So I just woke up from a nap.
On my desk...
At work...
Granted such a thing would be unheard of in the States. Or at least it would be unheard of a professional falling asleep at their job and not getting fired for it. In actuality, it's quite common here. Though one tends to see his fellow coworkers dozing at their desks towards the end of semester, it's not uncommon to find teachers in their chairs with their heads kicked back sound asleep. I've seen it, and now I've done it.
I can honestly say, I'm not proud of having passed out at my desk during the last 40 minutes, but it is a very Korean thing to do. I suppose with my new rash of afterschool activities at Seoseok Middle School, I finally have a Korean teacher's workload. Namely, that I'm teaching over 20 classes with no information about my students, class sizes, goals, or curriculum. Yesterday, was the first day of my Middle School after hours program (which I learned about on Monday). Today, there is apparently another Middle School class right before my two hours of High School (a class of 8 "excellent" students, which I was informed I'd be working with... this morning)
Given my experience with "Advanced" students in the previous semester, I'm verily certain I'm stuck babysitting 8 students who were passed over for other afterschool programs. I'd pretend I'm hopeful that is not the case, but I've been here long enough to know that I can't trust anything I'm told prior to the moment it occurs (even then can change).
For example:
Today I set out to teach a lesson on feelings/emotions with my Middle School Grade 1 class. It wasn't until I had come to class and began plugging in the school laptop that I was told the projector was broken (in fact there were simply dangling chords where the projector once hung). Taken aback I was now stuck with 20 kids for 45 minutes and no material at all.
What to do?
Simple, I reached into my addled and sleep deprived brain and seized the first untested classroom game I'd read about the day before.
Sadly, I believe that it was the most successful class I've taught this week. Basically, it involved generating vocabulary lists from students and then having them work in teams racing to write the word on the chalkboard. Forcing students to change writers each time got an impressive amount of classroom participation (75% of all students actively participated, that's nigh unheard of!). Though I tried it again in my second class of the day and it was much less successful in generating participation (granted I was competing with the distraction of freshly falling snow (yes it snowed today, no I'm not bitter about that at all, stupid spring season...))
But the whole point of this rant is to note a shift in my professional environment that is distinctly Korean, working obscenely long hours with little to no preparation. This is not easy, especially considering the long holiday I just emerged from and the relatively light workload of the previous semester.
All in all, I'm not sure if I'll make it to April with the amount of classroom materials I'm expected to conjure in the space of a few hours. Material enough for at least one class in all but two grades in the entire Korean education system! I shutter sometimes fearful that one of my co-teachers will appear from around some corner asking me to teach Kindergarten or Senior year of High School next week.
It's sad, but three weeks in and I'm already burning the candle at both ends. I can hardly imagine pulling this off for a month, let alone an entire semester! How do people make entire careers out of such a haphazard work environment? Or is there some special Korean/Zen secret to operating in this school system?
Needless to say, the surprise classes and the cascade of new student names are getting to me. Something here has got to change....
No comments:
Post a Comment