First Impressions

So this is friggin ridiculous. My first day here I start teaching. Just thrown into the lions den without any combat training; and that's just barely a metaphor. Seriously, these kids are nuts.

The first class of my first day it is next to impossible to make any of the kids pay attention. They're all yelling at each other from across the room, literally ignoring my pleas for silence. One kid curls up into a ball on his chair and refuses to budge. Great. The rest of my classes go ok, except that they ran out of one of the exercise books so they made a photo-copy for me. The first exercise: dictation. I have to read out loud to them. OK but read WHAT exactly? I very unstealthfully look over the shoulder of one of the kids in the class and read some of the lines from the previous page. They all notice, they all comment, and simply copy the lines from the page before. Awesome. The final class period is private tutoring, helping two girls with their pronunciation for an English competition. One girl is so shy she only reads the first page, speaking softer and softer until I can barely hear her. Then she just stops... that's it. No second page for her apparently. Awkward, to say the least, and she'll be reading in front of judges I presume? Not sure how that's going to go. The director comes in and comments on how quiet it is in the room. I guess he wants them to read louder since he's practically yelling the passage the girls have to read. The girls are giggling wildly: English is not his strong suit.

After school the director and I get dinner together. There's an uncomfortable language barrier. Who ever heard of a director of an English school who doesn't speak English? You'd think he'd at least flip through some of the seemingly millions of exercise books around the school. But he's nice, or at the very least generous.

He pays for our meal and his wife gifts me some towels and treats when he drops me at my apartment. His younger daughter runs up yelling what I'm assuming is "Daddy!" in Korean, and then stops short as soon as she sees me and runs away. Beware the big scary white girl. He shows me how to turn my hot water on and his wife says she'll buy me some dish soap (or "oil" as he calls it) and they leave with the little ones. Such nice people, but he puts me on edge for some reason.