Korean Job Discussion Forums

[agentX]

From the Donga English Section http://english.donga.com/srv/service.php3?biid=2011012611528

[northway]

That article is too garbled to make any sense at all. Testing for immunity?

[jrwhite82]

Wasn't someone on here posting about them doing random drug tests on existing teachers?

I could have sworn someone said about a month ago their coteacher got a letter from the MOE that said they will be testing teachers. This was back around Christmas. But it was only one city.

As for the teachers taking drugs while teaching, it has happened a couple of times. But the media also sensationalizes it. I'm pretty sure its quite often that most Koreans do this as well, but it doesn't make the news. It's just one of the prices you pay to living in a bubble here. They have at least been talking about the celebrities getting caught in the news a lot. So famous people and NETs are treated equally in terms of media exposure related to drug use. We are in good company.

Easy solution: don't do drugs.

[ThingsComeAround]

[Riker]

I don't use drugs, so I really don't care.

[hondaicivic]

[ThingsComeAround]

[jrwhite82]

We all have AIDS too....

I can see the value in a drug test if the purpose is to keep drug abusers from working with children. (Effective or not, drug use is wrong or not - it is our employer's perogative to test teachers, if you don't like get a different job) But if it is just aimed at forgeiners, it is not going to be effective in keeping drug users away from children.

Are Korean teachers required to take a drug test? If not, what's the point of testing only one teacher in the entire school? Especially, the one teacher that sticks out like a sore thumb.

[earthquakez]

I don't care either because I don't do drugs. My things is Boddy's or Guiness preferably in a pub with authentic wooden panelling.

But seriously, show all the Korean rules and media articles/politicians' rants about foreign English teachers supposedly swarming with disease and with bloodstreams allegedly full of drugs outside Korea and the society comes across as being utterly xenophobic.

I've told people who work for Govt depts in the UK (including Immigration) and media/business groups about how we are tested for HIV and drugs and translated articles from 'normal' media here to show them.

The response is always disbelief that a) Such a disproportionate amount of bureaucracy and time is going on people mostly given year to year visas and invited in to teach b) There is so much virulence directed towards people invited into work on those very limited visas, c) The open xenophobia/underlying racist assumptions are presented as normal in a country that has provided the head of the UN and wants to be 'internationalised'.

It never ceases to surprise me how much Korea wants to be taken seriously as a country by 'western' countries yet can't see that others see all this as whacky as well as backwards.

Even more so when non Koreans learn about the culture of paid sex as normal even when men are married. Also the unwillingness to face what seems to be a fair proportion of bisexual Korean men judging by men picking up other men in convenience stores and toilets with an observable frequency, the lack of HIV and other public health education on serious diseases like TB which should have been eradicated by now given Koreans are the carriers and the cultural acceptance of coughing/sneezing in others' faces, spitting everywhere, etc.

Yet there is paranoia about HIV coming from foreign teachers on limited visas, and the caricature of foreign teachers as being degenerates on drugs honestly looks like propaganda from the Korean 50s. Koreans should know themselves that their laws make it difficult to obtain illegal drugs and those who take the risks to obtain them are far more likely to be privileged Koreans.