And It Continues

So all the teachers had an after-school team building exercise today.  It was a cute, family friendly sports affair, with relay races and kickball (a combination of football and baseball).  Only the teachers were allowed, no parents or children, strictly staff.

These teachers complain, almost every day, that we are given too-easy a ride at Daewoo Elementary school.  For one reason or another, they lambast our department, inundating us with work and nonsensical complaints.  For example, a couple of our department feel it necessary to send children out of class if they are misbehaving beyond the control of the English teacher.  This only happens with the lower level classes who tend to have poorly behaved students, and those with learning disabilities.  (Of which there are only a few, as genuine disability tends to be confused with curable, rather than manageable illness.  Example, one child has autism, so his parents take him to acupuncture to fix him.)

The korean teachers (not the parents mind) complained that sending the children out of class was unethical.  Fine, I can see their viewpoint (in a skewed, liberal version of korea that doesn't exist) until you realise that these are the same people that beat the kids.  I'm not talking a rap on the knuckles, which they do with rulers regularly; I'm talking beatings.  Taking the kids shoes off and beating the soles of their feet so they limp for two days.

Suddenly a little time out of class seems rather mundane, don't you think?  This behaviour was made illegal, not fifty years ago, not a decade ago, but within the past six months.  Of course, rules are meant to be broken, and the foot beatings, knuckle rappings and bruises continue on.

If you work on the korean school board, for the love of god come and inspect daewoo elementary school.  I mean really inspect it.  Document the bruises on each kid, and ask them how they got there.  Of the hundreds of bruises I see, most are them walking into doors or falling over; but the ones that aren't, you'll generally find the child will talk to an adult quite openly about how his or her father or mother hit them; and the hated korean teachers are even more exposed - every kid knows who hits the students.  When new classes were announced this semester a child in my class cried because she had the worst beater in school.  A third grade teacher currently, if you must know.

So anyway, the koreans (even the nurse and administration) were playing; everyone invited.

Except the English department.

No invite, no welcome.  We, who work six consecutive classes a day every day, with two hours obligatory over-time at rates that barely cover a taxi ride home, versus the koreans who have a maximum of five classes a day, but whose average classload rarely exceeds four a day, are vilified for being lazy to the point where we aren't invited to a sporting event.

I absolutely, with all my heart, abhor korea.  Korea is a racist, one-eyed failed country.  They have no right to judge any other country in the world.

For the evangelical naysayers who attempt to post on this blog; come see the bruises on my kids and tell me korea is an amazing country.  Then go and thank god you didn't grow up as a kid here.