The Winds of Change Blow Again

When Kris and I returned to Korea, we were simply expecting to have a relatively quiet couple of weeks, with Kris finishing off the last few weeks of her old school year and myself quietly waiting to start a full-time position at the academy that I was working at. All we were planning on doing was coasting until the new school year, where Kris would resume her position at her old school and I would move from part-time to full-time. That was the plan. That was not at all what happened.

In the days following our arrival, Kris did some serious thinking about her job at the time. She considered all of the extra hours and effort that she put in to her work, with no notice from the school. She was feeling unappreciated and undervalued. She expressed this to her liaison to the school, and even wrote and signed a letter saying that if the school continued to treat her merely as a resource, she would not re-sign her contract. The school accepted this decision. Kris was out of a job, and we thrust ourselves into the job market once more.

After frantically ravaging Facebook’s various Korean job boards and groups for a few days, a friend connected us with an employer that would offer Kristen shorter hours for higher pay than she received last year. She jumped at the opportunity. This meant that we were moving from Wonju to Seoul, Korea’s capital and largest city. As for myself, I followed a couple of leads towards a communications company where I might have a chance to do editing or writing work. Sadly, those opportunities didn’t work out. I was disappointed, but soldiered on. I decided to work with the same company that Kristen had signed on to. The shorter hours would mean that I would still have time to write and pursue my hobbies, while retaining a full-time paycheck and a visa.

Once our jobs were settled, we hunted for houses, settling on a slightly expensive but very modern and wonderful apartment. We are now two minutes away from two subway lines, with a 10-minute walk to a third. There is even a gym in the building, to help me work off the weight I put on eating all of the food in South Africa.

A slow running down of the clock may have turned into a panicked search for new opportunities, but Kris and I are optimistic about the change. It will be an experience to live in Seoul, and hopefully our positions work out for us. We start our contracts shortly, so we will soon see whether we jumped out of a cozy nest into the lion’s den, or whether we simply upgraded into a job that is better for both of us.

Small Change, Big Impact

We recently had a new boss arrive at our first school in Korea, vowing to make changes and improve the state of the school. Unlike the majority of such vows made in Korea, he has actually acted on them, making a number of small changes already. The most pertinent of these is a change-up to our daily schedule. Our breaks are now shorter, and we have one additional class per day. It may no be a big change, and it may have only been in effect for a couple of days, but it has already made a noticeable impact on our approach to the school day.

Previously, we started the day with a period of largely smoke, mirrors, and bovine excrement known as ‘Sharing’. This class is one that all of the teachers at our school dread, because there is literally nothing to do for it. Until now, we have gotten by, weaving vast, creative webs of time-wasting and reviewing past content. As of yesterday, there is now essentially an additional 20 minutes of Sharing, in the form of ‘Morning Circle Time’. Where did this additional class come from? Our break times. Before this week, we had 10-minute breaks between the majority of our classes, an hour for lunch, and a 20-minute break between kindergarten and elementary classes. These have been hacked to pieces. We now only have 5-minute breaks between classes, 50 minutes of lunch time, and 15 minutes between kindergarten and elementary. Again, not exactly monumental changes. But the effects that these shortened breaks have had are quite significant.

The morning classes leading up to lunch feel like they take an absolute eternity to pass, simply with the addition of Morning Circle Time. We reach our shortened lunch break feeling far more drained, and have less time to recover through consuming either home-made or restaurant-bought edible goods and talking about everything and nothing with the other teachers. We also have less time to prepare for the upcoming classes, which hurts the effort we want to put into these later classes. In ten minutes, we had time to photocopy any necessary materials, or collect things that we needed for a lesson such as Arts and Crafts. Nor do we have time to simply sit, play a silly game on our cellphones, and disconnect from teaching for a couple of minutes and recharge our batteries.

On the other hand, the classes after lunch, including elementary, pass considerably more quickly. So, once we manage to reach the milestone that is lunchtime, it feels as if the majority of the day is over, even if this is not the case. Ultimately, I am sure that these feelings are temporary, and we will adjust to the new schedule quickly. For now though, we simply have to get used to it, and it is proving more unpleasant than I had previously thought it would be.

Will these changes truly change the course of the school? Who knows. For the time being, we will simply grin, bear our slightly less energetic smiles, and do what we do every day – try to actually teach our kids something.

Alike, yet Askew

It is after the passing of several months in a new place that one can stop focusing on all that is going on around oneself, and realize that other people’s lives are changing as well. People get married, or move house, start new relationships, or do something completely unexpected. For me, I have noticed a lot of changes in the last few weeks, causing me to look back at what has happened in the lives of my friends whilst I have been in Korea. I was staggered by how much has gone on whilst I was too busy trying to wade into Korea and its culture.

In our current age of immediate, ever-present social media and information, looking back on my friends’ lives has been eerily easy. I have browsed photographs of weddings and honeymoons that I had no idea were even imminent. I have peered through years of profile pictures, thinking to myself that some people change remarkably little, while others morph into completely new people through the passing of time. Someone that has always been known as clean-shaven is nigh unrecognizable with a full beard. The reverse is also true.

These unprocessed changes (or lack thereof) lay everywhere in my Facebook feed. In the past, I would have been able to keep up with the myriad of happenings in the lives of almost every single person that I was connected to. Now, I am boggled by trying to keep up with even a handful. I think that my inability to keep up is a combination of a number of factors.

Firstly, I simply do not have as much time to keep up with everything happening in the digital world. Between my full-time job, my volunteering at GosuGamers, freelance writing, and generally trying to keep my mental health within acceptable boundaries, I have far less time to sink into Facebook than I had when I was a bored student with hours of free time.

Secondly, I have become a little disillusioned with the platform and social media in general. It is certainly a superb way to connect with people on the other side of the world. I have managed to keep message conversations with people I would otherwise have lost touch with. Looking at a person’s feed is a decent way to see what they’ve been up to. For most of you, my doting readers, my Facebook feed is how you keep up with when I post a new slew of words. It is a necessary part of our everyday lives. However, it is also a dangerous, vacuous pit where one can lose hours and one’s happiness or ability to feel anything, simply by staring at selfies of those around you.

This is linked to the third reason I use social media less than I once did – the ratio between valuable content and superfluous content has most definitely lessened, meaning that one must invest far more time in order to find something of value than one used to have to. What was once a bright star of connection to one’s peers has swollen into the beginnings of a black hole of narcissism. It has become much easier to post one’s entire life experience onto Facebook, from photographs to documents to sharing that great Buzzfeed link to those around us (#7 will BLOW YOUR MIND!). While the sheer amount of content on Facebook makes it easy to track changes in the lives of those we care about, it is also easy to become overwhelmed by the depth of life going on around us. Or to see hordes of selfies. Even this post is an exercise in narcissism – I write what I am thinking, hoping that people will notice and click an arbitrary button and validate my thoughts.

Social media helps us keep together. It has been great to scroll through the slideshow lives of my friends as projected through Facebook. Keep posting things. I like seeing things, and so does most of society these days. But before you post, consider the value of what you are posting. We love you, but do we want to see another just-woken-up selfie? You decide. We’ll all see it all anyway.