Contract finished, Hawaii bound

Although this is sort of an ex-post facto post, I have finished my year-long contract at my hagwon and am now bound for Hawaii. If you really know me well, you might be thinking, "Hey, I thought you were gonna finish in August...."

Yeah, well, you're right -- it was supposed to end in August. There's a story behind that, which if you like hearing about negotiations and conflict resolution might be interesting to you. If you couldn't care less, you've probably stopped readin already.

According to my contract, my time was supposed to end one year after my first day of teaching. It's that "first day of teaching" part that came under conflicting interpretations, since I started teaching before I had offically gotten my visa. My school and I made the mistake of not setting my end date before it became an issue.

My goal was to get out of my contract as close to August 7 as possible so I could meet a friend in Hawaii. I reasoned that since my first day of teaching was August 14, and that there were two vacation days I hadn't used, I should finish my contract on the 11th.

My school counted my first day of teaching as August 27, the first day after I got my visa and was legally allowed to teach. (Part of this is because things could have gotten difficult if they acknowledged that I had been teaching before I got my visa). In addition, they wanted to keep me on during the "intensive session," the month when kids go to more hagwon classes because the public schools are closed.

We went back and forth on this issue from about the middle of June, and included my recruiter for her opinion. Eventually, I said that if my director wasn't willing to compromise that I might as well split when I wanted and let a labor court decide the issue when I came back on my next contract.

I guess this made the school's owners nervous. They had, in fact, been paying me to teach before I got my visa. If it had gone to court, they could have been fined, so they took advantage of an immigration mistake to offer this compromise:

• Instead of an 8-27 departure date, July 26. Immigration had given me an 11 month visa for some unknown reason, which could have been fixed if I was going to stay till 8-27. However, by leaving on 7-26 there wouldn't be a need for that.
  
• Instead of a full month's severence pay, 11/12ths. Fair enough -- by 7-26 I'd only completed 11 months work.
  
• Instead of a fully paid plane ticket back, only 5/6ths of the cost would be paid by the school. Again -- that was fair.
  
• A week of pay docked for the "orientation period" work that preceded my visa. I didn't like this, but I could tell the school was just trying to cover its tracks for having broken the visa laws, so I accepted it with the rest of the deal and started getting ready.

I'm going to Hawaii!!