Howdy
It's been a while, eh?
As some of you know, this is a VERY busy time at the school. It is Winter Break for students. In Korea that doesn't mean vacation time for kids. It means more school. So, we now have kids day classes.
Basically I start at 6:30AM (first class) and don't finish until 9PM. Monday to Friday. Kids classes on top of our other classes. There is about a 2 hour break in there. Of course that doesn't count preparation time. So, by the end of the day all we (the teachers) want to do is sleep.
That is about all that has been going on since New Years. Work, sleep, work, sleep, repeat ad nauseum. It lasts for a month, and the over time pay is going to be sweet, but it wears you down.
I have also started to see some of the bullshit happen that I heard of from other schools. Luckily, it is just minor stuff, and could just be because the staff is as tired as the teachers. I know that some of the English teachers are pretty pissed off with it all. Hopefully it is all just stress, and blows over.
I was trying to go to Osaka for my 4 day break at the end of the month with some other teachers. Unfortunately it costs a little more than I have to spare. So I will spend a few days playing the tourist in Seoul. I am REALLY looking forward to it, especially to having a hotel room with a bath tub. :)
Hopefully I will have more to write when I get my life back in 2 weeks.
Take care
Flint
********
This was my first introduction to intensive classes. God damn it was intensive. I taught 200 hours in 20 days. That was teaching time. Not preparation time. It was ... well ... intense.
I don't seem to have mentioned the bad stuff in my emails. At least not yet that I have seen.
What bad stuff? Well, finding out what classes you were teaching and seeing the book for the first time 1 minute before the classes started. Then finding out the screwed up the rooms we were teaching in.
The classes were a joke. The kids CONVERSATION level was based on their GRAMMAR level! What the kimchi?!?!?! This caused a lot of problems for the conversation classes.
It set my expectations for future intensive sessions quite low. So low that future ones never seemed as bad or chaotic as this one.
Oh yeah, I still miss bath tubs.
The blinders are coming off slower than I would have thought.
ReplyDeleteYou seem to be holding back, still trying to give the benefit of the doubt. I think at this point I would have pulled a complete 180.
I agree. Reading the old emails makes me shake my head ... at myself.
ReplyDelete