To Americans, or any other English-speaker, Korean names are a string of strange syllables.

It’s almost impossible for the novice English teacher to remember hundreds of Korean names.  This sucks for English teachers because sometimes you really need to.

For myself, there are a total of two students whose names I remember in Korean.

This, for the record, puts me in the “intermediate” category.

I remember one student because his initials spell PBJ and I call him “Peanut Butter and Jelly” quite frequently, as well as sing “It’s Peanut Butter Jelly Time” whenever I see him.

The other I remember because she was the only student in a class of 18 who didn’t have an English name.

It must be quite a thing, having two names.  You want to talk about something that damages your cultural identity, try having your traditional name replaced by some Western nonsense three times a week.  It’s the sort of thing that would make for a fine research paper if you were a cultural psychologist.  On the other hand, students don’t really seem to give a shit.  They just pick whatever sounds nifty and change it whenever they want.

And I fucking hate it.

- It’s a Simple Equation -

Students Changing Names All The Time

+

Trying to Find A Student’s Name in the Computer System

=

Gigantic Pain in the Ass

I spent the better part of two hours today just inputting grades into the computer.  We’re not talking actual grading. We’re talking data input. The vast majority of that time was spent by me sitting in a chair saying, “Lisa?  Who the fuck is Lisa?  There’s no Lisa in this class.”  All because “Sandra” decided she wanted to change her English name to “Lisa” on the day of the essay test.

On many occasions I’ve thought it would simplify matters greatly to just learn the Korean names of students.  But every time I try it, I wind up quitting within the first ten minutes of class.

Here’s why:

“Ee Song Min?  Is Ee Song Min here today?” I ask during attendance.

“Ha ha ha!” all the students say.

“Where’s Song Min?” I ask again, looking for a raised hand, listening for an “I’m over here,” which I don’t get.

“Ha ha ha!” is what I get.  “Teacher teacher!  It’s Seong Min!  You stupid!”

“That’s ‘you are stupid,’ moron,” I say with a scowl.  “And I’d feel a lot better about your laughing at me if you didn’t butcher every other word that came out of your mouth and then get all defensive when I try to help you correct it.  Your homework is to write the definition of “hypocrite” fifty times.  Now where in the hell is Sally?”

I guess if you want to practice pronunciation, a classroom isn’t the place to do it.

Long story short, I’m almost completely finished with grades for this semester and I can’t wait until I’m 100% done.  The only hangup I’ve had is this two name thing and the secretaries at work screwing up the computer system.  One of my classes didn’t exist on the computer, which makes it difficult to enter grades.  I spent about 20 minutes trying to find the damned class.  When I finally asked a secretary for help, they said, “Oops.  You not the teacher for that class.”

“Damned right, ‘Oops,’” I said.  “Get it fucking fixed!”

So the secretaries will fix that, I can input the grades tomorrow, and then be done with this accursed nightmare.

I’m in Seoul right now for a quick day trip.

The girlfriend and I zipped down to go book shopping and to have dinner at On The Border, which is (or at least would be in America) a rather conventional Mexican restaurant.

Unfortunately, it’s about the only good Mexican restaurant I’m aware of in the entire country.  Which might account for why the place was so busy.

There are a number of businesses that, if opened anywhere in this country, would do tremendously well.  Things such as liquor stores.  They’re ubiquitous in the U.S., but for some reason just Not Around when you’re in Korea.

Mexican restaurants are on that list, too.

Honestly, every time I’ve ate at On The Border, there’s been a wait to get in.  It’s not even great Mexican food.  It just seems great because in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.

It just makes you wonder why there aren’t more of them around.

I got pretty excited when we got there and dove right in to the chips and salsa.  When our menus came, I ordered a lot of food.  Well, at least some people thought so.  “That’s too much,” the waiter said.  “You can’t eat all of that.”

“Watch me,” I said.

So, after they moved us to a new and bigger table to accommodate all of the plates, they brought us out our meal.  I got an enchilada.  The girlfriend got a beef burrito.  It was her first burrito ever.  We also got a sampler platter with nachos, quesadillas, and some kind of taquito with a little cup of that fake processed cheese that you can dip anything in to make it automatically delicious.

