It's Sunday afternoon, and I 'm hung-over, so it must be time to write in the blog.
Usually, I have a hard time deciding to write about. Today I am encumbered by no such burden.
As anxious as I am to get on with it, I should stretch out the preamble a little further as precaution against exposing potentially damning content to the web surfer who has typed in a very specifically worded Google-search. You see, although this blog is invite-only and password-protected, for some reason, the geniuses at Google (who own blogger) make the first couple of lines of a given blog entry readable from the results of a browser query, regardless of privacy settings.*
Man, I'm getting to be such a good writer it's giving me chills. I don't know if it's the Graham Greene, the Strunk and White, or the "buffallow effect." In any case, I gotta start doing this stuff for money.
Okay, that seems like enough filler.
The ***** drama (my director) against my hopes and expectations, has continued.
It turns out that I really like teaching kids. I'm not going to do it for more than a year, but children lack so many of the pretensions that most adults carry around, they harbour less resentment, and they forgive and forget more easily. Kids, and even middle-schoolers, angry and confused by the world as they be, aren't as jaded by life. Kids, as a rule, don't cling to petty reasons to hate, as some adults do;
adults like the passive aggressive, over-worked women that are my Korean co-teachers.
Let me come clean about something. A couple of months ago, we finished the epic debacle that was the Beyond Advanced open class series. To celebrate, we were going to go to a fancy sushi restaurant. At the last minute, our benefactor decided to take us to a sea-side dive.
I had the silly idea in my head, as I often do, that I wasn't going to drink. Well, when I was handed a glass of soju, and prompted to make a toast, I couldn't refuse. My glass kept getting refilled--admittedly, I did do my share of refilling, although that job did not not fall exclusively on me.
Eventually, after too many sojus, I thought it would be funny if I took some pictures with my colleague's camera, and when my subjects posed cutely with their peace-sign, and fake camera smiles, I would take pictures of them from the neck down. In retrospect, this was a huge failure in judgment. In my defense I have only to say that I had too much to drink, and that this was meant as a private lark between my and the colleague who owned the camera, whom I had decided would surely see the humor in it, and not immediately show everyone.
Although this had happened months before, ***** brought the photo incident up while scolding Morgan and I after school last Thursday. Morgan blew up at one of his classes. He got angry at his students and got in a fight about which was better--Korea or the USA. ***** thought that while she was giving Morgan hell and informing him that they were pulling him out of that class, that she would scold me while she was at it--to save time, I guess.
She told me that some student's parents were accusing me of teaching their kids curse-words. I have no idea where this idea came from, because I did not. Also, she claimed, one student claimed that I made a "comment about her body". This is a very serious claim, and most certainly NOT something that I did, either suggestively or otherwise.
However, ***** decided to scold me as if I were a delinquent student. Her rational--if it were Greg or Ben who had received such complaints she would not have given them any credence, but since it was myself that was in question, she was unable to dismiss the complaints. I never did find out who the children were who were making the claims, and I doubt very much if they were reprimanded in any way.
*This was at one point true, before my contract ended and I made this blog public.
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