The Peace Corps Drops the Axe (Again)

I received another letter in the mail from the Peace Corps which informed me that my appeal was not approved.  Perhaps it was a day or two ago.  I was expecting to hear that, so I wasn’t terribly moved.  I felt a little relieved, anyway.  What with accepting (begging for?) this six-month contract at my school, shit would get complicated if I had to go through the Peace Corps’ extensive interview process.  I’m glad that I know where I will be and can plan accordingly.

I found the major reason why the Peace Corps never got back to me.  I had the wrong email addresses.  I forwarded them yesterday, and I know I got at least one of the email addresses correct because I received an automated “out of the office until” message.  So cross your fingers that they reaffirm my rejection quickly.

At work I’ve been steadily plowing through testing all of my twenty-seven classes.  The principal bought all of these dried bamboo sticks for the teachers.  Thems for hittin’.  Good thing I brought mine to my last class of the day.  First grade boys, with the infamous sexually aggressive Subin, and only seven of 33 did the preparation work for the test that they’d been assigned.  Little MK took the ones without the work into the hall and whacked their palms with my new bamboo stick and reprimanded them verbally.  At one point Subin kept saying “boobs” to me, and I told him to shut it, though all I actually said was “that’s not funny” and looked away.  After coming back from being punished he walked past me at the podium and blew into my ear.  Jesus!  Seriously, how has this 12 year old kid learned to sexually harass the female teachers?  Little MK says that he is a major problem and that, in her years of teaching (maybe 7 years?  I’m not sure) she has never had a kid who behaved this way.  If he persists, he is one the track to become a sexual predator or having the shit kicked out of him – well, only if he goes to Itaewon, the foreigner district.  I’m considering taking him out of the next class if he pulls this kind of shit again and yelling at him until he cries.  But it’s also hard to make myself care enough, either.  Like I’ve said, Korean women are so permissive to creeps.  I hope it’s just some demented stage that’ll he get out of in a few months.  Or that it isn’t even demented and that I can read about it in a child development book, and he’ll grow out of it and be a normal dude.

So, why did this class perform so so poorly?  Of all of the classes doing this work, they were by far the worst.  As I’ve said before, if you have consistent trouble with kids performing an assignment, as a teacher you have to look to yourself.  Have I not prepared them?  Is the work over their heads?  But the Korean educational system throws a major kink into the works by passing students no matter what their grade.  You heard me.  No matter what their grade.  I think they will have trouble getting accepted into a high school, but that isn’t a reasonable goal for students.  How can an elementary student understand that?  That’s a really long term goal.  I think they are doing their population a huge disservice.  While I’m giving them their grades, I can take a gander at their midterm grades.  Students fail, abysmally fail, like below 50′s, very very often.  It’s horrendous, and all systems are flawed, I definitely haven’t worked in the American educational system so I don’t know what’s wrong with it, but I can tell you that not holding students accountable for their work is fucking the students over.  They also are sort of tip toeing around another thing.  I think they are trying to tell me that I can’t give students zeroes.  If they don’t do one iota of the work – don’t finish the worksheet, hell, don’t even try to answer a single question,  and can’t perform the dialogue or answer one question, why do they get any points?

Screw this peninsula.

Rejection Letters Make Good Bookmarks

My open class is scheduled for next Tuesday.  There will be a few teachers / officials from other schools observing me, and they will decide to keep me based on what they see.  I’m unprepared, as of Friday night,  but I feel ambiguous about the whole thing anyway.   Take me, don’t take me.  I think – think- that the teachers I work with would keep me for another semester if it was up to them.  They are the ones whose opinion matters the most to me, leastways.  But this open class can’t be avoided.   Everyone hoping to resign must have one.   Of course, it isn’t a real class.  You have to put on a show.  Your lesson isn’t anything like the normal lesson you would give.  Do a song and dance.  (That is figurative, because as a middle school teacher I don’t actually have to sing and dance.  Phew.)

I would be disappointed if I wasn’t resigned.  I’m not dying to stay here, though.  I wouldn’t say I have a life carved out for myself in Korea which I would fight for, it’s just that I don’t want another rejection.  (I’m using my Peace Corps rejection letter as a bookmark for the Richard Dawkins book I’m currently reading.)

After my unequivocal failure last Tuesday at work, I was reticent about teaching again.  Turns out I’m not so awful, and that most of my students are adorable, respectful, cool little adults.  Every Friday we have the morning English broadcast.  Today I showed them pictures of mummies and talked about them a bit.  I use a lot of power point slides so that the kids that won’t be able to follow it very well will at least get to see cool pictures of dead shit.  Now that I’ve gotten into the swing of the morning broadcast I’m really digging it because I get to talk about most anything that interests me.  Mars, volcanoes, mummies.