I had kind of a hard, depressing day at work yesterday. I had slept badly. I really hate sleeping with the air conditioner running, as it makes the air feel stale in my little apartment (not to mention driving up the electric bill, and setting aside the fact that Koreans would tell me that it’s lethally dangerous – this is a strong cultural belief they hold) – but when I try to sleep with my window open, these horrible swarms of mosquitoes that live in the swampy between-buildings-place under my window invade and chomp on my blood.
So I woke up at around 3 am yesterday morning, chompified, and slammed my window shut and hunted mosquitoes for a while, and then couldn’t get back to sleep. Because of the way the window opens (a sort of angle out tilt-opening window), a screen wouldn’t work even if it tried to have one.
So later I got to work, feeling tired out and under-rested.
I have some new classes, in new formats, because of the “test prep schedule” (see previous blog post). I wanted to try to prepare for those some more. Karma hagwon calls them “CC” classes, and I don’t even know what this acronym is supposed to stand for, but they’re meant to be multi-media classes where we watch, listen to and shadow various audio-visual stuff: news presentations, movies, pop-song music videos, etc.
I am of two minds of this type of thing. I think it can be very useful, and the kids get into it, as they do anything audio-visual and computer-based. But Korean classrooms (especially hagwon) have such low standards of technology infrastructure that wrestling with the hardware and software is often much, much more trouble than it’s worth. Very often when teaching at Hongnong, and even more at LinguaForum and LBridge before that, any time I get stuck using technology in a Korean classroom, I soon find myself fantasizing that my next teaching job will involve a dirt-floored classroom with only a blackboard, somewhere in India.
So messing with the technology for this CC class put me in a grumpy mood.
Then, my boss kind of blew up at me over the fact that some mom called and complained that her kid was having too much fun in my class. I’ve written about this many times before – there is a major subclass of Korean parents who believe that if their kids are having fun in hagwon, they’re not learning anything. It’s a difficult demographic to please, obviously, especially given my own methodological predelictions.
There’s never an easy answer to these things, but having him bitch at me about it really ticked me off. He knows how I think about it, and I think at heart, he agrees – I know he does, because that’s why I wanted to work for him. But there’s a lot of pressure on hagwon owners to please the parents, and as a businessman, that’s only logical. So, net result… we have to figure out how to make little Jinmo a little less happy in his phonics class – give him a little extra homework, yell at him, a little bit. So sad… The parents are our customers, and “the customer is always right,” right?
So if the CC technology made me grumpy, my boss’s little parentally-induced tantrum had me fuming. Not your typical day at hagwon. And my “frontloaded” schedule – with no middle-schoolers – meant that I didn’t have any later evening classes to escape into to cheer me up again. I just sat fuming at my desk, waiting for closing time and trying to do something productive on my debate textbook project (which had been in stasis for most of August).
But then a middle-school student named Wonjun poked his head into the otherwise vacant staff room, and said, in a quiet, forlorn voice, “Hi teacher.” Gloomily. The test-prep classes aren’t much fun, I know.
“Wonjun-a! What’s up?” I said, with that false cheerfulness I’ve learned so well since becoming a teacher.
“I miss you,” he said, grinning.
[Picture above – Van Gogh’s “Pont de l’Anglois”]
