Me As an Educator

I've  been delaying writing about the actual day to day experience of teaching basically since I got here. I've thought about it a hundred times, but now that I'm sitting here I'm not sure what to write.

Sometimes I think my job is a joke. Sometimes I feel like a glorified babysitter. Sometimes I feel like I am doing good work, and that I am teaching these kids English really well for someone with zero training and no previous experience. Our lesson planning is minimal, because we work out of  books. All of the students have their own.  But we have a leeway--for most classes there is more time than we can fill up with the material in the books. The shitty kids spend way more time as is necessary, and the good kids get through the material early. The result is that I put in effort proportional to what the students put in.

My favorite class has only five students in it. They are keen and quick-witted. They do their work quickly and four of them really enjoy being in the class. I return their enthusiasm in kind. We chat, play games (some of them quite sophisticated) and once a week we read out of Charlotte's Web and answer questions about the story.

I had another class, until recently, and they were real jerks. Again, five students. Most of them would not do their work. Ever. They would constantly chat in Korean, not pay attention. They acted like they were on lunch break at school. Needless to say, I didn't care much about that class. I put in the bare minimum of effort, and even then I felt like it was wasted energy. I would take the worst offenders out of class every day. I would try to reason with them and all I would get in response was whining. From 13-year-olds.

 My school is twice as expensive as any other Hagwam in town, so I have to deal with a lot of spoiled brats. To be fair, some of these kids go to as many as five hagwans after school. And that's every day. Every bit of their day is structured, and they never get to spend much time with their parents. The result is that they develop all kinds of skills, but they are often immature for their age. When I ask my kids what they are going to do on the weekend, the most common responses are: sleep and play video games.

I'm not going to complain about my wage, but the teachers at my school have to work twice as hard as the teachers at the other hagwans. Sometimes I hear it suggested that we are overpaid. I don't think that we are. Sometimes I  say that the job is easy, but you can spend as much or as little time outside of the classes as you want. Everything considered we work more than eight hours per day. The job can also be very stressful. Not that there is a high level of expectation put on us, but we all want to do a good job regardless, and we don't always get support from out Korean co-teachers, not to mention our director (who still doesn't like answering questions, and still calls me "Bradly"). So even though the most likely reaction to our doing a shitty job is getting less responsibility, we still try to do good work, and we get angry when we are failing. Well, I assume its true about the others--it's certainly true for me.