if we were feckless, we'd be fine

what a horrible day! days like this make me question my sanity in staying in japan another year! two classes, TWO classes of absolute...holy shit, why are there so many cars in the courtyard? and why are they all silver? i lie, i see one blue and one red car. oh yes, i remember. today is parent-teacher interview day. i have a good mind to walk into some of these interviews and tell them what shit students their kids are. the disrespect that teachers here have to put up with! i thought j-kids were supposed to be well behaved.

so anyways, i'm used to a bit of background talking. but today, these kids were out of control. they talked over me, they talked over the teacher. i went up to them and talked to them directly. they pretended i wasn't even there. i got so pissed off! and the second class! well, they didn't talk over me. they just didn't talk. repeat after me. silence. repeat after me. silence. the teacher says repeat after karen. SILENCE. come on now, i know it's tedious, but can't u just humour us?

and a student told me today some of the teachers are a bit resentful of us ALTs cuz we get paid so much. yeah, we get paid a lot for what we do. i won't deny it. were pampered monkeys basically. the entire system is flawed. there is so much i would like to change, but like the japanese teachers there are things we don't like but cant do a damn thing about it. teachers can't kick any misbehaving students out of the classroom because they have a "right to an education". bullshit. the other students have a right to learn undisrupted. the kind of disrespect that gets handed out in the classrooms just would not go down in canada. and i'm sorry, a lot of my teachers are incompetent. they don't know how to discipline. and as an ALT, an ASSISTANT language teacher, it's not my job to discipline.

am i insane to do this for another year? just when i thought i'd arrived at a decision, a day like today happens which makes me re-evaluate everything.

i feel like i'm on a boat. most times i'm calmly sailing across the crystal blue waters. suddenly the boat has sprung a leak, and i'm bailing water as quickly as i can. and man, am i getting tired.