A Korean Surprise: The Lesson Demonstration

Today was a long day. A very long day.

I was already exhausted going into the day because of the all day field trip yesterday (which I really will write about soon).  Of course, Tuesdays are always crazy days for me because I teach pretty much all day and then I have a night class from 7:30-9.

So it was only made more crazy when after I finished teaching my first class of the day, my co-teacher asked me about my lesson demonstration.

My what?! (SURPRISE!!!)

She looked at me in a confused way and said "wait, you do not have your lesson prepared?"

I  told her that I did have a lesson plan for the day, but I didn't have it written up in a formal way.

The look on her face told me that was not good.

So, she called down my other co-teacher who told me that he had written up a lesson plan, but that I should just teach whatever I had prepared.  What?

 He told me that he didn't think the Principal had even seen the lesson plan, so it wouldn't matter.

Now, I'm still not exactly sure WHAT I'm supposed to be teaching in this class.  My co-teacher told me that it should be speaking related, so I had planned some speaking activities.  Of course, I've never tried any of these activities, so I had no idea how they will work,. Being observed while trying something that could potentially fail miserably was not really so thrilling to me.

I asked my co-teacher more questions as I tried to figure everything out, but he eventually told me not to worry because he doesn't think the Vice-Principal can even understand any English, and he thinks the Principal can understand very little, if any.

The whole thing was almost comical in a weird way.  My co-teacher knew this demonstration was going to happen, and he wrote up a lesson plan, knowing that it was just complete BS and that it would never be used...because his bosses can't understand it anyway.

Moments like these remind me I'm really not in America anymore.

When the time for the class came, my co-teacher told me that he had forgotten that I hadn't even met that class yet (we didn't have classes last Tuesday), so I should just forget about everything and do my introduction lesson.

So, in the end I was stressed for the larger part of the day over nothing.

Everything I've read about Korea warns you about how schedules change all the time and you have to be able to go with the flow.  I was totally prepared for schedule changes, but I was not in any way prepared for a last minute lesson demonstration.

Today really took the Korean Surprise to the next level.

Please excuse me as I try to placate my stress with ice cream (I'm really mad at myself for not having any beer in my refrigerator right now).