The Sux

Yesterday was my first day teaching in an outside school, a middle school. It was completely wretched. Seven Chinese teachers sat in on my first 40-minute class and the kids were dead silent because of it. I had to actually say through an EF admin that it was okay for them to speak and respond. I was some pissed. Those teachers fucked my class up hardcore. Then the second class was better, with only one teacher (their usual teacher). The third class was meh. In between, I found out that I had gotten the crappy students. Not stupid, just very very weak in English.

And everything they do is so formulaic. I had them doing dictation on the board in teams, and one of the classes couldn't grasp why I was saying days of the week randomly. They are all programmed English-bots. If you say, "Hello, how are you?" the canned response is "Hello, I'm fine, thank you." They could be lying half-dead in a gutter and they'd still say "I'm fine, thank you."

It sucked. I'm going to approach the director of studies today and make a formal complaint and suggest alternate activities that we teachers could be spending that time on. Off the top of my head, I would say sharing lesson plans, activities, brainstorming solutions to common teaching problems or particular students, coming up with new activities, and working on marketing for the school.

This is just bullshit, and it's completely souring my attitude towards private teaching at EF itself. So not only is the school not making money off this (nor are they gaining students from it), they're pissing off and demoralizing their teachers which could affect performance in classes that are money-making and crucial to the business.

Just a load of shit. And I have 4 more classes today in 3 hours, and 2 tomorrow. Three times a week I get to be pissed off as I watch any planning go down the shitter in a vain attempt to teach something to these mindless "learners". Weeehoooo

I'll see how today goes, but I'm not expecting much. The rare ups are not worth the emotional investment considering the constant downs.