Back to work

My two week vacation has unfortunately ended. The days went by far too fast, I miss doing nothing at home, now that I am once again doing nothing at work.

The new school year does not start until march, but we still have a couple weeks of class left. I have no Idea what I am suppose to be doing, since we have finished our workbooks and the 3rd year students are graduating. They have once again shut the heat off in my classroom so I can no longer watch movies and TV shows, being under the watchful eye of the Vice Principal once more.

Before my vacation they asked me to write some proposals on improving English, which i did not do. I do not really believe they are serious about improving English, or willing to do anything I suggest. The head of the English dept. asked me about it today, and I told her that I should stop doing lessons from the book, and just do conversations and activities with the students. Of course I already knew that would be unacceptable. I just said that, so she would not ask for any proposals in writing to give to the Principal and Vice Principal, on the off chance that they listened to me, it would mean more work for her and the other co-teachers.

Unfortunately she just asked me for my "prepared materials" it turns out that she has to present them to the Principal and Vice Principal, in say...five minutes. She had all fucking morning to tell me this, but at 5 to 11:00am she told me to give her my proposals. I am not surprised, I kind of expected this. Well I typed some shit out real fast, I proposed no more textbook teaching for me during classes, and bullshit after school classes where I would not have to do anything. Less work + more money = improved Englishee.

Over the break they installed motion sensitive "dialogue boxes" in the hallways of the school. Whenever you walk by one of these machines they start shouting phrases in English at you. How having random englishee phrases shouted at the students will improve English is beyond my comprehension, I am sure they will be vandalized, disabled or ignored by students after a couple of weeks.

Well that's all I have for now, time to watch movies while they have their big stupid meeting in some other classroom.

Winter camp, round two

I am doing 3 weeks of camp divided up among the five1st grader classes (7th grade equivalent). I have each group for 3 days of fun filled...being talked at. I just finished the first group so today we are starting the 1-2 group.

It has been so boring at school, with the camps being over at noon. It would not be so bad, except after my camp is over, they automatically shut off the heat in my classroom. In my classroom I can watch TV shows or movies or porn. OK maybe not porn, but I am all alone, with a large screen TV and I can do pretty much whatever I want.

With no heat in the classroom, I am forced to pack up my shit, and go to the Teachers office, where they feel sorry for me being bored, so they try to think of things for me to do all day. They don't seem to understand that I prefer being bored to actually doing shit.

It has been decided by the principal that he wants to focus on improving the Englishee of the students at our school. I have been given 4 assignments to write proposals for improving said Englishee.

1. Ways to improve Englishee in general. The ideas of the head teacher and principal include a read board to be ignored by students at the entrance of the building. Posting signs in Englishee by the stairwells, to be ignored by students. Making me write proposals to be ignored by the head teacher and principal that might actually improve Englishee.

2. Develop a method of testing the students Englishee speaking ability. They want me to judge how well each student speaks Englishee and grade them accordingly. That should encourage the students who have a harder time speaking, by telling them what a shitty job they are doing. That should give them the confidence they need to keep trying!

3. Newsletter. At the beginning of the year they told me they wanted a newsletter in Englishee. They told me to choose the students from an Englishee conversation class that we would have in the mornings. They chose the students for that class. The students showed up one time. Yeah that is not happening..

4. Dialogue awards. I will be giving students stickers when they practice talking with me, at the end of the year the students with the most stickers get a prize. That is actually not a half bad idea, except I know I am going to be forgetting to hand out the stickers, and I am pretty sure some of the kids might cheat by buying identical stickers.

Well I have 3 weeks to think about this, meaning I will actually write these proposals the day before they demand to see them. Good ideas need to marinate.