With the Christmas holiday fast approaching, I have become increasingly busy at work. The end of the year also coincides with the end of the marking period. I therefore am up to my ass in tests to grade and report cards to draft. Now here is something that’s annoying about teaching in this land.
Two weeks ago I had to write up progress notes, so my boss could call home and tell the parents how their kids were doing. At the time I thought this was awesome since the most time consuming part of report cards is writing the comments. So I figured that it was great to get them out of the way prior to the end of the semester.
This was not the case however. I gave her some report cards I assumed to be finished. She inquired as to the where-abouts of the comments. So I told her I thought they were unneccessary, since she had called home and told the parents the same thing I would be writing the same thing. In addition being in Goyang-shi none of the parents can speak, read, or write English, so my comments are just a formality…like most things that go on at hagwons, it’s just for show and has no real purpose…much like the entire testing and report card thing. They take level tests, but no matter how poorly they do they move up a level. Additionally with the report cards, I can not be completely honest, since the students are paying to attend classes there. If I write something the parents don’t like, the kid doesn’t come back. So I have to spend at least 2 hours writing these stupid report cards the parents can barely understand, but I can’t be frank, in the off chance that the parents own a Korean-English dictionary.
So we got today’s annoying aspect of teaching in Korea out of the way…now on to the awesomeness! On Monday I seriously yelled at one of my students. He is kind of a bastard, and on Monday told me to “shut up.” I’m not really down with that kind of rudeness and let him know. He started to cry, and apologized, and in the end I felt a little bad about it, but it was what had to be done.
Anyhow today, the kid came back, and was well behaved. At the end of class, his mom was there, and she apologized for her son’s behavior, and then thanked me for setting him straight. In America, I would probably have had to write up all kinds of paperwork, and have some parent teacher meeting, but here…I was praised for screaming at a kid. So like some fool said, you have to take the good with the bad…I’m off to write some report cards!
