Sunday 20 September 2009

Usually I think it's too bad that Rachel and Nick don't come earlier when the weather's nice (like now) because by the time they come it will be freezing and we won't be able to do as much. Then today it finally dawned on me how perfect that is. For me. Right about the time that I will be confined to my apartment when I'm not at work, they will be here.

I've started teaching after school classes at Wonmi. I was hoping I'd make a lot of extra money off of it, but it's only 20 classes disbursed over 3 months. That and I only tutor (or will be tutoring) 2 Saturdays a month. And it's hella far away. I just want one more tutoring job, maybe 2 and I'll be happy.

Thursday was my first day of after school. I had prepared a syllabus with some Korean translations. We would be doing the same thing every week. Monday's would start with the same writing exercise, then some vocabulary, etc. Thursday's would start with a different writing exercise, then a song and some other stuff and end with a quiz. I pretty much had all 20 classes planned out, basing it on nothing but myself since all I was told was do whatever I want. In our office, after the first class, Rose tells me that some kids told her it was too hard and then she told me to get an elementary school level text book for them. The text book and workbook I found Saturday cost me 24 000w. Whatever. It annoys me and pisses me off (esp. since that is twice this week I've done all this planning only to be told that I would need to start from scratch), but I'm working on getting over it. Choose your battles. Being pissed off isn't going to change anything. My other preparation was for a "demo" class that the principal would be sitting in on. I was told to pick any Thursday class. I picked the upper level 2nd grade class. I wrote out the paper that they wanted and I prepared the class. Then last week, Miyoung tells me that we can't do 203 because she can't do a lower level class. I don't know what the fuck she's talking about and I think there was some language issues with the whole ting, but it doesn't really make a difference to me the reason why since I don't have a say so either way. I prepared what she told me to for that and then O-kyeong mentioned me preparing the whole thing, so I stayed late at working doing that and writing up the plans for my after school class again. I finally left at 6:45. Rose was subtly asking me all day what was wrong, but I didn't say anything. If I told her I was frustrated from all that shit I think it would only cause more problems. No, I know it would.

ps. The plans I had prepared for the demo class, based on the example plans they had given me, weren't what the Vice Principal wanted and they had to be changed again.