Just when I get totally fed up...

I find out I am only teaching one class today. Normally on Tuesdays, like Monday and Friday I have 3 classes (heavy workload). My morning class was canceled, and my co-teacher says that the last class of the day is canceled as well. So that leaves one class right after lunch.

We are teaching the reading section of our textbooks for that one class today, and I don't do the reading part, so I am just riding shotgun in the class. All I am going to do is maybe read a few sections, ask a couple of questions, and stand there with a bored look on my face as my co-teacher translates everything into Korean.

Its a rough life. I have to put up with a lot of bull shit at this job, but it is the easiest fucking gig I have ever had.

My co-teacher even has it rougher. The poor lady is a temporary teacher, so she shows up 5 minutes before her first class starts (yesterday about 10 am, today around 9:30) and leaves when the last class is over (yesterday about 3pm, today the same probably). She still gets her hour lunch, so that makes such a long day more tolerable, but still such harsh conditions!

Its funny how the adminstration throws a shit fit if we leave early or don't come to school when there are no classes, but the a native Korean teacher can come and go as they please. Although she is plenty pissed that she has to come to two weeks of my conversation classes, she probably had a vacation planned! LOL!

HA HA!

As I have said before, the big thing going around right now is a bunch of whining NET's started complaining about having to work during the Christmas and summer breaks because their Principles and Vice Principles were dicks. At my school they told me I would not have to come to school for most of break as I only had to teach six four hour days of camp.

I rejoiced at this and I was happy, until some assholes passed down the new rule. They want to unfairly force us to honor our contracts! The nerve! I have to go to school every day, and put in 8 hours before I can leave! I cant believe how unfair this is!

Now this would not be funny, except they just canceled all my camps. When I heard this, I was like "Awesome! no work during break!" But it was not to be! What my VP decided in her infinite wisdom, is that we will not have the voluntary fun Engilshee camps, where we play games, watch movies, and do arts and crafts. Instead we need to have structured, mandatory Englishee conversation courses no games, no movies, no youtube videos, only dialogue memorization. Because I know how much I would have loved to spend my winter vacations in a classroom memorizing dialogues instead of, oh I don't know...HAVING FUN!

That is not the funny part though. The funniest part is that they are making my co-teacher and the head of the Englishee dept. come in too. They have to spend their entire vacations at work! Not only do they have to come in, they have to stay the whole 8 hours, HAHAHAHAH!!!

Something else that is funny is my wife is in the same program too, and her school was going to do the same thing until they figured out that they would have to pay her co-teacher to come in as well, and they didn't have the budget for it!

I bet the administration is going to get a shitload of complaints from all the Korean Teachers being forced to babysit us over their vacations! My co-teachers sure are pissed at this "it is not...Ideal" as they say.

Cussing in class

I have noticed a lot of my students will throw out the occasional "Shut the fuck up" or "Piece of shit", not at me of course, they love me. They will yell it at other students, however both my co-teacher, who speak decent Englishee (Since they don't actually say Engrish here) never seem to notice. I notice, but I don't really give a fuck if those pieces of shit say those things.

I have wagged an occasional finger at my students, and said "Hey don't say that" Only because I don't want them to get in trouble. I don't want them to get in trouble because that means they get the cane, which in return only seems to rile them up more in my opinion.

It seems like my co-teachers don't really know the good curse words, or if they do, they don't care. On the other hand, my teacher wouldn't let them listen to Justin Timberlake's "Bringing Sexy Back" in class because it was "Rude for the students".

I will never understand Koreans...



PS. Dave is a fucking, piece of shit, asshole, douche bag. He and all his mods can fall through the floor of a squat toilet and drown.

Book tour

So yesterday I was abducted. I had planned to go to Salsa lessons with my sister in law, but my co-teacher and the Head of the Englishee dept had other ideas.

Previously on Mr. Awesomecool's fantastic Voyage, I was given the responsibility of purchasing 2,000,000 won worth of Englishee books for the school(dont bother looking for a post, I did not write about it). As of yesterday I had done absolutely nothing about it. I had briefly checked out the esl cafe idea cook book, but that was it.

My co-teacher mentioned that she found an Englishee language book store, so Mr. Lee got all hot on that and scheduled us to go after classes on Wednesday. At first I was kind of psyched to go,I thought I might be able to pick up some books for myself and my kids. My enthusiasm quickly waned after we arrived.

It was an Enlishee Teaching bookstore, full of textbooks and all the useless lesson and learning books on tape and shit. Like a honey baked ham, my eyes quickly glazed over.

I tried to look for books that might be interesting to the students, and easy to read, but they were hard to come by. Sure the kids might like Harry Potter, but I had a hard time understanding what was going on in that book. JK Roweling being the crooked toothed Brit she is, chocked that thing full of Brit slang, and terms not used in the US, and that definitely would not be understood by Korean teens who read at a 3rd grade level. Everything I tried to pick up was "too differcurt" or "too herd" for my precious students.

My co teacher kept suggesting the most boring god awful books and books with cassette tapes (we dont even have a cassette player in the lab). "I tink da Student wourd rove to reern abert da piramird" But I dont tink so!

I wanted to get students Spongebob, the Simpsons, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Korean subtitles, but they only had Spongebob on video tape. Holy shit! Is it still 1990 over here? You cant even buy video tapes in the US anymore!

We ended up spending about 600,000 in the store, on nothing I wanted but as I learned from Asmith, I did not get involved in the Mongol bullshit. Every time they asked what I thought about something I just nodded and smiled. All I know is I wont be using any of the crap we bought yesterday.

Originally I guessed that the whole thing should take an hour and a half or so. We left around 3 pm, it took about 1/2 an hour to leave work. The drive to the bookstore took about 30 minutes or so. When we got there, we had to have tea first. We did not finish shopping until about 5:30pm, for some reason it took almost as long to actually buy the books. Afterwords we went to dinner, we drove around for about half an hour before finding a place(I will write more about that later). Dinner took about an hour, and then we had tea again. After dinner they drove me to a bus stop (another half an hour) and I finally got home about 9:15pm or so. The whole thing took over 6 hours, and I still have 1.2 million won to blow on books and DVDs. I think I will be ordering the rest online though.

the new ManDate

My co-teacher is trying to set me up on man dates. She wants her husband to do a fun activity with me sometime, but he is really shy so that does not look like it will happen. She has a brother in Law, and apparently he wanted me to call him, or have phone conversations with him, but I thought that was weird so told her I don't like talking on the phone.

Today she asked if would be OK if I went on an overnight trip sometime. I thought she meant for a school activity, and I said sure. Then she asked if I wanted to go camping with her sister in Law sometime.

I was like "Your sister in law?"

She said "Yes my sister in law"

I said "(Is she cute?(in my head)) She wants to go camping with me?"

She said "No he wants to go camping with you."

"Ohhh, your brother in law!"

He did not actually suggest this, it turns out this is all her cunning little scheme to man-date us. Even though she said she could "guarantee" his personality, I was pretty sketched out by the idea and she could tell. So she backed down to a day long fun activity, and I said maybe. It would not be too bad if I got to go somewhere and have some strange dude foot the bill.

It turns out he is the principle(her words) for some university, so if I play my cards right, it could mean a University gig for me sometime in the future, which would be schweeet!