It wasn’t exactly “Oh My God” amounts of Mexican food, but it was more than I could honestly handle.  I fought valiantly, even taking down part of the girlfriend’s burrito (covered in chili!) with a rather deft fork maneuver.

In the end, though, I was left with food on my plate and a stomach full to bursting.  It was quite sad, seeing uneaten food that I would kill for on a weekday.

But sometimes you’ve just got to go for the goal, if you know what I mean.  I’d rather have too much food than be left wanting.  Even though we didn’t finish it, I’m glad we ordered that much.

Now, we’re just hanging out at a coffee place while our stomachs calm down a bit.  Or, at least, mine does.  While the girlfriend performed admirably, I don’t think she threw herself into the task as well as she could have.  She doesn’t share in my tendency to over-eat.  Which I guess means she will be feeling good later while I’m moping around groaning, “Oh, god, I shouldn’t have ate all that.”

But as crappy as I might feel, I would totally do it all over again.

There are some students that you absolutely have to drag through a lesson.

It is, frankly, mind-boggling that so many students dig in their heels and act like stubborn mules.  In one of my classes today, there was a young boy who had some trouble with “working.”  Their work today was to write the good and bad aspects of fast food.  We brainstormed first to get the ball rolling, but then they got set loose in small groups to finish the activity.

The group with this young boy in it wasn’t working.  Or, rather, the boy’s partner was writing, but the boy wasn’t.  “Why aren’t you writing?” is usually what I ask in this situation.

“What?” he usually says.

He isn’t asking me to repeat myself.  Rather, his response to every single piece of work that is set before him is, “What?”  It doesn’t matter what the work is.  I could hand him a piece of paper that said “Name: ______________” and his response would be “What?”  He says it as if I’ve placed a physics problem in front of him, or some complex machine made of wires and gears, or a dead cat.  He gets a baffled look in his eye and says, “What?”

“Were you listening when I was giving instructions?” I asked.

He doesn’t respond to this.  Instead, he gets the I’m-a-Korean-and-I’m-in-trouble-so-I’d-better-shut-up look on his face and shuts up like a steel trap.

Pansy, I think.  Then I feel bad because he’s like 9 and of course he’s a pansy.

Anyways, I preempted him today.  Before I asked why he wasn’t working, I went to his partner and started praising the hell out of what he was doing.

He wrote, “Fast food is delicious.”

“That’s fucking brilliant!  That’s fucking brilliant and you’re a goddamned genius!  Shit!  Look at you go!”  Really hoping that the lesser-performing boy would pick up the cue and start doing some work.

He did.  He wrote, “I don’t know.”

“Look at that, he doesn’t know,” I told his partner.  “Tell him why fast food is good!”

“It’s fucking delicious!” his partner said, sharing my enthusiasm for the activity.

“So?” said the pansy-boy.

“And it’s fast as greased shit!” said his partner.

- Note -

Yeah, I’m immature.  I think cursing is hilarious.  Deal with it and move on.

In the end, after ten minutes of ridiculous hand-holding, the boy finished writing three reasons why fast food was good without my having to make him do his “naughty Korean shut up” routine.

God how I wish students were more motivated.  Or at least had the common sense to realize that everything is just easier for everybody if they just participate.

Fast forward to another class featuring the most obstinate student I’ve ever had.  I’ve written about her before.  Last Wednesday, as a matter of fact.  This was the girl who blatantly admitted to telling one of the other boys in class that he sucks every day for the entire semester.

Today, we were playing a game of “Would you rather…”  But, we’d made a tournament out of it.  So, students have to answer a “Would you rather…” question while the other students take notes, judge them, and pick a winner.

I had picked this game specifically for the girl.  Normally, when she has to do any sort of speaking, she goes temporarily insane and it takes five minutes to calm her down enough for her to say, “No,” to speaking.

I can’t blame her.  She’s not great at speaking.  But the reason she sucks is because she never practices.  So, I made this game where she’d have to stand up and speak with everybody waiting for her.  It worked like a charm.

“Would you rather have no teeth for the rest of your life, or a set of perfect fangs?”

The entire class was silent and watching her.

