23. Book / Movie Cabinet

They took that access key away from me the second semester around the second month. They must have realized I would use it, like they do, and occasionally show a movie. This would occur at the end of the semesters when, in the last two weeks after their final, the students still have class but don’t want to learn anything. The Korean teacher’s show movies themselves too, but it seems to be okay only when they do it.

So they took the key away from me. It was okay, I copied quite a few onto the disk drive; go me. Prepare for the worst situations, because they will happen.

The book/movie cabinet is filled with books that are way too advanced for the students. In Korea, it seems like they can’t spend money in any type of logical fashion. I was told that the budget for English materials was pretty much squandered by the Korean English co-teachers who wanted to try and advance their own learning (ahem… entertainment).

I was also given a small budget, but was given no method to find the books and only a small time period to do it. So, I pretty much found as much recommendations as I could online and found the books on some Korean site. It was highly inefficient and I would have rather bought books at a book store in person, but that’s too logical for them… They gave me 4 weekdays to do it, even though she knew about the budget a long time ago. I was told that they had to spend it, logically or they wouldn’t get the same budget next year. I was also told that the 4 Korean English co-teachers didn’t know how to spend the budget… well, that makes sense, trained teachers with no sense of how to supplement their teaching.

I wasn’t going to go on my own to the nearest bookstore about one hour away on a weekday. Not besides the fact I was still making lesson plans from scratch back then and it was generally killing my free time. So, I gave her a list of the books. I later received some of the books and was wondering why about half of them didn’t arrive (and also wondering why there were some duplicate books). I was told that the funds ran out… of course it wasn’t suspicious at all considering I didn’t come close to the budget she had mentioned previously. After it all, I only got a few semi-useful books and some more books to add to the book/movie cabinet.