::A Geek in Korea::

I am in a unique position at the school. The status quo with scheduling would have been very bad for me if I had come to work there through the regular means by inheriting the most common level of classes.  I happened to replace a teacher in the middle of the semester. That person had seniority over some people and had picked a higher level class to teach for whatever reason.

There were only two people set to teach that level, and everyone else teaches the level below. The level of the classes doesn’t mean anything, it only determines the books we teach. Schedules for teachers are distributed by seniority, so if I had replaced someone teaching at the lower level, I would have been nearly at the bottom for class scheduling choice. I want to continue teaching the same level next semester to save time.

Because I replaced one of only two teachers that teach the higher level, the playing field looks different despite being a new teacher. The only way I won’t end up with the schedule I have now is if someone ahead of me seniority wise volunteers to do double the work to take my spot at the higher level. They’d have to throw away all their prepared materials from this semester to teach the new level, as well as prepare new material on top of that.The chances that someone is going to do that, according to the head teacher, are remote, but possible.

There are a long list of names in front of me, and they could potentially decide to take my level and bump me down to the lower one if they liked my schedule better for some reason. I haven’t been there long enough to protest, despite the amount of work it would cause me. The Korean director certainly suggested that I’d be better off in my current position. She wanted to get me to sign up for my current schedule immediately, but I was told to hold off by the head teacher. He was doling out the schedules based on seniority and I didn’t want to cause any problems. Someone else has already signed up in someone else’s spot and I didn’t want to be in the middle of something if there was a problem. Since I’ll probably get what I want anyway, I might as well sign up when a few more people have decided what they wanted.

My schedule isn’t highly desirable compared to some of the ones that went right away, but it’s better than the work I had at my old private school teaching elementary school students. If someone gets a really lousy schedule and decides they don’t mind the extra work, or were burnt out teaching the same thing, they might end up taking my spot, but I hope not. The other person that teaches my level could theoretically also want to swap schedules with me, but unless someone really wants to teach the higher level students despite needing to do more work I don’t expect a problem over my schedule.

I hope, I hope, I hope.