Complaints about Friday

Friday was chaos. Not even organized chaos, but complete chaos. This was the first time that the foreign teachers had to proctor the tests, as the Korean teachers are so overworked. I mean, they only spend 2 hours socializing every day. They should be spending at least half of their hours at work doing nothing whatsoever. So anyway, I figured that when I'm instructed to watch the kids take a test, that I could do other paperwork or something, but no. In the first class, Ricky finished the test (including the listening portion) in EIGHTEEN minutes (of a 50-minute class). The slowest student took 25 minutes. That left me with an awful lot of time that I didn't have anything ready to occupy them. The next class finished the test in about 30 minutes, but I had some easy readers which they did fairly well at reading (except for Tomas, who tore the cover off his).

In the next period, usually my break, I wrote evaluations while the Korean teachers goofed off. Mr. Kim asked the foreign teachers to correct the books that Joshua (the laptop guy, he's adopted an English nickname now) has been writing. He even said we'd get paid extra (yeah, right, how much, is this hourly, when?). It's my last month, can't make waves, yeah, sure. Once I looked through the 2 books I was given (each 75 pages long) I saw how long it was going to take and I got upset because of all the work things that needed to get done on the weekend: evaluations, daily reports, student diaries (which I'd been putting off while I wrote the tests), and edit 2 books!

The next two classes were too silly/bad and I got a bad headache and felt sick. Then another test. Then in the last class they were incredibly stupid. I know Ken has a decent English ability because I had him in a previous class. But in this class, he barely says a word per class. I asked him a simple question: "What do you think happens next in the story?" and he wouldn't respond. I sent him outside to think about it, and it took 5 minutes before he finally came back in with an answer.

!!!!!

Joelle also bothered me, on top of everything else. She is not a good manager. She complained that the students couldn't hear my voice on one of the listening tests—made me go into the classroom to read it and then demanded that I tape it over again. Is it okay if I wait until next week when some of this other stuff is finished, Your Royal Highness?! When I made that tape 6 months ago we didn't have any decent tape players, thus the quality of the recording. But that doesn't matter—it was my voice on the tape, so thus it's my fault. Joelle made Tanya re-write lots of her evaluations because Tanya wrote her comment too low in the box. Who cares where it's written! The parents can't even read it!!