…but I’m not going to tell you how I’d like you to do them.
Aren’t bosses just the most helpful people? Actually, the guy in question here isn’t even the boss, he’s just a manager. He likes to think of himself as being in a position of authority – but only when it’s to his advantage.
He’s not the kind of guy you want to go to for help, since 95% of the time his reply will be some variation of “you can figure that out for yourself.”
Yo, genius, if I could’ve figured it out on my own, do you think I’d be asking you for help?
Case in point – classroom discipline. Kids can be unruly – I accept that and understand that it comes with the job. However, there need to be set ways in which the excessively unruly ones are dealt with. For the Korean teachers, there are. They all carry sticks and are allowed to administer whacks (up to 3) when the students get too far out of line (or when they don’t do well on tests, but that’s a different matter). Foreign teachers aren’t allowed sticks, because we “don’t understand Korean culture.”
Oh yeah, it takes so much understanding to hit somebody with a fucking stick.
The biggest problem I have in my classes is students who talk too much. Few things are more annoying than trying to explain something to the students who actually want to learn while there’s a clique jabbering away. My solution? If you can’t stop talking to the people around you, I’ll make you sit next to people you have no interest in speaking to. Seems like a winner, right? And all without the use of a stick!
Well, not according to “the manager.” One girl was so upset at being made to sit between two boys that she was on the verge of tears. Please, cry me that river. I’d warned the class that I was going to be assigning seats if they couldn’t refrain from talking in class. They lasted one day.
For the first day, they were great. The second day was business as usual. Day 3 came and so did the seating chart. Quiet students got seats to themselves while all the talkers ended up in this arrangement:
GB G
B GB
GB G
Keep in mind that these are 11-12 year olds, and they’re all at the “cooties” stage of gender relationships, so this arrangement is a fate worse than death for some of them. Hey, they were warned.
The “manager” wasn’t too pleased, I think mostly because a student was upset. Upset students can result in upset parents, and if parents are upset they may not continue spending money on tuition at our school. So what? The parents of the noisy kid might pull him/her out of my class? Break my fucking heart. God forbid that the students with the drive to learn actually get to do so.
If they parents of the bad kids don’t like it, I’ll have the “manager” ask them if they’d prefer the foreigner carry a stick.