Slaving Week 2

I survived the first week and it wasn't bad actually. I'm exhausted and I'm not too keen on giving up everything else I've got going on at the moment (Chinese, Korean, piano ,exercise), but the job itself isn't too bad. The classes are ridiculously long (4 hours), but I give (take?) plenty of breaks and somehow manage to pull through. While my morning class has made some definite progress, I was mistaken about the level of the supposedly 'more advanced' afternoon class and we have wasted a lot of time. While they are more capable of broken hotel English than the morning class (and therefore harder to fix their bad habits) in a few days I'd say a fair portion of the morning class can actually speak correctly more often than the afternoon class. I keep having to explain to them that years of studying a language in a classroom does not in any way guarantee you will be able to speak the langauge. As a prime example, I point out that I never actually 'studied' Thai and I speak it rather fluently. Sure, there are plenty of things I don't know. But there is plenty of crap I don't know in English either so I just absorb new things as they come rather than stress over the fact that I don't know everything.

Oh well. I'm tired and I'm in the middle of struggling through typing an email in Korean so I better finish that so I can try to sleep and wake up for another English marathon in the morn.