I swear to god, she started doing a river dance.  This is how she responds to stress.  Dancing.  Then she sort of collapsed into a heap.  “Waaaahhhh,” she said.

“Shut up,” said the other students.  “We want to finish the goddamned game.”

She did some sort of Russian dance while crouching on the floor.

“Fuck,” said the students.  “Knock it off.  Talk.”

After three or four minutes of students telling her to hurry up, she finally spoke.  And you know what?  She did a pretty okay job.  It wasn’t great–she lost the game–but she had a main idea, reasons, and details, and the whole thing sounded more or less like a 45 second speech.

All this fucking work to get two students to perform averagely.

- Do You Think -

When the robots take over my job, they will be equipped with tasers to shock students?  God I hope they do.  I hope they look like the bad robot from RoboCop, with machine guns for each arm.  I hope they look menacing and just scare the students into blabbing for 80 minutes.

The reason I enjoy reading the Korea Times anymore isn’t because of the star reporting.

Rather, because of all the gems you find.  Sure, they’re often very stupid and…well, not news.  But sometimes they’re good for a laugh.

Take this for example.  A 40 year old judge in Seoul was held in contempt for talking rudely to an older plaintiff.  The National Human Rights Commission reprimanded the judge for not respecting a Korean tradition that is grounded in Confucian ideology.

What happened?  Here’s what the judge said when the plaintiff was speaking out of turn:

“You are acting like an undisciplined child. Behave yourself.”

That’s right.  Now, you might think that the plaintiff immediately bounded over the divider, knocked aside the bailiff, and started throttling the judge with his cane for this infraction (a man can only take so much), but thankfully he restrained himself long enough to stagger to the National Human Rights Commission and explain that the big, bad judge had spoken rudely.

“I felt like a child being scolded by an old man for misbehaving, when the young judge told me to keep silent.  I concluded that my human rights were violated by the judge’s remarks,” the plaintiff said.

Now, this could be as simple as a mistranslation, but I’m having some trouble understanding what is meant by “human rights,” and so, apparently, is the government, the judicial system, and I guess millions of elderly people.  Tradition is not the same as human rights, and neither is Confucianism.  Those things are personal philosophy, and no commission has any business being anywhere within ten city blocks of dictating that to a judge.

By that same logic, yelling at my older brother would infringe upon his human rights.  So would be a wife being rude to her husband.

Human rights stand apart from rights that are dictated to us by any one government, political body, or religion in that they are rights for all humans, and not any one specific group.  Human rights are, for example, the right to live, the right to have an education, and the right to make your own choices.  These are rights that stand above any one philosophy.

If I’m sitting on a crowded bus and an elderly man comes along, how quickly do I have to give up my seat before it violates his right to sit down?  Is the youngest person on the bus the one who is guilty, or is it all those who are younger than the elder?  Technically, that baby two rows back knows better than to make me stand up, so really it should be the baby that is thrown in jail.  Or maybe the baby’s older brother is guilty for not fulfilling his benevolent duty in teaching the baby the rules of giving up your seat on a bus.

I believe it is important to respect our elders.  But there are also times when you need to hang up tradition in favor the actual laws of your country. Judges are responsible for overseeing the justice system, for helping to ensure that actual human rights aren’t tread upon.  To do this, they can’t operate in a system that is subject to an aged filibuster.  Sometimes, no matter how old you are, a judge has to be able to say, “Shut up and sit down.” If that’s too rude for you, well, sorry.

Thankfully.

I’m pretty sure many coworkers were a bit “on edge” when they were around me.  I seemed to be giving off a tense air.

In the copy room, I was making some handouts for a class.  The copier jammed.  I fixed the machine.  It jammed again.  I fixed it again, but this time got a bunch of toner all over my hands.  One of the friendlier secretaries who happened to be standing next to me saw that my head was about to explode.  “Relax,” he said.  “Use this copier.”

I flipped him off.

- Not Really -

Though the thought did cross my mind.

I talked to my director about the “cleaning up the school” idea.  She could see that I was fairly angry about it.  “This wasn’t my idea,” she said.  “Some of the other teachers thought it would be nice to get together once a month and do some cleaning.  They didn’t talk to me about it.”

