All in an hour.
Things I wasn’t told, in the order in which I wasn’t told them.
9.05 AM. I wasn’t told my class was cancelled. I proceeded to gather up the necessary materials in my arms, walk down the staircase, cross the courtyard, unlock my classroom, sigh at the lack of students and lack of notification, sit peacefully at my teacher desk in front of the silent classroom to listen to the rain through the open windows as I sipped my coffee and wrote a letter home.
9.40 AM, back in the teacher’s office, at my desk skimming through websites. Though I had drawn reasonable conclusions as to the location of my students, I wasn’t directly told that my students were testing. Generally, student testing is irrelevant to my schedule, provoking nothing but cancellations, and I acted on this assumption of irrelevance.
9.41 AM. I wasn’t told that I was supposed to be proctoring an exam that started thirty-one minutes prior. Immediately after notification, which was unclear and frantic, involving Mr. Choi waving a piece of paper at me and pointing to one time slot that read my name in Hangeul, a piece of paper whose existence I had been completely oblivious to until that exact moment… after this, I was frantically ushered down the hallway into a classroom, where I walked in, thirty-three minutes late, bowed in embarassment to the teacher proctoring the exam, bit down my frustration and anger and walked past the students and their half- completed exams to take my position at the back of the classroom.
Sometimes Korea just makes me crazy, crazy crazy.
Communication, baby, communication is everything. Gathering pertinent information from subtle context clues and rumors floating between other clueless foreign teachers is lame, lame lame. Korea, you make me crazy.