Schedule Sorting

The badness of my schedule a few days ago was beyond belief.

It’s still somewhat ridiculous. Well, now, wait a minute. Maybe I’m being unreasonable to call one horrible class ridiculous. I do have a couple of days where I have to start at 9:30, but that’s not so bad. I just find the idea of teaching English to an even remotely hostile class from 8:45 – 10:00pm on a Friday night ridiculous.

Read that last sentence one more time:

I just find the idea of teaching English to an even remotely hostile class from 8:45 – 10:00pm on a Friday night ridiculous.

I know, I only start work on Fridays at 2:30pm. I know, I am one of the newest staff members (I daren’t say faculty, for we’re not truly considered faculty). But there’s something crazy about trying to get 20-year-olds who don’t generally want to learn English, to actually focus on doing it at 8:45pm on a Friday night.

Anyway, all of this was made much more painful by the fact that another class I was asked the favor of teaching—a composition class—was changed (because a much more important Korean professor in the Languages Department requested a schedule change) and suddenly I was supposed to be either begging people to wreck their schedules, or else coming in at 8:30 am on Friday morning… the same day I was to teach until 10:00pm.

After some skeptical chattering about how to fix this mess, Vinnie suggested he and I go up to the Languages Department and see if another schedule might be possible for the Composition class… failing that, I was, in Shawn’s words, to “Tell them, ‘I’m not doing the class!'”.

It turned out that the chogyo—the student assistant in charge of those bookings— was more competent and sympathetic than we expected, and we found a workaround that effected much less drastic changes in my and others’s schedules. Whew.

Now I only come in at 2:30pm on Fridays, and most other days I start either at 9:30 or 11:30 am, consistently finishing by 5:30.

At least, that’s how my schedule looks for now… until some other Korean (read: more important than me) professor decides he or she would like a schedule change, and we have to do it all over again.

But I am, tentatively, calmed down for now.

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