tldr;

It's friday night and I should be out with the rest of my friends--fixing my hair, checking my teeth, spilling beer, laughing with and at people. I could be out, enjoying this freedom, my youth, exulting in the richness of my time and place.

But no. I'm at home. This week is all about recovery.

Earlier this week, I went to the dentist to finally get some work done on a tooth I broke awhile back. Lost a lot of blood then caught the flu the day after. >:| I'm medicated, but still don't feel rested. There is so much to do. I try not to think yet about everything coming soon, all the things I need to do, but one thing--that I need to pay my student loan bill--breaks through and now my head floods--I have to remember to write people back, and how many emails can I send in the next two hours. For how long can I continue the commute to work? Will I be able to pull my weight living with my relatives, will I be too busy, will we fight? How much should I/can I/will I burden them? Should I lighten my hair? Does whitening tooth paste really work? I need health insurance. I'm already sick. I must get started. Maybe I should work out. I could go to the gym. At least 30 minutes, a few dumbbell workouts. I haven't talked to my parents in awhile. I should call. I wonder what they're doing right now.....

These kind of thoughts usually emerge during the course of my commute and act as a web of constraints my responsibilities impose on me, or maybe I just put it on myself. Example, each class this term kicked the shit out of me emotionally during the first week. I told another teacher, dude..it feels like i'm herding pidgeons. But some useful advice I got from a fellow teacher was 1) have fun and 2) take it slow. Teaching at a hagwon/language academy is about perception vs. reality--in particular, what hagwons can, in reality, teach and what they can't. These academy classes are fundamentally not equipped to teach content. Instead, we focus on skills. Do the students know how to identify the topic and main idea of the paragraph? Find the major details? That is our job. Students learn when they are actively figuring things out, trying to teach themselves, not passively drifting through a class, expecting to be taught. It is implausible to actually teach them about the U.S. civil war or abstract art or seagulls (real topics). I want to design my classes not around what I will do, but what the students will do, to let them take command of their own learning, and to encourage using English as a way of thinking, learning about the world around us. Epiphany sounds too transcendent, but this was quite a realization for me. It probably won't make teaching any easier, but worthwhile, maybe.

Like these students, from one of my favorite classes. They're presenting a yoga pose and one of them wore his aikido uniform to class, so of course I made him go up, then took a photo. heh heh.