::A Geek in Korea::

I’ve been forced to put my phone on “manner mode” for the past week because of my students needing to take quiz in class. I told all the students to turn off their phones in class, but the best I realistically could have hoped for was a vibration tone of manner mode. As long as no one was taking calls or sending text messages to one another I wasn’t going to get too upset. Since my students couldn’t make noise with their phone, I’d look like a hypocrite if I did the same thing, so I’ve had my phone on silent manner mode for the majority of the week too.

I am a very routine based person, and my sleeping schedule is predictable too. I wake up at nearly the same time every morning and rarely feel groggy or tired after a shower. I need to simply get to sleep at a time to wake up at a point X hours later. If I got to bed much too early, I’ll wake up too early. If I go to bed late, I’ll probably get up at the same time I normally do, but simply need a nap sometime during the day. My body knows how much sleep it needs and operates within certain parameters.

These days though, with the baby, the dog, and the job requiring so much of my attention, I’ve been finding myself in a sleep deficit more than usual. When I get to go to bed I have few problems sleeping because I am falling asleep exhausted. I’m slowly approaching the top of that mountain instead of being buried underneath, but I’ve had a long week dealing with the quizzes and everything I needed to get graded and input into the computer at work.

It was no surprise that last night I left my phone on manner mode when I put it on the night stand to charge it. It simply slipped my mind. Because of that, it didn’t go off this morning to wake me. I haven’t needed an alarm for months because I wake up at exactly the same time every day. I didn’t go to bed any later than normal last night either. In fact, I happened to go to bed a little earlier than I usually do, but I slept in all the same. I got an extra forty minutes of sleep and woke up just in time to take a shower, scarf down my meal, get dressed, and head out the door to catch the last bus before class.

Serendipitously, I ended up on the same bus that takes my old coworker from my last job to his Korean class that he takes at my university! I has meant to invite him to a house party I was attending tomorrow and I ran into him on the bus! How awesome is that?! I still made it to work on time, and I had prepared all my lessons a day in advance so it took no time at all to get up to speed once I arrived. I actually had three fantastic lessons in a row too, then went straight to the office and worked for three hours on paperwork to get up to speed.

I guess sleeping in wasn’t all bad, since I got to catch up with my old coworker to see what’s going on and invite him to a party. Apparently, the machine of elementary school English education for profit rolls on without me. Oh how I wished I was the irreplaceable cog in that machine, but I’m as forgettable as any other foreign teacher! Sad but true. In a few months no one at the school will even remember me. (I did have four or five students stop me on the street while my parents were here to say, “Hello.” That was really awesome.)

I get to actually sleep in tomorrow morning, manner mode or not, and I hope I can make up the difference in sleep needed and sleep gotten for the past week. Right now that equation is very out of whack.