a day (or really long week) in the life of alex teacher

we've just finished a 6-day week, and i'm feeling a little tired of being a teacher. or maybe just a little tired.

as a sidenote, typically, we work on a monday-friday schedule, and relish our weekends (everybody's workin' for the weekend, aren't they?). however, last week, there was a protest on wednesday and we got an unexpected mid-week day off. to back track a bit, the government in our province is trying to pass a law that prohibits classes past 10pm - which, in my opinion is a human rights/child labour law that should have been in places ages ago before students were ever required to be in school from 8am to 12am in this country ... but i digress. so the big guys want classes to end at 10, and our school is outraged (as are many other hagwons), because this causes their business to lose money, and so on. in response, they decided to cancel classes for the day to allow representatives to attend this public protest and to ... prove a point? i'm not really sure, my mind's kind of boggled at the irony of demanding more class hours by cancelling an entire day of school.

but anyway, what this all meant was that we had to work this saturday, more or less against our will. which also meant that we had a six-day week, followed by a one-day weekend. which leads us up to now: relieved, and worn out.

don't get me wrong, on a good day, i really enjoy teaching. the kids are cute and entertaining and i really can't complain about getting to play a lot of games throughout the day. sometimes the students can be funny, and i like joking around with them and making them sing songs they don't want to (the older ones especially). i love when a kid wears a shirt with a hood and i catch them unaware and put it on their head and tie the strings really tight and in a double knot before they know what's happening (potentially cruel, but ohso hilarious).

but then there are the not-so-good days, where every student is super-annoying, and they won't stop speaking korean instead of english, and you keep hearing them drop "alex teacher"s in the midst of what you can't understand, and they're up out of their chairs and yelling and screaming, and your co-teacher is knocking on the door to check on you to see if you're ok and haven't lost total control because she can hear your little hellions through the wall ...

ok, so my classes aren't always like this, but i admit to sometimes losing the perfect classroom structure. in my defense, sometimes it's this lack of structure that can make class so enjoyable. see below, for jimmy's interesting pastime of giving himself a beard with the board marker. he happily posed for pictures (in his short shorts, no less) before pausing to ask whether they'd be going on the internet. then he did a happy dance at his potential internet fame ...


mind you, he was inspired by troy:


my students are crazy. i'll leave you with a would-have-looked-better-as-a-panoramic picture of my grade 1 class, who in my biased opinion are the cutest ones.

mike, jack, april, and ben (nose-picker extraordinaire)

tony, annie, mike and jack again

andrew, jenny, simon (in motion), christine, and tony.

needless to say, this class keeps me on my toes for 45 minutes every alternating day. oh wait, maybe they all do.