Well, shit.

Apparently you can't swear in Korean schools, which I found out today because this has not been a good week.

Dylan & I had to write dialogues for half of our classes for speech contests. I've never experienced a speech contest, so had no idea what to expect, & no real expectations were laid out. They hinted that they should be about 1 typed page, so I went with that.

This was not easy, because I have 3 classes that are very basic beginner level. How to create dialogue when they're still struggling with, "How are you?"

I was about halfway done when they said it can't be one script/class-- it should be 1 script/2 students. That now meant scrapping what I had done (a dialogue with 5 speaking parts) & trying to write 22 instead of 6-7. 22. In less than a week.

When I was finishing, I saw Dylan's, & that it was much shorter than mine. I checked with one of the teachers & yep, the lines needed to be much shorter & the length down by a good 10 lines or so.

That SHOULD have made it easier, & I think it did, EXCEPT for the 2 I had to do for the class I share with the head teacher, Anna. Because I'd cut from the original whole-class one & then trimmed dramatically from the other, they didn't make sense, & with 5 others that I still had to do for other classes, I just didn't notice until Anna came to ask about them. I was upset because I thought those were done, & I could now deal with the OTHER bullshit hanging over my head, including a 30-question quiz about Halloween for Monday. I had been running out of questions, honestly. Plus a new lesson plan I have to do for 2 classes in 2 days or something, plus... yeah. If only they could have distributed the workload from I-have-0-to-do, let-me-help to once again, there aren't enough hours in the day.

I took the scripts from Anna to fix, irritated, which then turned to quiet ranting as I discovered that I'd have to retype them because the files on my USB suddenly could not be opened on the 1 computer in the school that works & prints. Hence, my quiet swearing to myself that Anna mentioned today. In the end, she said she'd fix that class'. The rest of them apparently are fine, even the ones for the really lower level classes. & believe me, writing dialogue when you can't even use certain tenses because they don't know them, is not at all easy.

I was upset that I upset Anna by getting upset, upset that I couldn't get that script right, & upset that it all wasn't over. The kids have less than one month to memorize them, which I'm sure won't be enough for some.

It's hard because I don't want the kids to do badly, & I don't want to fail them. I want them to learn instead of just memorize without understanding, which is still the Asian way because that's the understanding of the Confucian way. & yet I have to stop thinking of this like real school. The kids will progress through books & levels that they are SO not ready for because it's the appearance of progress that matters, not actual progress. I was talking to Dylan about the Halloween quizzes because I haven't really taught any Halloween stuff, & neither had he, so how are they supposed to take quizzes? His response was, "Oh, it's going to be a disaster, but that's not on us. We just need to make the quizzes, whether the kids can do them is irrelevant."

All of this came after my trip to the bank, when I intended to send the money I'd sent to my original US bank account, only to find it hadn't been deposited because they closed it on me. The bank said it would get sent back to my Korean bank. I thought giving that a week would do it, but oh no: I had to fill out a form to request the official return of that money, & NOW it'll take a week to come back so we can send it on to my newly-opened, no fee bank account. SOOoooooo yeah, that happened as well. The one & only bright spot is that once again I was helped by the one Korean teller who speaks from what I can tell fluent English. He is able to do said transfers & be nice & is actually cute to boot, surprisingly enough. He has told me he'll call when the money is back, & that I should just come to him when I go there. Like I need to be told, that was my whole plan given that I don't need to worry about what google translate did to my request. So I have a bank account in the US again! Now I just need to get the money into it.