After I left the classroom, I found Mr. Kim in an office and asked him what was going on. I had come for an interview and a tour, not to teach. I wasn’t ready to teach. I didn’t want to teach. I didn’t know how to teach. I needed training, an orientation, some guidance.

I don’t know how he did it but somehow Mr. Kim managed to talk me back into that room. He did it by paying not the slightest bit of attention to anything I said and pleading with me to go back in there and talk to them. I wanted to know what level they were at, what books they were using, in short what I should do with them. Mr. Kim was unconcerned with any of that. He believed my physical presence in that room was enough. His job was to get a warm, native English speaking body into that room. He’d managed to entice one into his office, and now he didn’t care what happened. He simply wanted to move it from in front of his desk where it was making a lot of noise and damaging everybody’s kibun and back to that classroom.

I went, giving myself a pep talk about relaxing, going with the flow and a stern reminder of my financial state. I needed the job. I thought about Robin Williams in “Good Morning Vietnam”. His classes had a great time. He made his students laugh and they joined in unwittingly playing the straight man. The secret seemed to be to keep it light and funny and the students will meet you half way.

It was without doubt one of the worst hours of my life. The students sensed I was nervous and unsure of myself and went for the kill. I thought about grade school a long time ago when my class had gotten a substitute teacher. She was pale and nice but very nervous. Like sharks smelling blood, my class set about making her life miserable. We were uncooperative, nasty, ridiculing, and crazy-glued her desk shut. She suffered a nervous breakdown, and we never saw her again. I remembered in university I had an earnest, well-meaning, nice professor, who continually introduced well thought out, carefully planned discussion topics to my third year seminar class that always fell flat. The silence that built in the room grew and grew until the tension made it difficult to breathe. But I never helped him out, just watched him flounder and thanked my lucky stars it wasn’t me at the front of the room. Now it was me at the front, and for my sins I was given this class.

I began by introducing myself, thinking that questions about me and Canada could easily fill an hour’s conversation, which after all was my job. I was being paid to talk to these people. But nothing I said got any response. I tried to look in their eyes to see if there was any comprehension there. No one had said a word yet so I didn’t know if they could speak any English or if they could understand anything I’d said so far. Under the overwhelming pressure of the silence I made my sentences and vocabulary more and more basic. Still no response at all. The few brave ones who had at least once made eye contact were now staring intently at the tabletop with all the rest. For one second, I had the urge to thump my chest and shout, “Sound body. Sound mind. See Dick run.” I had to swallow the hysterical laughter rising in my chest.

This obviously wasn’t working and I decided to get them to introduce themselves. I was looking for any clue as to their ability, their expectations, and their identity. I had no idea how to proceed. Even as I asked for a volunteer to go first, I knew it was a bad idea. These people were not volunteer material. After an uncomfortable silence, I went on the attack and asked individuals directly to introduce themselves. I got total silence. No response at all. And the astonishing thing to me was that no one seemed embarrassed by it except me. I asked one girl the simplest question I could think of, “What is your name?”, and she maintained total silence. Not even a flicker of movement. I was obviously doing something wrong, but I hadn’t the slightest clue what it was. This was completely beyond my experience.

They had gotten up at six in the morning or earlier on a cold winter day, commuted for an hour to arrive for an hour-long English class at seven-thirty before they went to work at nine o’clock. This course ran five days a week and they’d paid for it and yet no one was willing to break the silence with even the feeblest attempt at speaking English.

I completed the hour with a lecture on Canada complete with a map drawn on the board and a rather silly rendering of a moose. When the class was over, I was furious and burst in on Mr. Kim with a “What do you think you were up to sending me in there with no preparation like that” sort of line. I told Mr. Kim what a horror the hour had been and that the students were very unhappy. Mr. Kim was completely unconcerned and told me I’d done fine.

I was very confused. Mark emerged from his room with his daughter once more over his shoulder still sound asleep. I told him my tale of woe, and he too was blase about it. He told me that it wasn’t surprising the students were uncooperative since they weren’t expecting me. Their real teacher, who had been teaching them for the past two weeks, had quit suddenly on Friday. They probably hadn’t been told and my appearance was a complete surprise to them. They were probably angry, but to show it would be to create a scene and that would be bad manners (kibun again). The best solution from their point of view was to pretend that I wasn’t even there. That way nothing happened and nobody lost face.

