the flaw in this design

This job can be quite frustrating. Every job I've ever had before this, about 5 or 6 of them, didn't require any particular skill in order to execute. They're the kind of job that robots could probably, and in time very well may, do. Even with my job at White Clay Creek State Park which required certain amounts of handi-man-ness and mechanical knowledge which I don't possess, I was still passable and indispensable. (It takes a certain breed to drag a deer which you just saw bludgeoned with a hammer 200 feet into the forest.)

This job is different. I'm required to draw up a plan. The onus is on me to gain the students' attention, respect, and affection. I'm supposed to impart knowledge to them. There are problems.

You see, with an institute such as mine, parents are paying money for their children to learn the English language. Ostensibly this can be viewed as an honorable thing; knowing English is quite valuable in this day and age, and preparing one's child in this way shows a certain amount of confidence and optimism that these parents have for their children.

However, as with all things, context must be understood. See, the kids that I teach don't just go to my school, all of them come to my school after they are done with regular school. In fact, some of them even go to another school after they go to regular school and my school. Just as there are privately owned English schools, there are math or art schools that many students' parents pay to send them to as well. This is a lot of education for any person to ingest in one day. For instance, my last class starts at 8:30pm, the kids in that class were in regular school at 8:30am. After my class they go home, and the homework begins. This is an inordinate amount of work to expect from a 12 year old child.

So, how does a teacher in my situation deal with this? These kids have nothing but school by the time they get to me, and after me they are expected to do more. Also, while they are with me, they get to see friends of theirs that they only get to see during our shared time, and so they are going to be understandably preoccupied by that as well. Is it fair to expect them to ignore their social lives in lieu of more school, school which they don't necessarily want or see the purpose of?

On top of this is the fact that "hogwans" do not exist solely to instruct, but are expected to turn a profit as well. If the teacher allows the cream of the crop to rise, and settles on merely focusing on the kids who are willing to learn while allowing the rest to flail and fail away (such as is done in the modern American educational system), then he is reducing the school's enrollment for the sake of imparting as much understanding as he can on those few who are willing to learn, and God knows that there are plenty of other hogwans waiting in the wings to take in those failed students, and their parents' money that comes with them. If this does happen, to the detriment of the school, then any employee of that school can hardly be considered to be doing his job well.

Who does this burden, this onus, of maintaining, or creating, a desire to not only learn, but learn more fall upon? Well, it falls upon me. And who am I? I am an untrained teacher who does not speak their native language, who came here not because of a fire inside of him to instruct in the ways of the English language, but rather because it was a meteoric thought he had one day, which persisted and gestated until it became the kind of thing he knew that if he didn't do would always haunt and trouble him.

And here's another thing: being an untrained and unprepared teacher means receiving on-the-job training. I have certainly benefited from this; I have definitely learned how to better teach in only two months of doing so. However, it was a trial and error process, full of hits and misses. I have found that some of those misses, or rather the time spent missing, has caused seemingly irreparable damage. During my learning process, some students, or even full classes, developed habits which are detrimental and stubborn. As a result, the current better-teacher-that-is-me is unable to overcome the damage done by the teaching done by the pre-better-teacher-that-is-me.

But I have realized something. The people who hired me knew that they were hiring an untrained, inexperienced person to teach these kids. When they threw me off of the speeding train that was my two-day "training" before I began teaching, they couldn't have expected me to hit the ground running. And given the fact that I am not (*yet*) a foreign teacher horror story, the kind that stumbles into the classroom still drunk from the night before and who vomits into the trashcan (yes there are stories of such a thing happening), I have to believe that I am not disappointing anyone.

So, I'll go to work everyday, I'll try my hardest to teach these kids to say "hello" instead of "herro", but even though in the classroom I may get so frustrated that I want to scream, I won't let it get to me too much. If the people who run this place don't turn as much of a profit as they did last year, what do I care? This time next year I'll be 7,000 miles away watching the Super Bowl with people I care about.

Perspective is key.