Viva La Revolution

Remember the French Revolution?  You know where French nobles were lounging around being French nobles, saying “Oh this is a perfect world, and it is the best of all possible worlds”.  Meanwhile in reality, people who didn’t have enough to eat were every so often being covered in feces, via the chamber pots of the well to do noblemen.  Now this is a blog about South Korea, and here I am going on about the French Revolution.  Allow me a little latitude if you please.  Now as I have said before, there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.  Turns out it’s the corpses of the 4 people who quit in the last 5-6 weeks.  Now this isn’t a large school, and there are really only 12 or so people that work in the whole building. 

When the locals start abandoning ship, I begin to feel like one of the passengers on the Titanic, watching the rats all heading in one direction, thinking to myself “Hey, where are they going?”  Now, I have known some of this for a while, but it wasn’t until very recently that I realized that our boss is completely oblivious to how much damage she is causing.  The week in question started off so well too.  For you in the states it was Memorial Day.  Over here it was Buddha’s Birthday, so we got our Monday off too.  With a four day week to look forward to and no weekend classes in sight, Rachel and I were feeling pretty good going into Tuesday.  That was before we had to start demo-lessons. 

Now practice lessons are all well and good, and sometimes they provide useful insight into another teacher’s methods and offer some useful tools and tricks.  These demo lessons appear to be more of an exercise in public humiliation.  I was fortunate to not have to go the first round, but two of our Korean co-teachers, Rachel, and John (the 3^rd foreign teacher) were not so lucky.  When all was said and done, the end product felt more like a monkey dancing on a stage to a monkey master.  Now have you ever tried to give feedback to a monkey?  Really think about what that conversation would be like, especially from the monkey’s point of view.  For others of you readers that are old enough to recall the peanuts cartoons, conversations with our boss are just like anything that adults say to the peanuts.  “Wha, wha, wha wha, however…wha, wha, wha, class-uh…wha, wha, blah blah blah, bitch bitch, bitch, bitch…bitch”.  No, seriously that’s how she sounds.  I know that it’s English, and I can understand (most of) the words that she says, but there are times that she makes absolutely no sense.  The best example is how “staff page” magically transforms into “step poo peggy”

Now I have had some positive experiences with our “Misses Marie A.”, but they are few and far between.  Rachel on the other hand had trouble right from the beginning.  The week demo teaching began, our boss lost serious respect, from me.  While we were going through these demo-lessons, we were requested to make comments and write feedback on each teacher.  I thought that it was inappropriate to be in a position where I would have to judge Rachel.  I asked if I could not write comments about my partner.  My boss looked at me as though I had grown a stick out of my forehead that had stupid written all over it.  I begrudgingly agreed.  When the lesson was over, Misses Marie A. (that’s not her real name, but the names have been changed to protect the innocent, and so on and so forth) asked to see me alone for a moment.  She was offended that I didn’t want to write feedback.  Specifically she was offended that I grimaced when she ordered me to write said feedback. 

Fast forward another week, where another local teacher and I had to do our sample lessons.  Now, I have no problem getting in front of people and doing what I do.  “Marie A’s” comments were short, to the point and of mixed usefulness.  Little things such as making sure that doing things in a particular order have their uses.  Other things, such as doing their reward/classroom management system, are less than helpful.  I decided to use a different system because I don’t think the other one has much use, and rewards too few students.  The local teacher had a very different experience. 

My fellow presenter came back to the office after about half an hour, silent and in tears.  Rachel had a similar experience when she presented.  What both of these experiences have shown to me is that “our Miss Marie” has no grasp on how much damage she is doing.  Every single local teacher is intimidated and resentful.  Like I said the corpses are starting to pile up and I am not saying that we should break out the guillotine, but there are times that I lament the old days.  Sigh.