The actual idea was to make teachers want to clean up after class more by making them come in early to pick up the classrooms.

“We aren’t children,” I said to my director.  “This sounds like we’re being punished for being messy.  I don’t want to do that.  I won’t ask anybody else to.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” my director said.

“Whose idea was it?”

“Some other teachers.”

“Yes, but who?”

She named five names.

I added five names to my People To Kill list.

Anyways, my classes didn’t go that great today, but I managed to not bite anyone’s head off.  I had a writing workshop completely fall flat on its face.  The “writing workshop” was basically a chance for students to share their writing in a small group, give each other feedback, and then use that feedback to revise their writing.  It was a pretty directed writing workshop, but it still didn’t go that well.

“Teacher, I don’t have anything to workshop,” said one particularly lovely student.

“You brought no writing at all?”

“No.”

“Find some writing in your portfolio.  You can workshop something you wrote before.”

“There’s no writing in my portfolio.”

“What?  Where’d it go?  It was in there when I checked it last week.”

“I wasn’t here last week.”

“Yes.  I know.  But you have writing in your portfolio.  I checked it last week.”

“No I don’t.”

“You don’t have any of the homework assignments?”

“No.”

“So, you’re telling me that you can’t participate in today’s activity because you somehow lost or didn’t do any of the eight writing assignments we’ve done this semester?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a good student.  Keep it up.”

This sort of thing happens in workshops, so I tried not to let it bog us down.  But, almost nobody was able to follow the rules.  A few people didn’t bring their writing.  A few others brought some but admitted to spending about five minutes working on it.  The others, those who actually did their assignments and tried, were mired by those others who seemingly do not want to be involved.  Giving “feedback” to another writer requires giving enough of a shit about somebody other than yourself to genuinely read and offer advice.  Most students in this class are too self-involved to honestly do that.

It sounds like I’m being hard on these students, or at least overly critical, but I saw the same workshop plan flourish in a different section of the class two days prior.  The only difference between these classes is in how the students approach their work.  In one, the workshop went very, very well.  Students brought in writing, did an excellent workshop, and left with some meaningful feedback.  In the other, students just wanted to sit around talking rather than try to do anything constructive.

I didn’t react angrily.  In fact, I was quite jovial as I watched the workshop crash and burn.  Why?  Well, there’s no use getting angry about that problem.

It is curious that I was about to explode because of “cleaning duty,” but the failing lesson plan didn’t bother me too much.  I suppose the reason is that the workshop is a worthwhile problem.  I can fix that problem, and it’s a problem worth fixing.  When we do our next workshop, I’ll have a different format for the class that needs it.  The cleaning bullshit, on the other hand, is exactly that:  Bullshit.  I resent the hell out of that even being on my radar.

Sometimes classes make me angry, yes.  But, at the end of the day, I know that I am going to find a solution for those problems because I want to.  But I cannot even begin to explain the depths of apathy I feel toward the continual barrage of idiocy aimed my way by other teachers and administrators.

- The Robots -

Are they here yet?

I’m on the verge of completely losing it.

As soon as I walked in to work today, three different people came up to me with retarded-ass requests that do nothing more than create a bunch more work for me to do for the sole sake of making more work.

For example, one Korean teacher told me.  “The director wants everybody to come in to work at noon tomorrow to clean their desks.  Can you tell everybody about it?”

So, my director wants everybody to come in two hours early to fucking clean.

My response to this was, “No.  We’re not children.  If you want us to clean our desks, we’ll clean our desks, but we’re not coming in at noon to do it.  I’m pretty sure everybody is capable of finding time to clean their desk without being told when to do it like a fucking infant.”

Because this is a huge problem.  Tremendous.  Gargantuan.  We’d better handle this fucking dirty desk problem with utmost haste, because it matters so much.

So now, instead of, oh, focusing on teaching or maybe planning lessons, I’ve got to spend time today 1) Telling my director that we aren’t going to come in early to clean, and 2) Asking teachers to clean their desks up.  Which is a fucking waste of time piled on to about 40 other giant wastes of time that are happening for no other reason than just because.

And god damn it.

