Almost two weeks here, now – the newness begins to wear off.
Walking home last night, I felt tired. There was that foggy haze hanging among trees and over streets, that you see with high humidity on hot nights, as the ground cools faster than the air. I guess I had my first "bad day" yesterday, as the routine is established and I begin to take certain things for granted, and then something goes amiss. Just this one group of kids (a medium-ability cohort called 왹고-2) who seemed profoundly uninterested, and couldn't stop chattering among themselves, checking their cellphones, writing notes….
Relative to my experience teaching in the U.S. (which was years ago, and in a fairly privileged private school, admittedly), there are very few disciplinary problems with kids here, but it still was getting to me. It doesn't help that the book we're working in seems a little "easy" for them, and that they seem uninterested in the topics being covered (the text tries to be "hip," providing articles covering things like video games and the internet, but in the area of computers and the internet, a few years amounts to decades, so the book's 2003 publish date means that the material being covered is ancient history as far as these kids are concerned).
Well, anyway, I tried to break up all the chattering pairs and roughhousing triplets, moving the seating arrangement around – this was the first time I'd done such a thing, and the reaction was sobering: suddenly the class went from carefree and chattering but entirely unfocused to somber, very focused, and with a palpable atmosphere of teenage resentment. They literally sat there glowering at me, with a sudden peculiar solidarity that forgot all their internecine squabbles and tribal affiliations of moments before. Ah well. It was bound to happen sooner or later – and I'm not about to back down – that's what they hope to achieve, of course. I know enough about classroom management to understand that the main thing is to be predictable and consistent – being a new teacher, I'm still showing them my boundaries and tolerances and expectations, and to back down would be handing them an irrevocable victory.
But still, it left me in a gloomy state of mind as I walked home later. Let's see how things go today.