So I was discussing with Gordo something that made my coworker Matt and I laugh. In my contract at my Hagwon here in Korea it says that I can’t physically punish one of my students for more than 10 minutes. I natural never physically punish any of my students just because it goes against my ethics. That being stated that clause always caused me to laugh and was the source of many jokes. Well after mentioning this to Gordo I decided to go to my contract and copy and paste exactly what it says here is a direct quote:

The employee shall not give students physical punishment no longer than 10 mins..

After I cut and paste this to Gordo I realized that it is actually a double negative. Which Gordo, Sam, and my friend Janette all agreed that it would mean that I could only physical punish my students for more than 10 minutes. Which I thought was hilarious in a black humor type of way, but then this just got better. I then consulted one of my previous Philosophy professors Johnny Terry and he corrected what I thought, here is what he said:

With the double negatives, it actually says quite the opposite. It says that you shall NOT be not giving them punishment for longer than 10 minutes. So you’d need to physicallly punish them every fifty minutes.

So after clarification from a professor of logic I now know that I am contractually obligated to beat my students every class. I assumed that the time period that the contract was referring to was every hour but my classes are only 45 minutes long so perhaps it means every 35 minutes? Regardless of how often my contract states that I am supposed to beat on my students perhaps I should change my job title on my resume. Gordo said I should use AKC which means Abuser of Korean Children. I hear this is a very favorable job title for employers such as Google or the Peace Corps. They have never been able to turn down someone who has been a professional abuser of foreign children.

Tomorrow I think I should enlighten my boss to this error…I’m sure he will just laugh as usual. Perhaps that double negative was intentionally put there, hmmmm…..