Thursday, March 17, 2011

what these new work hours mean (and other news)

I'm no longer as in touch with the daily goings-on in cyberspace now that I work from 3:30 to 9:30PM. By the time I get home, the unread tweets have piled up, as have the unread blog posts by the usual suspects.* Luckily, I don't have to get to sleep until 3AM, given how late my day starts, so it's not that big of a deal.

In other news: my day at the bigger, busier branch of YB went well-- certainly better than I had anticipated. I don't have a single clue as to how well I'm doing; I had some very positive student reactions today, but the twelve students I tutored over Monday and Tuesday said nothing directly to me. Maybe they spoke to the boss lady on their way out (as often happens in Korean hagwons; it's a way of checking in on the teachers).

Alas, I continue to make mistakes, especially in terms of pacing and time-budgeting. The only reason there have been no major repercussions is that the students themselves have shown a remarkable level of tolerance for my gaffes (and the younger ones may not even realize what's going on).

On the bright side, I'm getting better at planning lessons and keeping records, but it's going to be a while before I attain the insane ideal of planning nine lessons in twenty minutes. One of my coworkers at the big branch was very helpful in explaining what I do and don't have to do when prepping. One thing I don't have to do was photocopy the lessons: the students are supposed to do that. My job is just to jot down, in the student's dossier, what modules we'll be working on, and it's up to the students themselves to grab the materials, photocopy them, and bring them to me over the course of the tutoring session. My colleague's revelation came as an enormous relief to me; I was trying to figure out how a person could possibly do all that prepping and photocopying in under half an hour.





*I anonymously follow a whole host of blogs on my blogroll, and visit them whenever I see an update. I know that, by following anonymously instead of "nymously" ("ominously"?), I'm depriving these good folks of a measure of self-validation (don't we all count how many followers we have?), but I just can't bring myself to follow anyone publicly. It's an irrational hangup, I admit, but whadaya gonna do?


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