Waltzing matilda

My third week was much less stressful than the first two. The students I was having trouble with originally seem to have settled down a bit, and the ones who didn't have all vanished under mysterious circumstances. I should definitely specify that the previous sentence was a joke. So this is me making that clear. Thanks for reading, NIS!

This will probably be a short update as not a monumental amount has changed since the last post. I was thinking recently about how strange it seems that I'm a teacher now. It feels like such a short time ago that I was sitting behind the same desks as these kids (not literally), and now I'm actually leading classes. I don't think a single day has gone by where I haven't wondered if I'm not massively unqualified to be teaching English. I mean, for example: there are four god damn negatives in the sentence before this one and I didn't even intend to do that.

It's more than that though. When I was in elementary school, I always tried to picture the life my teachers had outside of the school. I always just pictured them going home, watching TV or reading a book, grading papers and going to sleep. That was about it. And certainly they probably had many days like that but I never imagined any kind of variety. I don't know if I ever wondered about what they did on their weekends, or for fun.

A few weeks ago some other teachers and I had a potluck around American Thanksgiving, and we (read: I) drank a ton. The next day a few of us woke up and went to a hockey game in Chuncheon, and the whole day was a riot. We started drinking again around lunchtime and just generally tore it up all day, went to a few awesome restaurants and chatted about stuff. We told jokes, talked about dating, made inappropriate puns. The whole day was fantastic. And it was at some point on the bus ride home, heading into hour 20 or so of being drunk, that I remember thinking, "Wait a second, don't I educate kids for a living?" 

The whole day felt like the sorts of weekends I had in University, just booze and good times and way too few bathrooms available when you need them. And it makes sense to me; this is the sort of stuff I wanted to do when I came to Korea. But I don't think 12 year old me had any sort of a clue that teachers also have lives that separate from school. So now I find myself retroactively wondering if any of them ever partied their assess off on the weekend the way I have. I remember some of my teachers telling me they had headaches; now I think I understand why.

So if there are any elementary school-aged kids reading this, I have some words of wisdom: You definitely shouldn't be reading this and your parents have dropped the ball.

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