One day. Two classes. I can’t wait.
It’ll be another bs lesson for my sixth graders. With the expectation that many classes at the end of the semester would be canceled, in combination with pure laziness, I haven’t gotten around to planning any real lessons for them for a few weeks now. It’s hard to be motivated to teach them, when nothing I do is effective, anyway. Half of the kids already know what I teach and are bored out of their minds, and half of them have no clue what I’m talking about. Either way, they talk, throw erasers at each other, and generally ignore me. So I’ve been taking the easy way out—praying for last-minute cancellations and winging it. Tomorrow we’re playing Bingo. I’ll have to invest in candy, but it’s worth it. We’ll both be happy.
And then it’s goodbye! Goodbye to Hongsan Elementary for two months, goodbye to the sixth graders FOREVER. All I feel is relief. I might be the most unsentimental person I know. I’m DEFINITELY the most unsentimental person on the peninsula.
Tonight we had dinner with the parents. These dinners out are getting really dull for me. I just sit in a corner, eat a TON, and mull over things. Everyone talks about me like I’m an idiot—sure, I’m not great in Korean, but I can understand my own name even when you say it in a Korean accent, fools—and I just sit and sigh. It’s a chore. Tonight I had to stand awkwardly in the middle of a drafty room while the principal droned on and on in his tiresome monotone and sixty people stared at me intently. It was very disconcerting. It was all I could do to mutter thanks and scurry away. I hate the spotlight. It’s the worst part of being a teacher—you’re always performing, always speaking, always at the center. Especially in a foreign language classroom.
I’ve been feeling really negative about my classroom experiences lately. I am sure now that the kids are learning English in their regular classrooms, which just makes my class superfluous and silly, and on top of that, I’m becoming increasingly doubtful that they actually understand anything I’m teaching them. Their recollection during the review activities this week was less than spectacular. I think I’m doing well enough with, say, first grade. But at the upper levels, I’m at a loss. Maybe I’ve become too focused on conversation and it’s become too much drilling without much comprehension. I don’t know. I’ve been a little embarrassed, even, among the other teachers—I feel that they know now I am a joke. But apparently not, since some of the parents told me I was the hero of Hongsan and the principal asked me to stay another year. There’s not a chance in a billion that I will, but I’m glad my employers don’t yet realize how worthless I am. Or maybe they do and they are just too polite to say it. This is the most difficult part of Korean culture for me—I take everything they say at face value and forget that many things are only said to flatter others. Not that this doesn’t happen in America, too, but at least I can understand the words, even if the body language is still beyond me. Subtlety and grace are not in me.