My foreign coworker managed to take his vacation at the BEST POSSIBLE TIME EVER. We’ve canceled all middle school and late evening classes, so I don’t have to stay later to cover all of his classes. Every teacher has been teaching on their break, so despite his absence I’ll only cover three of his classes this week. All of those classes were today.
My first class of the day was the youngest set of children that attend the school. They are the lowest level students of a huge class. My coworker often is defeated in his attempts to explain things to the children. With 12 very young students, any misstep would mean anarchy and chaos. It was a fine line to walk.
It was amusing to see how these students were conditioned by the teachers that usually control their classes. One student acted as a “number relay”, trying to translate every single page number I said into Korean for her classmates. I assume this is because some of the students don’t know English numbers yet, or my coworker doesn’t use Korean numbers when students don’t know what’s happening in class. Whenever I would tell the slower students what pages to turn to in English, I would hear an intake of air. The students would gasp in surprise.
One student that sat in the front of class didn’t know how to get my attention except to poke me with a pencil. I was sitting right in front of her, and she would poke my hand when she wanted to talk. This might have been cute, except when I went up to the board and started writing, she would walk up and poke me in the ribs with her pencil when she wanted to keep talking. My first rule: No touching the teacher. It didn’t apply in my coworker’s classroom.
One student forgot her book. I made a copy. Another student forgot a pencil. I loaned her one of mine. Another girl forgot her eraser. I tossed her a spare. One girl said, “You have to give them a demerit! They forgot their supplies! That’s what the Korean teacher does!”
I thought that was rather harsh. Most of the kids were just out of kindergarten. I let them off with a warning. When I got back to the teacher’s room, the Korean teacher in question asked me about the students. I told them that she had a reputation of being strict with the students and explained what one of the students had told me in Korean. My coworker denied ever punishing the students and called the young girl a liar. Heh. I found it immensely amusing to watch her squirm about the accusations of an 8 year old.
The next set of classes I covered was odd because my own cousin by marriage was in the class. He is in a class full of idiots I used to teach last year. I vowed never to teach his classmates after they made me angry repeatedly last year. This was the first time I had to be in a room with them again.
We did an activity where we had to draw a character in a story and what they were dreaming about, then draw our own dream and write about it.
The boy with the electronic dictionary said his dream was to, “Kill his sister.” What a wonderful child. Other students wanted to be pro wrestlers. The smarter ones, like my cousin, diplomats. I could tell that my cousin didn’t think much of his classmates.
The last class was filled with students that I had taught in other classes at various times, but never at the same time. They were all the overachievers of other classes thrown together to study textbooks much harder than the books common for their ages. This is the only class I would have volunteered to keep out of the classes I taught extra today. They were really very nice and well behaved. After the other classes my coworker taught, they must have seemed like heaven.
Regarding the workload for students, I give tons more homework compared to what I saw from my student’s notes. At every single level I give tons more homework than he does. My temporary students seemed dismayed when I wrote an extremely “light” load for them to do because they needed to study for their mid term examinations. I have no idea what will happen when I need to mix students with his for this summer vacation. I expect a backlash of rebellious students.
Anyway, it was amusing covering his classes, but I really wouldn’t want to do it for an extended period of time. The differences in the classes were subtle. I think I work the students harder and get more done in each class, but I also think he befriends more students. Meh.