I’m all for improvement.  Everybody can become better at what they do through teamwork and reflection.  But shut the fuck up with your bureaucratic I’m-the-boss-so-do-what-I-say-because-I-said-so bullshit and start giving everybody what they need to get better.

Maybe 50% of the staff wouldn’t be clambering to leave if you did that.

Anyways, I’m going to have to try pretty hard not to bite the heads off of any students today.  It won’t be easy.  And I guess I can thank the school for that.  Lord knows what would happen if my superiors weren’t around to brighten my day.

Fuck.

Today was pretty average, except for just about everything that happened.

When I got to work today, my back started hurting like crazy.  It was just one little knot right next to my spine, like a pulled muscle, but constant and debilitating.  I made a quick trip to the pharmacy where they have an English speaking pharmacist (whose daughter is in one of my classes).  “You don’t have any…back medicine, do you?”

I never know what to ask for at pharmacies.  Words like “ibuprofen” or “acetaminophen” get you nowhere, so you wind up acting like a kindergartner explaining where it hurts to the school nurse.

“Yes,” the pharmacist said.  Surprisingly.  Apparently they do have a specific over-the-counter drug for back pain.  “Here you go.  How’s my daughter doing in class?”

“Fantastic,” I said.  “Really top notch.”  I grimaced because my back hurt and thought, I see your daughter once a week for 50 minutes in a class of 16.  How enlightened do you expect me to be?

“Her vocabulary isn’t that good,” the pharmacist said.

“Well, she speaks a lot in class and that’ll help.”

I hate talking to parents.  Which is handy because 99% of the time I can’t actually do it.

After that, I sat at work for several hours grading essays, planning, and teaching.  I revised my crappy lesson from Monday so that it worked a lot better.

In one of my classes, there was almost a fist fight between a boy and a girl.  I stepped between them in the midst of a lot of Korean shouting.  “What’s the matter here?” I asked.

“She keeps saying that I suck,” the boy said.  “She’s been saying it every day, all semester.”

“Is that true, girl?” I asked.

The girl looked right at me.  “Yes,” she said.

“Um…why have you been saying that?”

“I don’t know,” the girl said.

I took a minute to explain to both the boy and the girl that they shouldn’t behave the way they are behaving.  I was very clear that the girl was acting like an idiot and should stop it, while emphasizing to the boy that hitting a girl would land him in more trouble than the girl was in for calling names.  I felt pretty bad for the boy because he is, honestly, one of the most stand-up students at the school.  He’s honest, hard working, and takes chances with all of his work.  I didn’t so much feel bad for the girl.  She’s kind of obnoxious and has been so for the better part of the last 8 months.

At the end of the day, because I’ve been watching a lot of House M.D., I diagnosed my back problem as a result of carrying a rather heavy bag around everywhere I go.  It’s a messenger bag that I carry on one shoulder.  I’m no chiropractor, but I guess that’s not great for your back.  So I’ll switch to a conventional backpack for a while and see what happens.

Then, I read in the Korea Times that robots are expected to take the place of golf instructors and native English-speaking teachers in the next ten or twenty years.  As stupid as this is, right now I feel like, why the hell not? Enough Korean parents expect their students to behave like robots, they might as well go the whole nine yards and give them robot role models while they’re at it.  Let a robot revise a failing lesson plan.  Let a robot break up a fight.

Send in the fucking robots.  I need a vacation.

My jaw literally dropped.

“I’m going to buy the Alien Quadrilogy,” he said.

I’ve heard people say that when westerners speak Korean, Koreans often don’t understand them when they speak.  Most Koreans just don’t expect westerners to bust out perfect Korean–they aren’t prepared to analyze their own language coming out of the mouth of an outsider.  They suffer cognitive dissonance.  It takes them a beat to realize that a non-Korean just said something understandable.

The same thing happened to me when I heard “Alien Quadrilogy.”

“What’s an Eileen Kwaderlidgy?” I asked.

“Alien Quadrilogy,” he said.  “The four Alien movies.”

“Ahh,” I said.  Holy shit, I thought, this kid knows about Alien.

