Korean Job Discussion Forums

[formerflautist]

My used to annoy me. Now they serve as a happy reminder as to why I'm not sad I got fired.

[igotthisguitar]

If done largely in Korean they're mostly a waste for most foreigners.

[Nok Yong]

At my first ever staff meeting in Korea my director called me a monkey in Korean and proceeded to laugh about it for the next few minutes.

Staff meetings were always conducted in Korean, as the director knew two or three words of English at the most.

After rambling on for 45 minutes, my other foreign co-worker and I would get the benefit of a five minute English translation of the entire meeting, which had virtually nothing to do with us anyway.

Even when I was requested to weigh in on some topics, like curriculum or choice of teaching materials. My opinion was generally dismissed and ignored until a Korean teacher would suggest the SAME thing some weeks or months later.

THEY'RE A COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME AND OUGHT TO CONSTITUTE OVERTIME PAY!

[Privateer]

Well usually I'll get to the meeting 10 or 15 minutes early in typical American fashion (as opposed to 15 minutes late in typical British fashion), read the agendum, and then either try to engage in small talk or flick through the paper.

The room will fill up and there'll be a 20 minute period spent wondering if the director will bother to show up this time.

If/when the director actually shows up he reads through the agenda, pretty much word-for-word, then asks for questions. There'll be a slightly awkward pause while people think of a question that won't make them look bad. Then we'll ask questions like 'So how is this going to work, Dr Park?' to which the answer is always 'I don't know. Ask the staff. We haven't decided/figured out the details yet'. Um-hmm.

It's then the turn of the assistant director to stand up and repeat an announcement that was sent out by email the week before.

The director will then swiftly make excuses - oh! so busy - and skip out.

We then get to sit around chatting, eating, and swapping theories on the possible sinister-or-otherwise implications of the proceedings. Is it all complete guff or does it mean anything? People tend to align themselves into the factions commonly seen here on Dave's. At opposite political poles, you get one or two people either alarmingly hostile and paranoid or naively faux-enthusiastic. A couple of sane and good-humoured voices may be raised with constructive suggestions! However the majority are silently apathetic or sceptical, having seen it all before and knowing that essentially nothing important is going to change and, if it does, there will be precious little the foreign teachers can do about it anyway so why take it seriously and, oh look at the time, I must be going now...

Luckily there aren't too many of these meetings where I work.

[cdninkorea]

Apparently at my last school, before I got there, they sat everyone down for their weekly meeting, and the director said they have nothing to discuss but have to have their weekly meeting anyway.
The meeting was finished right after she said that.

[Marley_Doug]

I am a teacher here in the U.S., and I will be coming to teach in Korea in about 6 weeks. We have staff or department meetings every other week. They last about an hour. So it's not just a Korean school thing.

Our meetings are boring and definitely could be put on a memo or school email. I wish that they were in a different language. So maybe I'll like the meetings in Korea more.

doug-life

[OiGirl]

Well, I can share what I used to do in boring education lectures in university. I'd subscribe to some interesting but high-volume listservs, set my status to "digest," and get a huge message each day. I could print it on the high-volume printer for free (with three holes punched, even! (although those were on the wrong side of the page for my purposes))

Ok, then punch holes on the "wrong" side of the page, stick them in a notebook. You can "take notes" as necessary on the right-hand pages, but you are actually reading the left-hand pages on your "recycled" paper.

I was able to stay awake most of the time.