Today the new, permanent foreign coworker has arrived. There is no training period at the school. People simply show up, are handed pages of paperwork for each class, and basically have to learn the system themselves. You can ask questions between classes, but there is a lot to cover. Different days we check different things, go to different classes, see different students, and sometimes have multiple books per class. It’s all rather confusing.
My coworker made the best of it, asking questions to the head teacher. She answered some of his questions regarding tests and collected journals.
The head teacher turned and asked me, "So, about how long did it take you to learn what was going on in the school?"
I replied, "Everything you just told him was new to me too."
Seems I’ve been at the school for a few months now and still don’t know all the paperwork procedures. Not that I’ve ever been told what to do. I track attendance, homework, give tests, proctor other tests, teach, assign homework, create worksheets, hand out papers, and everything else required in "teaching", but I still have more paperwork to track and keep organized. Wow.
Not only that, but there are shifting priorities. Once I graded with a score, then I was told to change to a letter, now it’s back to a score. All that kind of stuff means I’m constantly learning on the job. Just when I think I’ve got a handle on the situation, things change. I spend probably an hour a week in each class fiddling around with paperwork and checking boxes, signing, or collecting papers. It’s all an enormous hassle that makes me only slightly more productive. The students and the school wouldn’t be able to keep the schedule and operate without it however, so the likelihood it will decrease is no where in my mind.
