Craziness Working

I am working more hours now than I have ever worked in my life, I think.  Eleven hours per day at the workplace, 7.5 of which are on my feet teaching.  And I’ve been seriously teaching, too.  Good lesson plans, managing students and taking work home so I can return it to them in a timely manner.  I wanted to start strongly after fading away near the end of the last term (although it didn’t help that no one at the school could tell me when the term began or ended).

But yes, many work hours.  Also, it’s cold as fuck and windy out there.  I thought I had a winter coat but I guess I don’t and the my gloves may as well not be on my icy, numb hands.  And it’s not like they’ve got the heat blasting at the school either; it’s barely preferable to be inside the place.  It hasn’t stopped me from running my longest distances since I’ve been in Korea and with consistency and from cranking out my gym-budget-saving pushups.  Incidentally, I don’t consider those to be New Year’s resolutions because I started them just before the new year!

Anyway, it’s been a crazy pace for this term and we work on Saturday again this week!  Somehow it got me to comparing the winter schedule here and the summer school in the Haystack.  I’m at the English academy more than twice as long each day than I was at the high school, but it’s much more bearable and I’m much more in harmony, I suppose, with my job now.  Those summer school days seemed neverending and I would struggle to fill time and to get the information across.  Maybe I am a better teacher now, but there are other factors, too.  English isn’t even my field but I’m buoyed by the high expectations of the students.  It’s not that they expect me to make them experts or that they’re even considering the skills they’ll possess once they leave my class.  It’s that they arrive knowing that I have something to offer and they are truly ashamed to be delinquent or to fall behind in their learning.  Anyway, I’m losing the point of this post and I don’t want to badmouth U.S. students especially because my current high could be a result of personal growth or maturation or something else.  It’s just interesting that the craziness working here is more tolerable than the craziness working at home.