Friday is high school day.
1st period --- reading test.
Reading test is always easy for me.
I just have to sit there and listen to the kids. One by one they read to me a random paragraph in the textbook.
I don’t understand the point of this test, it doesn’t show their English ability at all.
They get to use their own textbook during the test, so most of them just put katakana spellings on the text to help them read without understanding the text.
A text sample like this:
“Most people here only eat with their hands. I’ve never used my hands to eat curry.”
They would read it like this:
“Mosto peeporu heeya only eato wiz theyya hanzu. I’ve neba usedo my hanzu to eato kali.”
And sometimes for lower level kids, they would read it like this:
“Mosto…… eto….. eto….. wakaranai…… heeya only eato with …. eto…. wakaranai…, I’ve neba used my wakaranai… to eato kali.”
2nd period --- jeopardy game…
except the projector wasn’t working. So… the PowerPoint slides that I prepared was a waste. I can’t use what I had prepared, so I had to come up with a new activity in class…
Grammar point was “What’s this?” “It’s…..”
I just wrote some random Chinese words on the board for them to guess.
3rd period --- went well :]
4th period --- the kids wouldn’t shout up again.
+
I went back to the office after having the lunch at school.
AND…I have nothing to do for the rest of the day.
Even if there’s nothing to do, people here like to pretend that they are busy.
I am so bad at pretending to be busy.
People here work really slowly because they don’t have enough jobs to do, yet they want to look busy. Such as take 4 hours to coloring 3 worksheets… or take 2 hours to cut out 30 name cards. Instead of using cutters, people like to use scissors, the slow way.
For the same job, I could finish it in 3 minutes and then they would say to me, “wow!!! You are so fast” and then I would have no jobs, AND THEN they would think “she is so lazy, she is not doing anything.”
“Efficiency” just doesn’t exist here.
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“Efficiency” just doesn’t exist here. >> I totally got the same feeling when I worked as a marketing researcher in Tokyo. Almost like I was being punished for being competent sometimes. Sounds like you're having fun.
ReplyDeleteAs for my students? Keep in mind, I'm a tutor so I haven't experienced the terror or Korean youth yet, so I don't have a direct comparison. But I find most Korean kids that are around my age pretty difficult to deal with, as compared to the working adults. I just get the impression that few to none of them are interested in branching out or socializing with Canadians, and the only reason they're here is because a working holiday is a good excuse to fuck off and do nothing for a year under the pretense of "learning English in a native speaker environment"
It sounds like it's difficult to make friends there... Kindda the same here in the country side. It's difficult to interact with Japanese outside Tokyo.
ReplyDeleteBut, you are teaching people of your age. At least you have more things to talk about and relate to than dealing with stupid kids.