happen to you, statistically, but we all wear our seatbelts anyway, right? Stay safe out there. It was somewhat controversial because it seemed to break away from some peoples` insistence that Seoul is some kind of Mayberry, USA and mistakenly took my post to mean that I think this city to be like the city of Compton in the 1980`s.


5. Next - The Korean FASHION Wave?

March 27


Now here`s one that reflects my new photographic interest in fashion - especially street fashion - that also includes the occasional runway show or Seoul Fashion Week. I`m generating a lot of good pictures from this area of things, and I think a lot of people are also responding to someone covering an aspect of Korean life that doesn`t get much coverage in English.

By Michael Hurt



2008.12.30