If I can boast about one thing in life, it's my ability to be exceptionally flexible. Not flexible in the physical sense, mind you; anyone who has seen me attempt to twist my body into any yoga-like position knows physical flexibility, for me, is nothing more than a thing to joke about. But I pride myself on being mentally flexible, which I think is more important anyway. :)
Since moving to Korea, I have come to the realization that having a schedule of any sort is entirely meaningless. Every schedule at my school is subject to change at any moment, without any fair warning whatsoever. Example: Today I went to my 7:30 middle school class to find the math teacher standing at the podium. What the--? I looked around the classroom in confusion as my students started babbling in a weird English-Korean-combo-language about my class being canceled. I tracked down my boss and a translator and found out that my entire schedule, starting that minute, has been changed for the rest of the semester. Thanks for telling me before I prepped for all of my classes, guys! But not to worry--this girl can roll with the punches. And since I don't have class for the next 45 minutes, I'll just blog about my flexibility.
To add to the whole schedule thing, today my boss informed me that we're doing away with the textbooks for eight of my classes. This, naturally, led me to believe that we would be replacing them with different textbooks. Forgive me for being stupid, but I thought it was a safe assumption to make. Wrong. "You need to make your own curriculum" were the terrible words that followed the first announcement. Ugh. This means I need to plan my lessons from scratch, with absolutely nothing to go by. And when does this hefty task need to be completed? Before next Monday. Lovely. But it's okay because I'm a good teacher and I'm flexible. I am flexible, I am flexible, I am flexible!!!
Just a few moments ago, as I was writing this post, a teacher approached me and said, "We have a parents' meeting at 2 o'clock tomorrow. Please prepare a presentation about your teaching method and give it to me in the morning." It's 8:10 in the evening. I'm scheduled to leave work at 8:30.
OK, so mental flexibility only goes so far.... Someone shoot me please.
3 comments:
yikes! (That's really all I've got to say about that.)
you can do it!!!
Okay, this is sounding strangely familiar.
After spending weeks setting up the 2007-08 online schedule and loading all of the required information into CARS so that students could register for classes, one week after registration opened, the department decided to completely revamp the shedule. Not for next year, mind you, but for the current year that students had already started registering for. Ahhhhhhh!
I feel your pain....
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