Horrible Day

Today sucked! I know, everyone says that some days. Today was my day to just have a bunch of little things go wrong to make one big annoying bad day.

First, at the kindergarten

I’ve had my usual “classes” interrupted for arts and crafts, which I’m not really complaining about as the kids have yet to learn anything. So, I was very happy to not come up with some lesson mostly on the fly for the kids to ignore. But, what’s the point of having a foreign teacher if not to teach something?

What I am complaining about is that I was ignored all day by the other teachers. And one even stood infront of me when we were trying to entertain the kids while they waited for their snack.

But, during arts and crafts, that thing that had taken over my teaching time, I had to help the troublemaker make a clay popsicle and decorate it. It sounded like a really cool craft and I hoped the kids would be able to come up with something interesting, but, for the most part, they were a little young. One just made “chocolate ice cream”, a plain brown popsicle.

The troublemaker is one of those kids that will do something, you’ll say “No!”, then she’ll smile, look you directly in the eyes, and do it again. I now understand why parents hit their kids (I haven’t, but she makes me want to). She also has a tendency to scream in that really high pitched loud way that only little kids can when she’s really excited (which is often) or when she doesn’t want to do something (which is also often). She’s also hasn’t managed to clean up after herself yet.

If you can’t tell, I don’t like this kid. She is easily my least favorite kid ever. Granted, I haven’t met that many little kids, for which I’m very thankful, but I can’t imagine meeting anyone that is worse. If I ever did, I’d either cry or run away screaming.

Making the craft was fine. She was able to do a lot of the work, unlike one of the other students. The problems started once she lost interest in it. She was only entertained for a little while. Once she decided that she was done, that was it. She started looking around for other things to play with.

Then, she started making a mess. She found where they kept the googly eyes. She started grabbing handfuls of the little eyes and dropping them on the table. She did try to add a few to her popsicle but most of the eyes were grabbed because I said, “No.”

After a few handfuls of eyes and me cleaning them up so they didn’t wind up everywhere (if they had, I’m sure the kindergarten would have blamed me), she decided to grab more play doh colors and just smush it. Which, on the whole, I thought was a great idea. If I could limit her to one color at a time. And, that wasn’t really difficult as she has little hands and is easily distracted.

But, then she found the crayons. And her insatiable desire to color kicked in. She would not be denied. She wasn’t going to let a little thing like not having any paper stop her from using the crayons now that she has one.

The Art Teacher noticed and let her pick a piece of paper. She chose a piece of green corrugated paper thar was almost exactly the same green as the crayon she was scrubbing on it with. Which, I’m sure sounds cute to people that don’t have to deal with her every day.

But, she wasn’t making a mess and she was entertained, so, I was happy, well, really I was bored, but it was a peaceful boredom. I sat and stared. Eventually, kindergarten ended and I was allowed to leave my personal hell.

Then, it was on to the training center

My food took forever to get there (I know, really minor complaint, but I was starving!) and I was told that a couple of the parents don’t trust me and don’t like the way I’m teaching.

I was told that they think I’m not loud enough, not enthusiastic enough, don’t say the kids names enough, and am cold. Not that they’ve ever actually seen a class, just a couple seconds when one of them burst into my classroom for some unknown reason before leaving.

So, before class I had 4 parents in the class dropping the kid off, talking and fussing over random stuff, while I was trying to get the kids to get ready for class. And after class, they were all back with a couple extra friends! Thankfully, I can just run away from the parents and leave my Chinese teacher to handle them. I do feel sorry for her, but I don’t speak Chinese so I can’t help.

Also, they set up a camera in the classroom so the parents could livestream the class and see exactly how I teach, without being a huge distraction inside the classroom. I have no ideas what they thought, but it doesn’t seem to have mattered. Nothing has changed.

But in my first class, the class clown thought it would be funny to kick my hand instead of giving me a high 5 and hit me straight on the tip of my nail. It fucking hurt! It cracked the nail and there were some spots of blood underneath.

As I was trying not to swear at the little asshole or cry, the class laughed when the Chinese teacher told them that he really hurt me (I mimed crying). I got a perfunctory sorry and he calmed down for a minute.

Unfortunately, he was back at his antics before class was over. I had hoped he would have calmed down for, at least, the rest of the class, but I just wasn’t that lucky.

A few days later, I found out that the ringleader parent from the class that doesn’t like me just wanted free classes as she knew someone whose kid got a ton of free pre-class classes (they don’t really learn English, just how to behave in a classroom) as they were too young to be in a regular English class. So, she wanted free classes, too. It didn’t matter that they were different levels with different goals. She just didn’t want to pay.

Parents.