Screwed!

Well, looks like my 3 month honeymoon period has come to an end. When I first made it to the school 3 months ago, all of the teachers there seemed like they were thinly veiled bubbling pots of anger and cynicism (to exaggerate a bit). I thought that if I kept a positive attitude and outlook, I would avoid becoming an embittered and enraged employee of education. I was told that I would lose that positive outlook and the same thing would happen to me - once my honeymoon of 3 months was over. Sure enough, like clockwork, things at the school seem to be drastically declining.

Our new supervisor, although greatly well intentioned, is caught in a difficult position of relaying the bad news of the upper management to the teachers and helper teachers. The upper management seems to be hell-bent on reforming the school to more closely approximate the conglomorate company's standard operating procedures. Unfortunately, this is a step in the wrong direction, because the large company's standards don't necessarily fit the individual schools all that well. It's kind of like trying to jam a CD into an old 1980's style cassette player and expecting it to work properly. Aside from being in the position of having to relay bad news, the new supervisor has little supervisory experience, and as such, feels like she isn't in a position to stand up for the rights of the teachers - because she never experienced the old system and can't make a solid argument about the way things "should" be. To make things worse for her, she is scrutinizingly compared to our old supervisor, who had more than her fair share of voice and balls, which enabled her to stand up to the ridiculous requests of the management.

Add all of this together, and you get a frustrated supervisor trying to make changes in the system while keeping the calm and butting heads with disgruntled teachers, who are doing battle with the shrewd and unscrupulous management team (which would be the director and the owner).

The latest in the downward spiral has been the decision on part of the management to deny the teachers a Christmas (winter) break. All hagwons get a winter break, and it is an unwritten rule in the business - talking with any foreign teacher from another hagwon, you will be greeted with talk of plans for the winter holidays, and where they plan on going to. Some teachers at other schools get as many as 10 days off for Christmas. Our school? Well, plans were to give the teachers 1 day, but (****Shhhhhhh**** don't let the word out, because it's not finalized yet), MAYBE 2.... Lucky us! The school seems to think that it's ok to be quick and dirty with the way things are run around here - just today, Charlie did not get paid on time - he probably won't get his paycheque until after payday, since payday falls on a weekend and today is Friday... yet another breach in contract.

Needless to say, most of the teachers are less than pleased, and many are talking about walking out. The problem? Well, the school may have a point, because it isn't written into the contracts anywhere - the contracts state that foreign teachers are entitled to a minimum of 7 holidays (aside from national holidays), per 12-month contract... which we have already taken 5 of for the summer holiday. That's another thing: at hagwons, if a national holiday falls on a weekend, they are not obligated to recompense the holiday in any way by moving it to a Friday or Monday. Therefore, any holidays that have fallen on the weekend this year are blotted out. Turns out, this is an especially unlucky year for Koreans, as most national holidays fall on weekends... meaning even less holidays for the teachers.

And there I am... previously elected as "Head Teacher", to relay information from the supervisor to the teachers and vice versa. In brief, I am given the responsibility of being the voice of the teachers in this awkward situation. Is it stressing me out? The answer to that is yes. Am I caught up in being angry about being shafted from my winter break? The answer is also yes. Am I going to stand to be shafted? The answer is "Hell No".

I have called a staff meeting for next week to try and work some of this out. Step one is to try to improve relations between the supervisor and the teachers - especially the Korean teachers, who really don't like the supervisor at all. Truly, though a situation like this, we need the supervisor to be helping out instead of cowering behind the management. Secondly, we need to confront the management head on, as a group and let them know that we won't stand for the way that they have been treating us. Unfortunately for us, the director has decided to take a 2 week vacation to the United States and won't be back until later this month. Hmmm.... kinda funny isn't it, that the director gets more time off in one lump sum than we get in a whole year?

Personally, I take it as a personal insult to our intelligence and a rude expression of how the owner of the school truly feels about the work that we do for them. In Canada, a teacher trained with as many years of education as ourselves, is entitled to a 2 *month* summer holiday as well as a winter holiday and sick days, makes more money, and typically isn't living away from their family. All the while, they don't have to be suspicious at every moment that they are being wronged by the company that employs them. The message that our school is sending is that the work that the teachers at our school do isn't even worth 2 weeks of holidays... which is downright degrading, insulting, and wrong.

You see, foreign teachers are commodities here... kinda like trophies, really. The more foreign teachers that a school has, the more well respected it is, supposedly. However, because of the situation that they're in - not speaking the language, signing a contract from overseas before they know the standards of life, routines, and normal hagwon behaviour and such, hagwons sometimes feel like they can treat teachers however they see fit.

Anyway, that's my weekly rant. I've been saving it all up from the whole week and I'll be damned if I don't get my winter holiday. If they don't budge, I'll find another school to work at - it's that simple. There are scads of better schools out there to work at, and I can find another job in a matter of a couple of weeks - maybe much less.

Thanks for reading, and wish me luck!