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Probably the last post before the 24th of July, i.e. when I begin part one of my return to home/North America, et al – I have been “posting”, but just not here – tons of images at BDA and flickr – check adumbrate if you want to see some words with images – Wordpress still sucks at image additions, with lots of bleeds and general fuck ups. Oh, well… state of the art, eh? Oh and I have rekindled my linkage addictions by abusing delicious. I’m still pissed that this Yahoo! entity steals server time from flickr and tries to force you to up their eyeball count by the infamous “stay logged in” but there is nothing quite like the time wastage of trolling links.

Personally I never liked the whole idea, despite the domain name of delicio.us being so fucking clever; I guess I got over it.

I get to wear shorts to work now; as long as the hem (if that is the right term) passes the knee I’m good to go. Of course the kids get to piss their pants over my semi-nakedness and resulting hairy body part reveal, which I could care less about. My primary school’s principal asked my primary co-teacher if this was just another cultural thing; she told him that I was hot. Right; 35 degrees Celsius and 100% humidity will do that, honest. The heat, plus fasting was making me a little crazy, needless to say. Not quite rabid dog crazy, but frothing at the mouth was quickly becoming part of the agenda.

Fasting – as I write this I am on day thirty. The focusing has been tight, the desire to keep going strong, the weight loss manageable; I may just have to stay on this thing until I land in Houston. The whole idea was to discipline myself through a conscious denial of food when hungry. And man, I have been so hungry; only rice and water for two out of three meals per day will do that. I’ve expanded the abstention aspect as well – no sex, no alcohol, no nothing. I don’t think I am a monk (even they masturbate) but I am trying my best to make good decisions. We’ll see how that plays out.

There was one recent typical-for-teaching-English-in-a-foreign-land crisis. I was working two additional jobs – four hours a week doing supplemental English instruction at one of my countryside schools and two hours a week online English teaching for schools considered as being “remote”. The former is a dream – I even got to pick the curriculum and the supporting materials – running the show the whole way on my own (anybody tells you that a teacher isn’t a control freak, well, they are lying – it is ideally suited for those seeking that in their lives). The latter was, is and probably always will be, a disaster. At the kick-off meeting in mid-March I should have known something wasn’t quite right. The “you won’t need a contract” and the accompanying (nervous) laughter should have been a sign. The fact that my stomach got that bad butterfly thing going on didn’t help. At the same meeting there was a fair bit of confusion and lack of planning – again, making me nervous, but hey, I wanted to part of the solution, not part of the problem.

The technology supporting the project was awful – good old Netmeeting reincarnated as Live Meeting – still hardware intensive and very susceptible to failure; like it would crash if you looked at it or left the room for a minute. In time it will get ironed out, honest; hang in there.

Then the fact that one out of the two classes (both grade fives) had the following litany of issues: one student was developmentally delayed and probably deaf (she could barely speak Korean let alone English);  one student liked to chew on her microphone, literally, in her mouth, saliva flowing, for the entire 50 minutes of class time; one student, for at least half the class, had another English class going on in the background, drowning her out; another student didn’t like English, so she would whistle and play with her video equipment, for the entire class; and finally, the online co-teacher had the habit of taking personal calls, pulling down her headset so she could talk freely, but neglecting to turn off her microphone – we’d get to listen to her talk and laugh and carry on for 15-20 minutes at a time. A mess, but hey, I wanted to help – so what if we could not follow the National Curriculum and therefore provide measurable results… you know numbers we could act on, as professionals.

The last straw (I had been thinking of quitting the program for weeks at this point) was when it came time to be paid. At the half way point we were to receive half the money owed; for me that worked out to be about $800, not an insignificant amount of money. I sent an email to my (English speaking) liason at the responsible education office; she confirmed that everything was on target – pay was due one week from the 15th of May. Although that is considered pretty fast by Korean standards, I accepted the answer. No pay on the 22nd – nor was there anything after the weekend. When two weeks went past I sent another follow up – no response. Several more days go by, no response, no pay. Fuck this; I blast off an email (after I confirmed other teachers, working in other districts, were getting paid – turns out about twenty of us, out of a total of 90, were getting “stiffed”) – you don’t pay,  I don’t work.

Well, I’ll be damned if that didn’t get their attention. It garnered me enough attention that they fired me and paid me out. Fine – see yah.

During the time all of this was going down I was also negotiating my second year contract. It didn’t go exactly the way I wanted, but close enough that I was happy with the end results. The process is a simple one: co-teacher and I negotiate and come to a written understanding; co-teacher submits contract to Principal for his approval/signature; signed contract is forwarded to local education office…oh, oh: local education office. Much to everyone’s surprise, my name is no longer on the “approved” list of foreign teachers. I guess I pissed in the wrong rice bowl and ended up making an enemy or two.

Eventually I end up in the principal’s office. I come in with about a half inch of documentation, outlining what happened and when; the preface is a chronology of events, a blow-by-blow description of who said what and when. He scans the documents, talks with my co-teacher and then sums up: no question the office of education is at fault – they should have paid you when they said they would; no more stopping work – if you have a problem come see me and I will take care of it with one phone call; there is no problem with the second year contract; handshakes all around and that was that. All-in-all about ten minutes.

The interesting thing? I was prepared to see it all blow up. Sure, my wonderful two year plan would have been fucked and I would have been faced with the need to bail out. But, you know what, I was good with it; I was calm about it, I was ready to accept the consequences of my actions and… Move. The. Fuck. On. Funny, I don’t think I could have said that a couple of months ago – I would have been crushed, another, as the kids like to call it now-a-days, epic fail on my c.v.

Well, that didn’t happen and other shit did happen all at the same time – and that was a nice feeling.

It is July 1st now all over the world and I got to go set off some bottle rockets in celebration of the 142nd birthday of the my homeland, home of the True North, Strong and Free (Who Would Only Riot If They Turned Off Cable Television), Canada.

You take care of yourself and know that you are loved. Until next time…