The daily grind

If I’m not mistaken I have not told you a great deal about my experiences with my current job. Maybe the best reason for this is because I like to tell you about the lighter stuff of life here and tell to save the less amusing stuff for my more private circles (you may also interpret this as the unlucky few who hear me complain about my fortunate life).

It’s about three and a half months ago since I started working at my new job, or as I like to view it, the first quarter of my contract is now behind me. When accepting this job I knew full well that working with these kiddies wasn’t going to be something I would love. The youngest, 3 to 6 year olds, are definitely not my forte. But as the job landed in my lap and fitted perfectly to my wishes as for the starting date and salary, I had no problem accepting the job. My main concern was always teaching these youngsters, I had previously taught these ages in Thailand to confirm what I already knew, I don’t like working with young children.

The first weeks were not too bad, since I hadn’t worked in a long time and I had a change to develop myself as a more rounded teacher. The novelty of teaching these young kiddies wore of more quickly than some bad hangovers and with the majority of my week being made up of teaching exactly these under-aged terrorists. My job took a turn for the worse.
Work is now very much so work, I don’t enjoy it and I start counting down the days/hours to the weekend when I’m in the bus on my way to work on Monday morning. The only thing that keeps me going now is the memory of an extraordinary year behind me and the knowledge that this hell shall pass too and when it does I can return to my beloved lifestyle.

So how bad is it exactly?
I teach 9 levels, 3 kindergarten levels and 6 elementary school levels. The kindergarten classes combined I teach a total of 21 times per week. The elementary school levels combined I teach another 15 times per week.
The kindergarten classes are being made up by the three lowest/youngest levels of my cram school. The youngest of them all I see 1 time per day, these kids aren’t the worst but I get very little satisfaction out of teaching the exact same shit every week. Trust me if teaching the colours, numbers, alphabet, shapes, animals, simple phrases isn’t bad enough, it’s even worse if after 15 weeks some of these kids still can’t figure out which colour red, yellow or blue is.
The second youngest are a better bunch and they even tend to listen to my instructions, although here there are still some kids that don’t seem to have learned anything I have been trying to teach them. These kids I teach 8 times per week, I might not even want to see some of my best friends 8 times per week let alone these kids.
The last class to make up my kindergarten levels are pure evil. The class is too big, I have about 17 to 19 of them and the word unruly doesn’t begin to describe how bad these kids are. To make matters worse there’s one kid that has no business being in a school for normal kids as he is simply not all there, he has some serious mental problems, think about Taz the Tasmanian Devil from the Looney Tunes and you might get an idea of what this unpredictable kid is like. Add about 3 kids with serious ADD in the mix and throw in a few thick ones too to make it more interesting. I don’t approve of corporal punishment but these kids really know how to push the limits and I have to suppress a smile when my Chinese co-teachers (who think differently about corporal punishment) take care of these nightmares. This lovely bunch I also see a whopping 8 times per week and I dread every single time I have to teach them. A variety of different approaches have failed to work or to keep me from getting angry with them. I know this is me failing as a teacher but fuck whoever said that because I would gladly see you try to keep all smiles with this lot (every teacher in school agrees with this observation fyi)

The elementary school levels then, they aren’t so bad, but that may also be because I them no more than 3 times a week and some only twice a week.
Sure there are some classes here full of little shits but there manageable, their English levels however are still very low. It’s hard to really have a conversation with any of them and the older kids that should be able to do this absolutely hate coming to English school and would love to see the place burn down to the ground.

Don’t think that I hate every minute I spent at that school, but it’s safe to say I’m not very excited to go to work in the mornings. Luckily my colleague and sole other Westerner at work is also very jaded so we get to bitch and moan together and try to find some humour in this.

This is a short insight to my daily grind here in Taiwan and I shall leave it at this for now at least because no one wants to read about my shitty job. Or do you secretly enjoy that I too have to endure the misfortune of having to work a undesirable job for my future hopes and dreams ;)

Anyway, work sucks but life isn’t all that bad, this weekend I’ll be making a break for Macau to have a look around there. And with the added benefit of having a long weekend, I’ll be enjoying a short week next week.
So look forward to a more upbeat story about Macau after this dreadful story about working.