mups wrote:Like I need 2 beers and 4 showers.
The reason it can be extremely tiring for me has nothing to do with my not wanting to talk all day or not liking the job. What gets to me are the students who have zoo-animal levels of listening and interacting ability. I mean you could put rockets on your legs and grow a 3rd head, and these students would still be busy staring into space with mouths agape. They're basically overgrown infants who have never been made to pay attention to or focus on anything other than a TV for more than a few seconds. Nobody holds them accountable or interacts with them at home, it's always painfully obvious when this is the case. These are the same kids who run around supermarkets screaming and running into people's legs while their parents shuffle along, simply too lazy to do anything about it.
And it only takes 1 or 2 in the class to exhaust you. You gotta repeat stuff like 3 times to them before they even start listening (including simple instructions like 'be quiet' or 'look at me'...sometimes you can even give them the answer and they look at you with blank faces, forcing you to repeat...sometimes they find something funny while you teach and laugh, which is ok of course, but then they can't stop giggling like idiots with no self-control. Just abhorrent levels of focus and attention (especially when it's older children)...as I mentioned you can even be playing a game or teaching them something cool and fun using pictures and video, still zero response. They don't have to pay attention to or respect their parents at home so why should they do that with their teacher? I'm not so easy but it drives me crazy to see their Chinese teachers playing nice with them and babying them even more, asking them politely to stop doing something then getting ignored..and then being ok with it.
So I guess that's how I feel..putting 100% into not only teaching English (which I find extremely easy on it's own) but also doing my part to raise some respectable kids with the tools to one day turn into respectable adults...knowing all the while it's pissing into the wind. But in good conscience I can't stop trying, because that would make me feel infinitely worse.
Also it's too hot.
Are you my doppelganger?
The thing that really drives me up the wall is when I ask who doesn't understand and then a kid raises his hand. I stop the progress of the class to go over it again so that kid will understand, and what does he do? He immediately starts screwing around with the kid next to him, which is why he didn't understand in the first place (because he wasn't paying attention then either). So then I get annoyed or move the kid or punish him in some other way and he/the other students/my co-teacher/the homeroom teacher thinks I'm being really unreasonable because no one else has ever held the kid accountable in his life. No one has ever held the adults in the kid's life accountable in their lives either, including half of his teachers in their sheltered workshop/iron rice bowl/creche for adult government jobs.
With some of these dumbarses, I just want to knock their heads against the wall and say, "Wake up you fucking idiot! This is why you're never going to amount to anything in life. This is why no one in your family has ever amounted to anything in life. This is why you're all poor trash who live in a tin shed on the side of a mountain." Complete waste of time though, but like you said, I can't just switch off. This problem is endemic to mass education though. Short of taking all of these clowns out of the class (which rarely happens), what else can really be done?
The other one that drives me up the wall, and that I still just cannot seem to de-condition from kids is that if I ask a kid a question, even in Chinese, someone else will always answer for him. I then turn to the other kid and ask him if his name is the other kid's name. Christ, if I'd wanted to ask the second kid, I would have either asked the second kid or put it out as a general question to the class. It's just another way in which the smart kids cover for the serial fools in the class. Instead, all those kids who want to learn should be riding those kids who constantly slow the class down due to misbehaviour.
With all of these things, I do have strategies for dealing with the kids, but they're only marginally effective, and I also end up wasting tons of time each lesson (I really want to bring a stop watch into my class and time it one day) moving kids around, waiting for everyone to shut up, etc., or I spend time outside of class chasing them up because their homeroom teachers always say they'll do something about them but never do.
Still, the positive I take from this is that I am really determined that my kids won't grow up to be like many/most of the kids I teach.
