Organized Chaos

I'm a teacher at a private Kindergarten/After School English program and we're preparing for a talent show/Christmas concert.

The owner of the school has put together all kinds of plays, songs and dances for the kids to do. The Korean staff and the western staff have been feverishly teaching these kids to do what the westerners deem as 'Mission Impossible.'

I was told to arrive at work 2 hours before my regular start time (no overtime :sad: ) to do a dress rehearsal today. I arrived to see the owner of my school screaming at a bunch of 5 year old kids because they haven't memorized the pages and pages of lines for the play. I looked at the performance schedule and noted that I don't need to practice with my kids today. So, I'm sitting here doing nothing...all the while my co-workers are getting screamed at because the students aren't ready and the show is only 2 weeks away.

I'm thrilled that my students are angels and that we only have to perform the Hokey Pokey. I'm also thrilled that I only have another 3 months of this ridiculous job.

If any of you ever, EVER, decide to teach English overseas, make sure you find out everthing, EVERYTHING, there is to know about where you are working.

Hound_dog, do you work at SLP near E-Mart? Your story is all too familiar....

No, I work at Brighton (HanSol owned). It's supposed to be the Marquee school of Jeonju (twice the price of other places) but it's the same crap as anywhere else.

How can some one expect 5 year old children to memorize pages of a script. Their brains aren't developed enough for lots of memorization!!! How horrible. Poor kids. I know that when I was in kindergarten, I had one line, about 15 words long, and I wasn't able to memorize that. And the teachers knew that most of the children wouldn't remember their lines, so there was always a teacher near the area where the speakers were, so they could give us the next word if need be.

Yeah...well, I work in the land of uncommon sense.

Here, at Brighton, every child is a future Nobel Prize winner. Every child is a future magazine model cover. Every child at Brighton is going to change the face of the world (drip...drip...drip goes the sarcasm)

I have it lucky...my students and I have a bit of leeway because the parents love me. My students have gone from zero English skills to holding a basic conversation in about 9 months. How? By talking about kid things like boogers and crayons. I don't follow our crazy book. Last week's math lesson was multiplication...I used that time to talk about my students' favorite topic....my dogs.

Well, I just finished the rehearsal and in total, I did 5 minutes of work. They asked to see my class' routine and when I finished they said thanks, bye.

I've been here since 10am and it is now 2pm. Granted, we did have 40 minutes for a lunch break. 5 minutes of work in 3 1/2 hours. The funny thing is that in half an hour, I'll have my official break (2 hours) where I can actually leave the building.