This student is particular.  I won’t give you his real name.  Or, at least the English name he picked because foreign teachers can’t pronounce his Korean name.  Let’s call him Richard.  Richard is about exactly in the mid-range class of English speakers, occupying a level that can talk to you about most things, but not physics or philosophy.  The “gateway” level, where you’re just about fluent.

Only Richard stands head and shoulders above every student in the class.  He answers every question.  He knows arcane words like “equinox.”  And he isn’t afraid to just come up and talk to you.  In fact, he loves talking to you.  Many other teachers know him as “that student who comes up to you on the street and says, ‘Hello.’”  Yes, it’s actually rare enough that he can be known by it.

I spend a great many class days wondering, “What is this student doing at this level?”  He seems like he should be in a class substantially higher, but foreign teachers at my academy have very little say in where a student is placed when they first join.  Now that I’m aware of this student, I will do my damnedest to make sure he enters higher levels.  He can speak and write circles around students who are 3 levels higher.

The first time I met him, I asked him, “Where did you study English?  The U.S.?”

“No,” he said.  “I’ve only studied in Korea.”

This was strange news to me.  Usually, the only students who gain such an absence of accent and a grasp of idioms study abroad.  Richard never did.

The reason he is so good at speaking and writing?  “I watch a lot of movies,” he said.

Really.

So today, he tells me he needs to get the Alien movies.  After the initial shock of this statement wore off, I said, “The second one is the best.  The fourth one is just stupid.  Watch Aliens.”

“What about Alien 3?” he asked.  “David Fincher is great.”

My jaw dropped further.  I had to collect myself.  Normally, if I discuss movies with my students, I am lest than honest about my tastes.  Korean students flat out don’t know the movies that I like, so I’ve got to talk about movies they know and enjoy.  Twilight.  2012.  Avatar. Etc.  For Richard, I had to enter into, “Really discussing movies” mode.

“You’ve seen Fight Club?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said.  “I’ve seen all of David Fincher’s movies.”

“And you like Alien 3?”

“It’s not great.  But it’s not that bad.”

“Panic Room?”

“It was good.”

“Zodiac?”

“Kind of boring.”

Anyways, I was damned impressed by young Richard’s knowledge of movies that don’t suck.  If it turns out he knows anything about music, why he just might turn into my favorite student.

The life of a criminal is not an easy one.

I always knew there was something good about this place.  As it turns out, Korea is “Heaven” for criminals! These criminals are the scourge of Korean society.  They are those with the audacity to teach English to people who want to learn English.

Those fuckers.

In all fairness, private tutoring outside your academy is, in fact, illegal.  Technically, teachers with E2 visas (most of us) who decide to do some tutoring “on the side” are actually breaking the law.

And it’s fairly common.  Most people who come here to teach are under the burden of student loans and are out to make a few bucks.  But does this desire to earn a little money on the side really present any sort of threat to the population at large?  I’m not sure.  In Korea, if you work under an E2 visa, you can only teach at the business that hired you prior to your arrival.

If you have a different, say F visa, given to spouses or foreigners of Korean descent, you can teach anywhere you want, whenever you want.  I’m sure there is a logical reason for this standard.  Probably something economic, or perhaps a social regulation meant to hinder those who are not real teachers.

But the real question here is, Why is this front page news in the Korea Times?

Teaching English here is a simple formula.  If you speak English, you can teach it.  Yes, it works better if you go through some training.  But, if you want to learn a language, you get somebody who can speak it to teach you.  Who the hell else would you get?  That is, after all, why the teachers are here.  To teach.

My problems with this article aren’t with any “facts” it might present.  Honestly, it’s true.  There’s a lot of illegal tutoring.  But the Korea Times bases their claim on interviews with three people.  And all of those people say, “Er…yeah.  I do tutoring.  I get paid for it.  It’s no big deal.”  This hardly constitutes a horrendous crime being thrust upon unwilling learners.

Also, everybody knows this is true already.  The only reason they can print such an article with unfounded claims is that everybody who reads it already believes it.  So why print it?  What’s the point?

As has been said before, the Korea Times has a tendency to print irresponsible and unchecked articles that do little more than rake muck.

