Seoul, Korea - November 25, 2003
Life is good as usual. I'm exactly where I want to be on every conceivable level. Just the general gyst of how things are going here. First off, I have a vacation which starts this Saturday!! Its one full week meaning about 8-9 days which includes the two weekends sandwiching my week off. I've decided to take this time and go to Thailand. Its been almost exactly seven years since I've been there. Generally, my previous experience was that I didn't like it. Mainly it felt too tourist oriented and I just couldn't seem to get away from hordes and hordes of other foreigners. This time I'm taking a different approach and avoiding all the places I went to before. (Just for the record, last time I stayed on Ko Sahn Road in Bangkok (notorious for nearly 100% all foreigners), as well as a trip to Chiang Mai in the north, and Koh Samui in the south. This time I plan to get to know Bangkok very well and the plan as of now is to only make a few hour short trips at the maximum.
Okay, I'll talk more about Thailand later, and I'll be trying to record everything as much as possible during the days down there. For now, I'll revert back to Korea. First off, its getting colder here. My workplace is still doing well. However management fired yet another Korean person who is currently our supervisor. I think we have one of the world's worst managers. She's fired well over 20-30 Koreans in the last 7 months I've been here.. and we have an extremely small department. At any given time, we probably only have about 12 or so Koreans working here (as well as 4-7 foreigners total). SO of course that many firings is quite alarming.
Our manager also seems to make the worst decisions you can possibly imagine. If I may complain for awhile, as I get so irritated about it. For one, we have sample classes on the webcam internet method which I teach. The sample classes are never setup, meaning there is no lesson for the student. We are suppose to be sampling a class, instead they just turn us over seemingly unprepared to carry on an English conversation with an 8-year-old for 10 minutes. 10 minutes is an eternity for any child, but definetely for a child that has to speak in a foreign language to communicate. Now if they'd set us up with a decent lesson on the webbook to use, we could revert to 'whats this' and 'its a book' by pointing to the book method. Our sample classes seldom attract students.. yet no one in management has figured out why.
We have other problems. Actually there are too many. But yet another main one is there are so many problems with the books. For example, errors as they were made by Koreans. Sometimes I have to pretend the error is right so I don't completely lose the confidence of the kid. Some of the errors are annoyingly wrong. They also edited the lessons (these are by programmers who don't speak English).. so they delete and rearrange lessons completely wrong so that they often don't make any sense. A couple teachers spent an enormous amount of time documenting everything that needs to be corrected, but to date, as of one full year, no corrections on any of the web books has been made.
Problem #3.. the main manager has got to stop firing everyone. About once a month or two, she goes on some firing rampage. Its nerve-wracking. To date, no foreigners have been fired, but apparently we have been fought for by our immediate supervisors saying that if one of us were to go, it would shatter our confidence in our stability here for the others left behind - this is true. Fortunately the main boss hasn't fired any foreigners yet, but she's definetely fired A LOT of Korean employees. Our immediate supervisor was fired today for reasons unknown. The thing I hate about having a new supervisor is they always come in being informed that the teachers are the problem and try to crack down really hard on us. For example a weird list of rules with a boss a couple months back who told us no more pornography or chewing gum while teaching. I started laughing as I thought he was joking.. he wasn't.. and I talked to all of the teachers and no one was doing that (or admitted to it). But regardless you shouldn't be making up crazy rules. There were other strange rules too.. and the gyst of it was the company wasn't doing well and the teachers must be the problem.
Another one that annoys me. There is this emphasis on return students signing up regularly as loyal customers. This is great and I understand this. But when you are an Internet company with a new product, your main concern should be marketing. There is no reason that with the technology and system set up in place.. there is absolutely no reason that you shouldn't have seemingly unlimited teachers (as all of the internet technology is designed - its just a matter of having students taking the class and teachers meeting that demand). In a country of 50 million Koreans or whatever it is, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever that 500 or even a 1000 or however many you want to get to sign up, could sign up, if you put the money into that. There are limitless ways to market and advertise these classes. I asked them what they do, and apparently they put up some banner ads somewhere on the Internet as well as offer discounts to the father company's employees who we are a subsiduary. They should be advertising in Internet cafes, giving demonstrations in Middle Schools, and many other things. I don't know the solutions exactly, but all I know is there seems to be some boom of new students and they just cipher off several months later, and then another boom in students. When the boom of students hit, I always ask 'don't we need new teachers?' and they always say no because enrollment will eventually decline. My feeling is that if you can make the booms happen once every few months, if you had enough teachers, you should be able to continuously have the booms and won't suffer the several months of declining enrollment afterwards. That is if you know to make the booms.
Anyhow I've degressed to complaining about my company online of all things. I love working there, I find it an ideal environment for me. But sometimes I do get extremely annoyed at the senior level management. Its only one person the main boss who is the upper management, but they don't speak any English whatsoever, have never talked to me or any other teacher, fired nearly everyone in every position only to replace them with new people who follow her more unaware thoughts on management to her personal vacuum-like whims without suggestion. To correctly run the company, she should be aware of what the teachers are aware of and be able to address those problems. We have a list of things including the correct way to have a sample class, 100s of webbook corrections, please don't fire our immediate management pleas, and whatever else. But none are addressed and we keep getting new immediate management who generally start thier new job with trying to focus how the teachers must be the problem and how to make us conform and perform better. The answer is easy really, ask us about the webbook. In addition, there are countless computer technical problems that never get fixed, which I am certain should be extremely easy. Too many little ones to go into detail. But I'd love to be able to tell the non-English programmers the most effective way to make the program work for us the teachers who use the system on a daily basis. Too many small little things that are all messed up that don't need to be that way.
Anyhow, I complained about work the entire time after a six week absense of this log. Sorry about that, next time I'll be writing about Thailand and how much fun I'm having. I hope that makes up for this one! You'll see that one come out in less than a week. Also, while traveling or in a new place, I do keep very much on top of my journal writing to record things as I experience them. So you'll have a lot to look forward to next time!
Next Journal Entry Bangkok, Thailand:
November 30, 2003
You can email me at:
Wintermoon2@yahoo.com