Family Newsletter

Here is part of our August Family Newsletter that Liji wrote. I will try to add more of an update from just this last week and also pictures tomorrow.

In the past two or three weeks we have been approached by several people asking us to privately tutor their kids. Our contract says that if we want to teach English outside of our school, we have to have permission from our boss. Well, I asked her and I found out that it is illegal for us to give private lessons. We are here on E2 visas, and we found out that we can only teach English, we can’t have any other job. Another provision that we have is that we can’t teach outside of a certified institution, public school, or private academy. The penalties are pretty stiff, we get fined, the people we tutor get fined, and our boss gets fined as well. After finding that out we have had an easy time saying no to the people that approach us, though invariably everyone tells us that we “don’t have to tell anyone” that we are giving their kids private lessons.
Work has been getting easier and better every week that goes by, especially in the past three days. On Wednesday we had a meeting with our boss after work; I guess it was an evaluation meeting. We kinda felt like it was an accusation meeting. She told us several things that we are doing wrong, often comparing us with the previous teachers. “They did this, and they did that.” The meeting was really hard to sit through, the main reason is this is the first time that our boss has given us any input at all, and now all of a sudden she tells us all of these things we are doing wrong. Nearly everything she talked about were little things, but it’s just frustrating to find out that we have not been pleasing our boss, when we could have been… if only we knew what she wanted. Now we know, and things have been going much better.
One of her main points was that we were not becoming part of the “teaching family” at our academy. She was right, we did not feel much attachment, obligation, whatever you want to call it to the academy. Since then, Christina and I have talked about it a lot and we think there are several contributing factors to our lack of enthusiasm about joining the “family” at school. The main reason for us is that we didn’t feel like we got enough input, negative or positive, we just didn’t hear anything from our boss. For example, a couple weeks ago more than half of the school (including our boss, and the other Korean teachers) went to a water park for a field trip. The first time we heard about it was when we got to the school the day of field trip. We found a note on our desk, it said, “We went on a field trip.” She also told us how she wanted us to run the classes while nearly everyone was gone. That is the biggest example of an apparent non-communication policy. We always got notes on our desk telling us that the schedule is different from what we were expecting; she never talked to us, always notes.
So for us it has been hard to want to be a part of the “family” when we feel like we are not informed about anything. But like I said earlier, things are getting better, we know what is expected of us, and the last half of this week has gone really well. We look forward to becoming part of the “family.”
We went to the temple on the last Saturday of the month. This time we went by ourselves, and it was a journey! By asking around we found out what subway stop we had to get off at in Seoul to get to the temple. But everything else we had to figure out on the fly. We didn’t know what time the buses left, so we decided to go to the terminal at 6:00am, things didn’t quite work out how we expected, but we did make it safely to the temple and safely back.
I think the best way to describe it would be a time line, so here goes: 5:30am, wake up (only me); 5:45, Christina finally rolls out of bed; 6:10, we leave on the scooter, we didn’t take our helmets because we were going to leave the scooter at the bus terminal and we didn’t want to leave the helmets on the scooter all day and we didn’t have space to take them with us, plus the bus terminal is only three or four blocks away, and we were taking the back streets; 6:15, return to apartment to get camera; 6:25, arrive at bus terminal; 6:40, leave bus terminal headed for the train station after deciding we would rather take the train because we thought it would be faster, and the prices were pretty much the same; 6:50, go back to the apartment again to get helmets because we had to take the highway to get to the train station; 7:00, arrive at train station; 7:03, call missionaries to ask why we can’t find Seoul on the destination map, we found out that they put the name of the train station, Yongsan, not the name of the destination city on the schedule; 7:07, buy tickets; 7:12, get on the train headed for Seoul, yeah we got lucky on that one, if we hadn’t caught that train, we would have had to wait 40 minutes for the next train; 10:49, arrive at Yongsan station; 10:50-11:00, wander around completely lost in a train station that seems to be twice the size of Pilot Rock (it may not have been that big, but it was huge) 11:00, ask for help; 11:05 get subway tickets; 11:10, get on subway; 11:15, get off at wrong stop, wander around lost for five minutes; 11:20 get back on subway, 11:25, get off at right stop to make transfer to another line; 11:30, get on line 2 subway; 11:45, get off at stop nearest temple, walk to temple; 12:00pm, find out the next session isn’t until 1:30; 12-12:30, eat lunch on temple grounds; 12:30 go in temple and find out there are no workers except the person at the recommend desk who just happened to speak English, the workers were all out to lunch; 12:30-1:30, wait inside temple for workers to show up, get dressed at 1:15, and start session at 1:30; 3:30, finish session, walk to subway; 3:40, get on subway; 4:00, arrive back at Yongsan station, get in line to buy return tickets; 4:05, purchase standing room only tickets for the 4:15 train to Gunsan; 4:15, get on the train and discover they weren’t kidding when they said standing room only, ride in the dining/entertainment car sitting on the floor with about 40 other people who had standing room only tickets also; 7:47 arrive back at Gunsan, ride scooter home; 8:10, Finally! Get back home.
So as you can see it was quite a day, on top of the time it ended up costing us 57,200won, or about $46 to cover the train and subway tickets. All of the time and money was worth it, we really enjoyed our session in the temple, and we sorta figured out the subway. So the next time we go, we think it should be faster. Although I think I might try to talk Christina into taking the scooter next time, it would be a lot faster, we would just have to figure out which back roads we needed to take to get there since we can’t take the scooter on the freeway.