The amount of inconsiderate bullshit I will tolerate in my day has been exceeded by such a wide margin today that I’m simply fuming.Right away, the day started off on a sour note. My first class was supposed to be my advanced students, my favorites. They had to return to school today, because they needed to do their level changing paperwork and say goodbye to friends.
Instead of good students, I got stuck with students I can’t stand for my first class. This would have been tolerable, as I teach them once every day. The problem was that I’d still have my normal class in addition to this extra class I was taking over to “help out”. It’s a double dose of a bitter medicine I don’t like to take.
The stuff I had planned for my normal class got pushed to my first class, then I had an hour with nothing set up to follow. These are students that will have WWE wrestling matches in class if I step out of the room for 30 seconds. Half the class is filled with sweet, nice students that hate the bad students as much as I do, so any universal punishment isn’t fair either. I wanted to reward the good students for not quiting for a month of class with these morons.
I brought the game “Boggle” and set it up on the board. We had a game of competitive Boggle between two teams working really well. With about 15 minutes left before the class was supposed to end, the secretary showed up with two boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts. The secretary came in and announced “DONUT TIME!” You can’t turn down food when it’s given to the entire class. This is too early to let the class break and just eat pure sugar to recharge their reserves too.
Left unsupervised, these students are three minutes away from throwing someone out of a window. The think about Krispy Kreme is that everyone wants to wash their hands because the glaze. Once one person leaves, everyone has to leave. This means a constant stream of bad students running around the hallway.
If I can’t watch them, they are going to do something bad. If the secretary had brought the donuts 10 minutes later, it would have been PERFECT. I would have really liked to have ended a class with a donut party. Instead it was only 2/3 of the way done, and the result was CHAOS. I basically threw up my hands and tried to make sure none of the bigger children hurt anyone in elementary school. That’s all I could do to contain the violence.
I WOULD have gone to complain about this terrible planning on their part, but every time I was out of class, the director would run into her office for another meeting with parents. This was a problem for another reason that soon became 100% more important anyway.The past week I’ve been bothering my director for a schedule for my next set of classes. I finally got that schedule today. It’s not a good schedule for anyone involved. I’m working over my contractual obligation for another month. Yes, I get paid per hour, so I am going to make a lot more than normal. I’ll make off like have an extra month of intensive period classes.
All of my coworkers were over their contract limits too, and they won’t be hiring a new Korean teacher to get us below that limit any time soon. None of the teachers are pleased about it. Also, I’m staying past my desired time for latest classes three nights a week, and teaching straight schedules with only 5 minute breaks.
This is another annoying thing. We’ve pushed our classes back, so we stay later, but removed breaks to keep students from running around the halls. The students will STILL run around the halls, but now they’ll be five minutes late when they return. This is a huge problem when you need to make a change or prepare new material for a student without a book. I’ll waste more class time because I won’t have preparation time before classes.
When I cornered the director, pointing out that if she took a single class of mine, which I could then “repay” to her by taking one of her own, I could save THREE hours of my time and have a slightly more tolerable schedule. She said, “No, I’m not going to have a class. I need more flexibility to deal with problems.”
Yeah, how about the problem of finding a new teacher if you think I’m going to put up with this schedule? If only I had mentioned that at the time. My wife told me to hand in my resignation on the spot after I told her how badly I was being jerked around. Contract with defined terms and limits? Who needs to honor a contract?
My director gave me assurances that several of the classes are for a single month only. If this isn’t the case, she’ll get my resignation letter the first day I see the new schedule. I’m in a very friendly market, and I am more than willing to throw my weight around to see I get what I want because of it. My director might be busy, but I’m not happy about how I’m being brushed aside with my terms of employment.
That was NOT the final injustice of the day. One of my classes got preempted because my director had a “special program” that she wanted them to see. She hadn’t told me about this ahead of time. I was fine with having a break, because I was going to have my last class in an hour anyway.
When the students to the last class of mine showed up to school, they were also directed to the seminar. I was kept in the school waiting for them for an hour, but I didn’t teach for the rest of the day. I wasted TWO hours of my day for NO reason other than someone was too lazy to tell me they had changed the schedule and canceled my last two classes. No one could tell me anything because no one knows what is going on!
Basically, my school went from “Tolerable to somewhat enjoyable” to “What the hell am putting up with this for?” annoying in a single day. I’ve got my shit together, and I should expect them to be able to handle their school matters better.
