Wednesday, March 31, 2010

New co-teachers

My wife is lucky. She has been going through a slew of bizarre new co-teachers. I did not get any sensi-purse wielding crybabies, or giggling man-children. I did not get female versions of "Mr. Toad" or anything. All I got were three new co-teachers this year, two men and a woman. They all seem perfectly stable, and are all dreadfully normal and/or boring.

The female is a temporary teacher with the personality of a soggy loaf of bread. She sits in the back of the classroom and stares off into space until I call on her to translate something. And when I do, she looks shocked and confused, and may or may not spit out an accurate translation of what I say. We might share one or two words in between classes, about what subjects need to be covered, but mostly we just ignore each other.

The male teachers both speak excellent Englishee, one of them lived in Indiana for several years, has two or three doctorates, and taught at a University in Indiana. He is waiting for a job at one of the better Universities in the area and only took this job to make ends meet until then.

The other male has not lived abroad, but speaks really well, especially for someone who has lived in the sticks of Korea all his life. He has been teaching there for 13 years and came to our school because he wanted to teach in a bigger city, where the quality of the students would be higher. He is very disappointed, since my school is in an industrial area, and the students are poor we have one of the lowest ranking schools in the city.

My head teacher is even more disappointed in the bunch than I am. Not because of a lack of ability, but rather a surplus. She wanted the new Englishee teachers to work for her, and do her bidding, but since the dudes are incredibly over-qualified to teach they have both been made heads of other departments. So once again poor Mrs. Lee has only the temporary teacher to act as her slave, and temporary teachers don't have to show up until their first class starts and leave when the last one ends. She gets her at the most 6 hrs a day, so I am the only one left to do her dirty work. Unfortunately I just play dumb until she does whatever it is she wants me to do, until she does it herself.

Some people get all the luck.

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