Day 25: Why I Will Never Be Able to Hold Down A Real Job

I regret to inform you that it is once again exam week. I had to fail a student today, who blithely decided it was time to pull out his cell phone and start flipping through it, mid-exam. He said his brother had sent him a text message. Despite the fact that I repeatedly said never to do this for any reason, and despite the fact that he signed a waiver that says being caught with anything that can be used for cheating will give you an automatic zero, he still thought I was going to think this was OK. It wasn't.

I told you how women in authority are.

Now I have lots and lots of papers to grade over the next 48 hours. But lest you think I am going to complain about that, I'd actually like to tick off a few reasons why I will never be able to hold down a job in the real world, or even work at another institution.

• I have no "boss" per se, other than the head of department, and our interactions are generally limited to him asking if I'd like to cover another class
• I have a three hour lunch break, guaranteed
• I often start 10 minutes late and/or leave early, and it doesn't matter as long as I teach them what they need to know
• I control my own curricula beyond the requisite textbooks--and if I don't have any creative ideas, I can just go straight out of the book
• I can call in sick at the last minute and not catch any hell for it
• I can enforce or not enforce whatever rules I want
• I can gab away for 90 minutes about absolutely nothing and call it a lesson
• I can force people to write outlines with titles like "Monsters: An Identification Guide" or "Bombs: We Can Prevent Them from Exploding"
• We can do zany things like draw pictures, put on plays, and hold classroom olympics
• I don't have to have to call anyone "Sir" or "Ma'am" or tolerate any rudeness
• Paperwork consists of signing the attendance sheet (which is also how they know to pay me for working that day)
• "Going home early" is an incentive to make people work harder, faster.

So you can see why I sometimes ask myself: How will I ever be able to hold down another job?

The answer: I WON'T.

Now, if only I could get more ink from that durn bureaucracy...

Day 11: Grading Papers and Killing Geckos

Because I want to save money for this year's visa and a motorbike, I decided yet again to hang around the house and do nothing. As a consequence, halfway through the day, I suddenly became painfully, unfathomably bored. So bored that it hurt.

I decided to solve this problem by doing what I should have done a week ago--grade exams. Now, I really don't like grading exams. It's just hours and hours of reading page after page of bad English and assigning it an arbitrary number based partly on the student's skill in English, and partly upon my own whim. It's just a boring, laborious process, and honestly it's the sort of thing that makes me realize I don't want to be a teacher forever.

There are some things that make grading worthwhile, however. One of the sections on the exam was "dictation", which means I read a sentence while the students try to accurately copy what I say. One of the sentences was "You can't hitchhike". We definitely discussed the word "hitchhike"--they thought it was such a cool word to say; they kept repeating it and giggling. Yet for some reason, a week later when the exam came around, they seemed incapable of remembering it.

So I read 27 sentences that said the following:

• You can't hicharge/kitchen/ketchack/pigcheak
• You can't hit chuck.

You can kind of understand how they might write down what they hear. But not all of them make as much sense phonetically:

• You can't eat cheese.
• You can keep change.

And my personal favorite:

• You can't hit shit.

Like trying to spell "Qaddafi", it lightens the mood.

On a less light note, however, I would like to take this time to apologize to the small gecko which I inadvertently killed this morning. I was on my way downstairs--I told you how my temporary apartment is dark and sunless--and I didn't see him there. He apparently didn't see my descending foot, either. And thus his little life was snuffed out.

I found him smushed against one of the steps after I turned on the light. I feel kinda bad for the little guy.