I am working 12 hour days. I have shifted my schedule six hours earlier. I am spending nine hours a day in the classroom, trying to control myself around small children who would probably be very easy to fling against a wall. I don’t have the time or energy to eat anything other than food I order in (bad), spaghetti (worse), or mcdonalds (worst). I broke a lightbulb three days ago and the broken glass is still on my floor, and I’m running out of clean underwear (again).
Here is what I am learning: there is not enough caffienne or prozac in Korea to keep me artifically conscious and happy, or at least, un-miserable.
Could we fix this please? Could somebody get on that? I’d do it, but then Eric would cry, two boys would start bleeding, Rooney and Aiden would start playing and unchecked game of touch the penis, and Ellen’s mother would start calling the school to ask why exercise seven in her daughter’s grammar book wasn’t checked.
Well, my students are still, occasionally, playing ‘touch the penis’, and yesterday I got caught playing tetris in class.
WIN!
I have a very awful habit which doubles as a pretty awesome skill.
That’s right. I can hit a snooze alarm for two straight hours, drifting seamlessly between sleep and wakefulness.
How productive/awesome is that?!
I say seamlessly because, during those two hours every morning, I don’t know what’s real and what’s not. The alarm goes off every eight minutes: I don’t ever remember hitting the snooze alarm that many times, though I must.
What this means is that anything I think of, or dream, or imagine, or remember becomes vividly real, and even later it becomes difficult to sort out.
This morning, I spent a very long, disoriented time trying to figure out what time I needed to be at Starbucks, and hoping I hadn’t left my bike at school.
I haven’t worked at Starbucks in……months, and it was on the other side of the world.
I swear to God, if that kid had mispronounced the same word I had corrected him on three times just once more, somebody was going to bleed.
10 more days.
I thought my students could no longer surprise me with the things they said in English class. I thought that after “teacher! how do you spell sniper?!” and “…and after that, snail takes poops?” and “teacher! pregnant? baby?” i was ready for anything.
i was wrong.
the other day, from a couple of adorable, highly energetic, uncontrollable twelve year olds I heard this:
“Teacher! Aiden cut my penis! Now he won’t stop touching it!”
“No, I’m only touching my own penis!”
Yesterday, I fell down. In class. In front of my students. From a stand-still. I was flat on the ground. I have a fantastic bright red bruise covering half my thigh, pictures of which I would post here if it didn’t involve showing alllll my readers (3) my pasty white thigh. This happened shortly after I huffed and puffed up 6 flights of stairs clutching my Big Mac bag.
sigh.
Filed under: idiocy (my own)
it’s only the third day of my month of intensive classes. only the third 12 hour day. i’ve only taught nine 3-hour classes.
already this morning, while it was still dark, i dragged myself out of bed and found myself stumbling naked through every pile of clothes, searching for a pair, just one single pair, of clean underwear.
17 days left.
