The director apparently made both of my Korean co-teachers so angry and upset, they decided today they'd had enough. It was only a matter of time before things blew up because of the way they are treated, but I didn't expect to lose both of my only English speaking co-workers today. My co-teacher walked out mid-day and the other had previously put in a notice that today would be her last day.
Due to a bunch of female drama in a language I don't understand, she was in the office with the shouting angry director most of the afternoon, leaving me alone in the classroom with 2 different classes. We don't have separate classrooms, just a curtain to divide the room. Typically 2 classes go on at once in 30 minute increments. One Korean English teacher teaches one class and my Korean co-teacher and I teach the other before we switch. Without a Korean co-teacher present, it's extremely hard to control the classroom because the students' English levels are so extremely low.
I don't want to dwell on the negativity and complain about all the typical ways and poor working conditions of a bad hogwan, (even though I'm pretty sure mine could be blacklisted) because you can find plenty of that online, but I will say it was a challenge to be left in the classroom alone this afternoon with 20+ screaming children who know approximately 20 words of the English language. I just wanted to sit in a corner in a fetal position and rock back and forth when my attempts to make them sit down didn't work. Apparently, using Korean to tell them "too loud" or to "have a seat "makes it worse because they just laughed and went even more crazy, making it a game to see how loud and how awful/out of control they could be. Toy fruit and wigs from the role play stations flew across the room, little girls made it a game to see who could scream and laugh the loudest, boys pulled out their Taekwondo moves and by the time the class ended, the room was literally upside down. What a disaster!
We are told not to raise our voices and since the school is ran as a business, the students are basically allowed to do whatever they want so they don't go home and say bad things to their parents. All I could do this afternoon was stay calm, try and direct them one by one with hand gestures to their seats and pray that they would stop. Eventually and miraculously, I got most of them seated long enough to put on a cartoon on YouTube to occupy them until my Korean co-worker came back from her dramatic meeting with the director.
6 year old girls |
Daycare students These aren't students of mine so they're looking at me like "who are you and why are you taking my picture you crazy white woman!" |
Gifts from my students (coffee & tea, canned tuna and ham, dried seaweed and canola oil) |
Nabi |
Nabi & me |