A New Semester

Well, it seems that the powers that be at my school have settled on having 4 teachers for the foreseeable future and almost certainly until I hit the road.

On paper, having four teachers (Han, Boram, a newer teacher named Hajin, and myself) seems pretty solid. In truth we really only have around 40 to 50 kids. The thing is that being a private academy our classes are based on what kid comes at what time and how many days a week. Most kids come in every day at the same time. Some come in most days and others come in at all different times.

In the past I have had problems with somebody at school dumping a class into my lap with less than a minute before it began and then looking shocked when I appeared to be a little flustered. At times I have to remind my coworkers that I am not a proper teacher and it takes a significant amount of preparation to even function at a marginally competent level in class. In fact, even with preparation there are times when it is embarrassingly obvious that I have lost my train of thought and am writing on the board incessantly just to buy myself time.



Both hands visible.  Working on the most
complicated craft on earth.

There are times when I must confess to being a pretty phenemonenaly bad teacher. Do I feel bad about this? No. This is likely to be the only time in my life I am ever employed as such. I will not be signing on for a second year (which my boss asks me about once a week) and it is nothing I lose sleep to. I do my best and sometimes it works out great. Sometimes not so much.

There are notable editions and missing faces in my school at present. We have a new little boy whom we affectionately call Hands-in-his-pants Boy. There isn’t really much description needed. He is about 6 years old and if his hands aren’t otherwise occupied he usually is using Han’s compact mirror to apply makeup or put his hair in a ponytail. A few kids are gone. One of them being the Angry Girl. I was the last person to have her in class. For a time it was a one on one class but recently a new student was tossed into her class.



How do I describe this kid? He is incredibly skinny with long hair. I would say he was quirky as eccentric implies some significant age but he constantly wears this old-man fly fishing hat so I will go with eccentric. We call him Skinny Boy despite Bat-Shit Crazy Boy being more accurate.

Skinny boy and his class.  He is in the hoodie next to his friend:
The Chair.

He has the attention span of a moth in the void but he is smart enough to keep on everyone’s good side and understands enough English to intentionally make me laugh. In his new class the three of them (Angry Girl had since left) were saying something like “Let’s play computer games.” A second boy would say “OK, after let’s play soccer,” to which Skinny Boy would in theory say “OK. After, let’s play baseball.” Instead he looked at me and stone cold said:

“But I am not OK,” and through a fake temper tantrum.

Another time I was doing “Eanie Meanie Minie Moe.” Thin Boy had run to the back of the class like he does every ten seconds. I pointed to him and he threw up his hands and dropped dead after apparently being shot.

Point is, Angry Girl had one class with him and decided that it was not going to happen. So, she left. No goodbye.

The fact that she has called and texted me every day for the past two days is a little reassuring / completely creepy.

My 2:30 class is with a 9 year old we call the Missing Boy because he went missing for a solid 3 hours after getting on the wrong bus and getting out god knows where. The school was in full blown panic mode at this and his mother called up every 5 minutes to scream us out. When asking if it was our bus driver’s fault Han told me that it was all of our faults as we had given him this ridiculously random schedule (actually he comes in at 2 every day but Friday when he comes in at 1). To this I would like to submit that nobody tells me jack about anything and that therefore eliminates any guilt on my part.

He turned up eventually and his mother kept him enrolled. It is very difficult to keep his attention for more than 2 minutes at a time and he frequently pulls out a bouncy ball or Pokemon comic book in the middle of class. His new class mate is rocking some pretty horrible ADD which I do not have the know how to deal with so that class is almost a complete loss as far as learning anything significant.

Older Girls Conversation.  Sorry Kid.

I have an older boy (no nickname) whose class I have forgotten about 3 of the 4 times I have had it which means that he spent too much time staring at me as I went bombing into the class with my book and no lesson plan.

My new favorite class is my Older Girls Conversation Class which is a girl and boy. In the boy’s defense I wrote the name on the folder before he was enrolled in the school. In my defense he acts like a 87 year old woman 95% of the time so I haven’t yet bothered to rewrite the class name. These two kids are 13ish and advanced enough so that by the time I get to their class (they are my last class on my two worst days) I breathe a sigh of relief at not having to put such a huge effort in making myself understood. It’s tiring sometimes to have to put such a continuous effort into being understood. So by the time I see him complaining that he is cold and putting so much effort into his coughing one might mistake him for a chain-smoking old man, and her looking like she wants to deck him, I know the hard part of my day is over.

There is one class that has caught me completely off guard as far as the capabilities of a bunch of little kids driving me nuts.

Little Kid Conversation. It started off well enough. It even had some of my favorite kids. There was Rock Paper Scissors Boy, this really loud girl (I actually know their names but they’re all Kim’s and their full names would take a page, so I’ll call her Loud Girl), this adorable girl that looks like a rabbit, a new quiet kid, and this kid who has a huge problem with pronunciation (I took years of French and I can appreciate this). All at once everything hit went down the tube.

I was too nice. They, particularly the cute little girl, walked all over me. For a few classes it took a lot of work to keep them in their seats and focused. Then I got mad at the cute girl for NEVER paying attention and trying to read comic books while everyone else repeated my every word (oh the power!). Then the boy with the bad pronunciation started to act up. They would routinely get up and try to play games on the computer so I stopped being nice. I started yelling and giving homework, hoping to put an end to the plague.

Didn’t work. My classes with them descended into anarchy. The boy threw a hissy fit after I gave him a slightly torn photocopy. The cute girl wouldn’t participate as she was mad at me for denying her stickers. The Loud Girl just wouldn’t shut up and what is worse RPS Boy turned on me. He shocked me. I’d always pictured him as an ally as he always seemed to yell at kids to shut up for me.

The current bane of my existance.

Monday was what I hope to be rock bottom. I tried to play a game. Somehow RPS Boy and the cute little girl got into a tug of war over a spay bottle. I reached in to try and muscle it from both of them, they ended up ripping off a bunch of skin from my thumb and I sprayed them both in the face and gave them all homework.

Mature? No. Effective? No. Only one kid did the homework.

My current plan is to blindside them with kindness. Today we studied for 20 minutes and then watched 10 minutes of America’s Funniest Home Videos and then gave them all pennies. They now think I am the greatest again.

And that’s my schedule for the foreseeable future for the new semester. This doesn’t actually mean too much as I am averaging one new class a week and generally don’t know what is going on anyway. Tomorrow is my last day of class before the Chuseok holiday for which I am beyond excited. Hello My Name is Earl!