I have come to my decision about whether to renew my contract teaching English in my elementary school in South Korea. I will renew my contract. However, I will do so along with a new attitude towards my job and towards when it will end.

Whether or not I stay here has to be based on how happy I am living and working here. Over the past seven months here in Korea I’ve found that my mood changes frequently, and I’ve not yet found stability. So I’m not capable of deciding whether or not I should stay until October 2015, which is when my second contract would finish. So renewing the contract can only go ahead if I see the contract renewal date as setting an upper limit on how long I will continue in this job, while choosing to view resignation before October 2015 as something that I can and should do if I’m unhappy for a prolonged period.

Before this weekend I had a few reasons for thinking resigning unacceptable that I now don’t have. One is that it is strongly frowned up on by Korean culture (as I understand it), and I’d got very much into the habit of questioning and disagreeing with Korean culture, but not questioning whether I’m going to go along with it while living here. This is wrong because resigning is a matter of whether I stay in Korea, rather than something about my life while staying in Korea. So given that my own ethical judgment is that resigning if I’m unhappy is not unethical treatment of my colleagues, school and pupils, it’s okay.

Secondly, I worried a little about the administrative hassle of replacing me with only a month’s notice, as I know that this is tricky within the Korean bureaucracy. But I was informed by SMS on Saturday morning that this year’s school budget allows for my contract to be renewed but does not allow for a replacement to be hired. So the school will be losing something if I leave, but they won’t be gaining an administrative burden. If this changes, I will trust the decision I made this weekend with the situation as it stands now.

Thirdly, I have chosen to disregard the financial hit I would take by resigning. Depending on when I do so I would potentially have to pay back some money to the school, and I definitely wouldn’t get money towards my flight home. Overall the resignation would cost me around £1500. However, that money would be taken from my wages here in Korea, rather than my longterm savings back home. That fact, along with the fact that in the grand scheme of my life it’s not a huge amount of money, lead me to not let this be a factor in the decision.

In order to deal with the issue of my changing mood, then, I will renew my contract but consider this connected to when I will leave Korea only to the extent of setting an upper limit (except in the circumstance of wanting to leave just one month before the end of the contract, or something). How, then, am I to decide when it’s time to leave, if that time should come before October 2015? My week-to-week judgements of my emotional state are useless, as described. So I will instigate a scheme of checkpoints. Every three weeks, I will decide whether I am lonely, bored of work or feeling unhealthy (headaches, tension etc.); two of these are the reasons for thinking I should leave now as described in my previous post on this topic that I wrote on Thursday. If I have been feeling like that since the last checkpoint, I will schedule an earlier checkpoint for two weeks time. If I’m still feeling the same way at that second checkpoint, I hand in my notice. At this second checkpoint I should not get into trying to make a decision about whether to hand it in, but put some trust in the decision I made this weekend to use this system of checkpoints, and just hand it in.

The idea here is that I’m not using some calculation of utility or duties to myself and my school to judge whether or not to stay, but trusting my feelings about the situation as a guide to how successful I’m going to be. The system of checkpoints is to deal with the fact that my feelings vary so much. It’s this variance that led me to utter lockup this weekend, unable to decide.

To try to make answering the question as to whether I’m lonely/bored/etc. at each checkpoint as easy as possible, I will try rating the three factors on a scale of 1 to 5 each day. I can then look back at the scores for the past three weeks to remind me of the times I was feeling up and down and why. This might be completely useless; I’ll have to try it for a few checkpoints and see.

I’m not going to try and explain all of the above through the partial language barrier to my colleagues. But I’m not going to just say that I’m renewing my contract and leaving it at that. I want to let them know that I don’t feel able to make a decision about staying in Korea all the way until October 2015, and so I will renew for now but consider resignation to be a serious possibility, while at the same time emphasising that I don’t expect to resign before October 2015. They don’t have to happy with my attitude, but if they find it totally unacceptable, then I just won’t renew the contract. As I said above, this is the only way to make renewal acceptable.

This new way of looking at my job here, developed in response to my belief that I’m not ready to start a real career and so any job at home is likely to have most of the same downsides that this one does, shifts the balance of power in my relationship with my school. I will not use the fact that they can’t hire anyone to replace me as some kind of bargaining chip (in any case, knowing Korean bureaucracies, the budget constraint may disappear at any time). But it will change my attitude towards difficulties that come up. Such difficulties will feel less permanent and inescapable.

I am not totally sure that it is ethical to think of one’s job in this way: to think that one always has a get-out-of-jail-free card. I have such a card because of my financial situation and the fact that I’m not in my home country. However, I suspect that taking this attitude might in fact make me a much better English teacher and colleague. We’ll see how that goes.

One final worry concerns getting a reference from my colleagues for future jobs: this reference may be damaged by going against Korean views on resignation. I don’t think that this outweighs my other considerations. Due to the partial language barrier, using my colleagues are referees is not very useful to employers, aside from confirmation that in my most recent employment I wasn’t crazy. In any case, I don’t believe they will call me a terrible employee to the extent that I won’t get a job. I believe this because my predecessor was, I am told, significantly less diligent than me, and one of my co-teachers was recently trying hard to write him a positive reference.

So much for my decision. One other thing that I intend to do is be more proactive and creative in my work, while trying not to pile undue expectations on myself. I have become much less creative and much more reliant on the textbook since February or so, because my co-teacher asked me to focus more on the basics for the benefit of the less able students. Now that the balance of power has shifted as described above, I feel more able to trust my judgements and be more creative, and strike some kind of balance between her opinions and mine. This should reduce my boredom with the job. I might not manage to do this, and if so, that’ll be an indication of boredom and I will hand in my notice as per the checkpoints.