Why are you even here?

I'm so disappointed in some of the foreign teachers here.

I just returned from a teacher's training conference in Gyoungju where I met so many foreign teachers that don't care at all about teaching. So many people are here just to party and make money and they don't care at all about their jobs. They don't want to plan lessons, they don't want to discipline students, they don't want to build relationships with their co-teachers, they don't want to partake in the culture, they don't want to do anything except drink their beer and soju (vodka).

There was this one British guy who sat by me in all of my sessions who had absolutely nothing positive to say about teaching in Korea. Every time the speaker proposed a new learning or teaching method, he would shoot it down with, "Oh that doesn't work. Sorry guys, but Korean teachers just can't do that." He was literally insulting the intelligence of all the Korean teachers in our room! He had absolutely no tact. But the sad part is that he wasn't the only one! There was another British teacher who literally said, "I can't change the system so why bother? These teaching methods are only idealistic; we can't make them work. Nothing works." I totally understand their frustrations, but how can they just do nothing? Why keep working here if your miserable and hate your job? Honestly, do something to fix it or go home. Stop making learning a burden for students and teaching a burden for teachers.

I've been doing a lot of thinking and I'm far from figuring out the most effective way to co-teach, but I do know one thing: if I don't have a decent relationship with my co-teachers, my students will pick up on that and won't be learning at an optimum level. It's the same thing with raising kids. If your parents fight and dislike each other, it doesn't matter if they smile in front of you; you are unhappy because you know they're not happy. Well, in this culture, the teachers are pretty much the parents. If we can't create a comfortable and secure learning environment, then we will fail. We'll fail at making our students want to learn and we'll fail at making them secure and confident individuals.

So, when I see teachers like these yahoo's, I get so angry. They go to work thinking, "Only 8 hours until I go home," but if they only went to work thinking, "Today I'm going to make things better," then perhaps they wouldn't have the frustrations they do. Perhaps they would see results. We need to stop using the system as our excuse when our students fail to meet our expectations. It's not the methods, it's not the co-teachers, it's not the curriculum. It's us. We are the variable. It's our ability to communicate and our ability to relate to them. If there's no effort, of course there will be no results.

And I beg the question: why are you even here? If your only purpose in life is to make money doing the least amount of work, stop teaching and start begging. At least the work/results ratio is your favour.