One Korean word that I use quite frequently is 시간표. It means “schedule” – I use it because it comes up so much at work, and there are so many issues involving the scheduling of classes, etc.
Today we had a sort of “schedule crisis” – that’s how I would describe it. I am of the opinion that KarmaPlus has made its own schedule unnecessarily complicated, but it’s more a consequence of lack-of-planning and the “evolved” nature of it than because of any specific incompetence. In any event, anytime some policy change (e.g. in this case, the new policy “Jared should teach all the advanced level speaking classes for the elementary students”) is decided, there arise numerous scheduling conflicts and problems – in fact, we have 11 cohorts in parallel and only 10 teachers – so you can see where the problems can arise as resources get spread quite thin. Thus, the new schedule (intended for July 1st) failed to represent the intended policy. My reaction was to just shrug and take it in stride, but Ken felt upset because it was something we had fought hard for. Now we are madly struggling to solve the problem, well past the deadline. This is typical in Korea, I guess – at least in hagwonland.
I’m writing about this because in the event of discussing this, I got a bit defensive and got angry. “I didn’t make the f__ing schedule,” I said to Ken and Razel. This was bad behavior, on my part. I agree. Now I feel badly about it. That kind of reaction poisons coworker relationships.
Partly, this event occurred after I had just gotten out of three not-so-well-done classes. I had attempted to “have a fun class” with the elementary kids, since it’s the last day of the old schedule before cohorts get rearranged and new books and levels are started. The kids weren’t getting it, though. After having computer problems during my first class (I was trying to do one of the karaoke-style “CC” classes with them), the second and third classes failed to play by the rules of the game we were trying to play. So I was annoyed with them; we stopped the game and went back to textbook, which was a bummer for everyone. I didn’t lose my temper in class, but I was on a short fuse by the time I got back upstairs to the staff room, and when I got confronted with “why is the schedule like this? This isn’t what we agreed on,” immediately, I blew it.
Thus I’ve spent the last 2 hours feeling repentant and trying to solve the schedule problem, but I can’t. It’s just too complicated. There are universities with less complex schedules than this small 10 teacher hagwon, I swear. A person would need a degree in mathematics with a specialization in graph theory and combinatorics to solve it.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]