Legal? I Think Not.

We don't exactly have a great teachers' room. It's in the basement floor of our building. We each have our own desk which is about 2 feet by 3 feet. The room includes a copier which jams everyday and runs out of toner twice a week. We also have 2 computers to share among 30 teachers. Neither of the computers have Microsoft Word on them. The internet is the slowest internet I've come across in Seoul. We have a cheap $50 HP printer that doesn't always want to print. It broke 3 weeks ago and instead of buying a new one, the school called the HP repair guy who took 2 weeks to fit us into his schedule. We went 2 weeks without a printer. We also have a small book shelf with the books we are supposed to use for teaching.

Our director came to our teachers' room to make an announcement. Our teachers' room doesn't have the right permits to be a teachers' room so it's actually illegal that we are down there. So we spent this morning hiding all of our books and re-arranging the desks to make the room not look like a teachers' room. A few teachers were trying to protest because this isn't the first time our school has revealed that they're doing something shady. For the time being, we have no place to go at school but our classrooms. Our director told us that we just need to "hang around" but not at our desks for the next week while the school puts in the proper paperwork. Meanwhile, inspectors are coming to look at the building and when they come, we can't say anything about the teachers' room in the basement. When I first started working at the school, this would have amazed me . . . but it's starting to be just another ordinary day.