up at 7:15

Sleeping in a few minutes, then up at 7:15AM. 9:30AM train outta Yeosu; back in Seoul by lunchtime, then spending all day in the office on campus to upload syllabi, gather my new textbooks for the upcoming semester, and take care of other school-related beeswax. Dongguk constantly bombards us with stuff to do; it's a wonder we can have any undisturbed vacation time at all. The emails from our office just never... stop... coming.*

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*Case in point: we were recently emailed about doing extra work over two days in February, grading a couple hundred student writing samples as part of a placement-test evaluation. The pay for two days' work? A measly W300,000. I make three times that in a single day by working at KMA. No, thanks.

Let's do the math: the job calls for evaluating 200 student writing samples. At three minutes per sample (assuming that this sort of evaluation proceeds a bit more slowly than does TOEFL essay rating), with 200 samples spread over two days, that's 100 samples per day, or 300 minutes per day—a little over five hours per day, i.e., ten hours for two days' work. W300,000 for two days' work, divided by ten hours, equals W30,000 an hour, which is fairly standard hourly pay for the extra work that Dongguk farms out to us. While not terrible, such pay also isn't particularly tempting if you've got better options available to you.



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