My head whirled. I went back to the classroom and sat at a desk to think. I pulled open one of the drawers and found a black notebook. It was a journal left by the previous teacher and addressed to “The Teacher Who Replaces Me.” It contained page after page of complaints about the school. It told how he had to fight every week to get his pay, was consistently lied to, was given surprise classes, never received his sponsorship for a work visa as promised, had to purchase his own materials and on and on. It was a magnificent find, a message in a bottle, the diary of a castaway on a desert island, the scratching on the wall of a prisoner in solitary confinement. That journal added a sense of adventure to my predicament. I had stumbled on the Robinson Crusoe’s island of English teaching.

Mr. Kim came in and gave me the tour he had promised. He proudly showed me the language lab facilities, which I noticed didn’t have a single working component. The video library was archaic and incomplete which didn’t worry me since there was no TV or VCR evident on which to play them. He showed me how to turn on the gas heaters mounted on the walls of the classroom. Had I known about them earlier, my poor class might not have been so unresponsive in their refrigerated room. Giving me the tour after my first class was over demonstrated in my eyes an appalling lack of concern for the students and a complete absence of management skills – conditions not exactly uncommon in the hogwans of Seoul I was to discover. I also learned that Mark was the only other teacher there and that their specially designed books were actually made up of segments of other English books which had been cannibalized and badly photocopied. In fact, I had been lied to about just about everything and the school was a bad joke. But I was learning, and rather than bring any of this kibun-damaging unpleasantness up I smiled and told him it was a wonderful school and I was very happy with the conditions and of course I would return in the evening to teach more classes. I didn’t know then if I would return or not but kibun demanded I say I would.

I had a final cup of coffee out on the landing before leaving. As I stood there wondering what to do next, an old man opened the door leading from the street and started to make his way up the stairs. He was bent over with age and covered with many dirty articles of clothing. His hair was unkempt and long, his hands dirty and twisted into claws. He obviously lived on the streets, a beggar perhaps, though I had yet to see a beggar in Korea. I felt an instant bond with him for we were both very different in our separate ways from the well groomed majority here.

When he arrived on the landing he turned his face towards me and said in an impeccable British accent “Good morning. Are you an English teacher?”

Feeling a total fraud I said yes I was an English teacher. I quickly dumped some more baek wons into the machine and offered him a drink. He accepted it with ceremony. He then reached into a pocket of his overcoat and pulled out a slim well-worn book. Every page was dog eared, and almost black with fingerprints and small printing in the margins. Several pages threatened to tumble to the floor as he opened it up and began searching for something. So much had happened in the short time since my arrival I thought I was incapable of more astonishment but almost in shock I saw the book was Shaw’s “Pygmalion.” What was a tramp doing studying such a book and how could he manage such precise English when my students were the silent zombies from hell?

He handled the book with reverential care, pursing his lips as his fingers ran down the pages. He asked me several questions about passages in the play that he didn’t understand and made careful notes in the margins noting my answers. He replaced the book in his pocket, thanked me quietly and went on his way down the stairs and out the door.

I spent the day looking for other work and thinking, but in the end I returned that night to teach again. I didn’t have much choice. Most hogwans pay their teachers on a monthly basis at the end of the month. Even if I’d found work at another school I would have been flat broke long before I saw my first pay. The Munwha for all its Alice in Wonderland aura at least promised to pay weekly.

The last class finished at ten and after an hour and a half of commuting, I arrived back at the Inn Sung Do. Dave and Tapio were waiting in room #1 to hear how my classes went. They had bought some cookies and beer and we stayed up most of the night talking. Before it seemed possible, it was five in the morning and time for me to leave again to cover the early morning classes. My career as an English teacher had begun.

 

 

 

Tags: Canada, Korea - First Days Teaching English, Robinson Crusoe, Shaw Pygmalion, VCR