You know I am not doing any extra teaching beyond the paltry 5 hours a day I am doing at my regular job. The reason is simple. I am absolutely hating my job. I hate that there is virtually nil flow or progression. The class is like watching a cripple attempt to scale a staircase, and not even manage the first step.
My emotions go from frustration, to anger, to being utterly bored.
I find I spend my breaks making lists of things to do in the evening. It's really just a feeble attempt to escape my present reality by imagining a jam packed near future. My lists include exciting chores like 'washing the dishes' or 'organising folders on computer' or emails I need to send.
I have 12 year olds who are at a capability below kindergarten kids I've taught. Having been in this country as long as I have, and being stuck at this level is torture. It's excruciating. It's like a rocket scientist trying to teach 1+1 =2 to 1 year olds. Actually, there's some challenge and possibility in that.
They do things like scribble on the page they're supposed to be working on. I mean, drawing thick pencil lines over a page until the pecil is blunt. Even when they do write it's so illegible they don't even know what they've written. A regular thing is to copy something, all the time looking at the copied text, but not looking at what they're actually writing. That's lazy baby behaviour. I didn't come here to baby boys and girls, but that's what I'm doing. I'd love to leave. But I am in that terrible position where I am just going to endure for a few more weeks. And that's what's killing me. The wisdom of this decision seems all the less wise as each day passes. I'd like to avoid being a position like this, where you try to just get through another hateful day. Days should be celebrations, they should stretch you, and make you reach outward. Not have you cringing at how basic and bland your life has become, and wishing away minutes of it.
It's not a gratifying job where you have to say "Open your books" ten or eleven times, and then finally out of exasperation, you take the book out for them and open it for them on the right page. Where, in every class, one or two students either don't have their books with them, or don't have anything to write with, or both. Every time you visit their desks there's either nothing there on the page, or a scribble or a picture. They can't even imitate text written on the board without spelling it wrong, or writing it in the wrong place, or simply not writing it after being encouraged to do so over and over and over again. But what can you expect where the teacher may not discipline the children?
So the result is a very frustrated, and frankly, miserable teacher.
When I arrived in this country, I came with a very deep vault filled with a teacher's greatest resource. Patience. That's vapour now. It's gone. So I'd like to be too. It's not much fun being me, and probably not much fun being around me.
I guess I did this. I did, after all, choose this school, choose this job, choose this life.
I know I noticed from the first 5 minutes, that the kids levels were very low, but I guess I thought I could do something about it. And I did for a while. I did make some progress. After a few hiccups we were moving along like soldiers, really getting somewhere. Then I was told to stop disciplining the kids and they went from bad, to good, to worse than when we started. And that's where we are now.
Yes, I have a few classes with a few good students. But overall it's a miserable waste of time, and I feel I want to have nothing to do with Koreans for the rest of the day because so many of them at work can't understand the most elementary thing. I know it's not fair to stereotype, but it's the same siege of brain numbing frustration every day. So when I get on a bus and say Hwajeong and they can't understand me, I feel my ears fire up. I know the bus driver's can't be expected to understand me, even when I say place names slightly too slow or fast, but at the same time, no one can expect me to have renewable reservoirs of patience. Not at the rate they get depleted at work.
So what elementary things can my students not do?
Here's elementary: I asked a 12 year old boy how old he was, and not only did he have no idea what I was talking about, no one else in his class did. I've taught brighter 5 year olds. Actually, you know, I don't think it's about intelligence. I think it's the framework. You can't have a school that is run the way this one is. And the framework is being perpetuated by a retard.
Result: bottomdwelling students. And a teacher covered in the slime of wasted time and unused talent.
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