Fun times at Reading Town

Before I begin this post, I would like to mention that I still like my boss at wonderland/reading town. The workload was ridiculous, but he was generally honest, paid on time in full, was very helpful in getting the teachers situated, and was open to some compromises. I would recommend the school for a first year teacher who is wary of hagwons. Nevertheless, I wouldn't return there myself.

I began working in the middle of the week. I came in on a Wednesday, I believe. My first week, I was just observing classes and going over the new program. The first surprise came when I was handed my schedule. I was in fact teaching kindergarten. I started in the afternoon, but I had to teach kindergarten PE and attend field trips and Saturday events. I would be fine with this except for the fact that on field trip days, I was working from 9:30am to 10:15pm. That's a bit much.

After my training, I started teaching. Teaching was fine for the most part, but the kindergarten classes were horrible. It's one thing when you teach 10 students everyday and you can build up a relationship with the students. It's another when you teach different groups of 20 students each day and you only teach them once a week in a room filled with toys.

The elementary students were fine. The paperwork involved with the elementary students was insane, however. Each student wrote two journals, one essay and three book reports every week. I had about 80-90 elementary students, so that comes out to around 510 pages of marking every week. Then there were tests, quizzes and report cards. I was also teaching a program for a few hours a week with middle school students. This program wasn't so bad, but there was a lot of information I had to print out and enter into the computer using an incredibly buggy and horribly illogical system.

Most days, I was there for about 12 hours. I was barely able to complete all of my paperwork in that time. Sometimes, I'd make a mistake or two like forgetting to write a daily report or not correcting a set of papers for one class on time. This happened on days when I was there for more than 12 hours. The first two weeks, my supervisor was on my ass the entire time.

I am usually a laid back person. I'll be very stern with kids, but I'm usually very calm and diplomatic when I speak to adults. If I am really pissed, I usually maintain my composure. When my boss in Bucheon lied to me every day about my severance pay, I never raised my voice. After two weeks at Reading Town, however, I snapped.

It was Friday. I had come in at 9:30 to go on a field trip. The night before, I stayed until around 11:30 to get some paperwork done because I wouldn't be able to the next morning because I had a field trip. After the field trip, the elementary classes and the middle school classes, it was 10:15, and I was doing some more paperwork. My supervisor came in and started yelling at me about one of the middle school classes. I made a mistake the previous night while assigning their online homework. I had assigned them homework for level 4-AC instead of level 4-AB or something else along those lines.

I said, "Sorry, which class are you talking about? I'll fix it." She said "the Mario class." I said "Which class is that? Is that WM4C or WT4C?" She started yelling again. "You are a terrible teacher. You should know all of your students names. Why don't you know Mario?" I was still calm and explained that I have only been here for two weeks, I only teach the middle school students twice a week and I have about 200 students in total(As it turned out, Mario had been absent for the first two weeks I was teaching, so there is no way I could have known who he was). She yelled for a little while longer and dragged me into her office to watch me enter the homework into the computer. I logged in and began looking for the class after going through six steps to pull up the online homework assignment page. I was slowly scrolling through a list of around 60 classes to find the WM4C class. After I took to long, she pushed me out of the way, found the class and assigned them.

"Why didn't you memorize the instructions I gave you?"
"I need to sleep and eat. I don't have time."
"You are so lazy. I thought you were smart. Mike Teacher memorized the instructions in one day. You don't know how to use the computer after two weeks."

This is when I decided to vent my fury which had been building up over the past two weeks. I yelled at her first about how I would be able to use the computer system just fine if things were listed alphabetically, by level or any other logical system rather than completely random. There is no way to remember a list of names consisting of three letters and one number. I then ranted about how I wouldn't be making so many mistakes if anyone had bothered to debug the horrible software we were using, if I wasn't here for 12 hours a day, and I was able to eat something other than kimchi and rice during my 12 hours at the school.

After I finished yelling at her, she gave me a written warning and I gave my written notice.