Albeit fun to read muck.  There’s is a certain level of humor that can be derived from seeing what idiocy sometimes presents itself as “news.”  It’s been a nice morning of sharing this retarded article with all the other teachers in the office.  “Ha ha ha,” we say.  “That’s true!  That’s true and it couldn’t be less important!”

But as much as we might be able to see how stupid this article is, there are going to be oodles of bozos who are going to read this and think, “Jesus!  Something must be done!”  Rather than realizing that English speakers are merely filling a demand, readers are being encouraged to see English teachers (even those of us who operate within the law) as criminals.

Criminals who teach.  English.

The bastards.

- This is Loud and Captures the Mood -

I had the feeling that today just wasn’t one of those days.

One of those days when you feel like you’re doing a good job, that you’re making a difference, or that you’re helping anybody.

My director called me in to her office for a meeting with the other Korean head teachers.  She asked me my opinion about two different student newspapers.  “Honestly,” I said, “they’re both the same.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” my director said.

- First of All -

Don’t call me in to your office so I can agree with an obvious question.

One of the drawbacks of being a teacher at a hagwon is, even when you get to the point where you can start making decisions, you’re still not convinced that the decisions you make even matter.

Like the newspaper thing.  Yeah, I suppose on some level it matters which crappy written-for-EFL-students newspaper we use, but that completely bypasses the question of why we’re even using a crappy newspaper in the first place.  Why not a class that centers around watching Disney movies or that reading classic novels?  There are good reasons not to do both of those things, but hell.

I guess I never really know what level my director is operating on.  Most of the time I doubt she knows either.

After the silly meeting in which I got a bunch more pointless work to do, my classes started.  One of them went really well.  The rest tremendously didn’t, and I think it was because the wind had been taken out of my sails.

The books for several of my classes just suck.  Besides being TOEFL prep for a writing/speaking class that shouldn’t even be considering the TOEFL due to their general inability, the books are poorly written, poorly organized, and as boring as the day is long.  Most of the time in this situation, I just build a new lesson that is similar to the book but that is actually engaging.  Today, there was no way to make it engaging.  We had to practice reading and listening note-taking.  While there is a good way to do this, it involves a lot of research, which I didn’t have time to do thanks to the stupid meeting and all the stupid term tests I have to grade.

- Side Note -

Today I read the longest run-on sentence I’ve ever seen.  The thought of correcting the grammar and punctuation mistakes almost made me cry.  I’m not even joking.  I stared at the sentence for ten solid minutes thinking, “What has brought me here?”

So, several of my classes today were absolute bores.  The students were not thrilled.  I, too, was not thrilled, and it showed.

Knowing full well that it was my own damned fault for not having the time to accurately prepare, I couldn’t really justify being angry with the students for being defiant in the face of a stupid lesson.  I, however, was.  I kept them on task with an iron fist–the fallback procedure of any teacher who doesn’t know what to do.

I was secretly judgmental of all of them, noting with disdain the ones I considered to be cowards.  I would normally feel bad about doing that, but my give-a-shit had been ripped from me by either the tedium or the long, bureaucratic arms of the hagwon industry.  “Where do supermodels normally work?” I asked them

“Supermodels work all over the world,” the recited from their books.

“Wrong,” I said.  “They work mostly in Canada.”

“Ah,” the students said.

“The correct answer was, in fact, Canada,” I said.

“Canada,” the students said.  “Yes.”

“Damnit!” I said.  “No!  No no no no!  The reading passage said nothing about Canada!  It talked about tropical beaches!  Why would you possibly think supermodels work mostly in Canada?  That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard and I just wanted to see if any of you were actually thinking about any of this and all of you failed miserably thanks to the mindless didactic drill-and-repeat routine you’ve been subjected to so frequently that you actually somehow depend on it now and can’t function without somebody telling you exactly what to do, when to do it, when to hand it in, when to correct it, and when to hand it in a second time so that I can write comments like, ‘Good job, it appears as if you’re actually thinking, but in reality you just copied sentences out of the book so as to make it look like you’re actually thinking because you’re deathly afraid of stepping out on a limb and hearing that limb crack underneath you,’ that you can promptly ignore but also show your parents so they’ll think they’re getting their money’s worth!”

“Ah,” said the students.  “Can we have candy?”

“F^@&!” said I.