Ups and Downs

Work has been a little bit of a rollercoaster lately.

Teaching has been great--the usual good points and not-so-good points. However, making the textbooks for the school as been a pain in the neck. Or something else. Ugh.

First, we edit the Reading and Listening sections for the month. Then we record them at the studio (which is a tedious 3 to 4 hours). Then we edit the Speaking and Writing sections for the month. We rewrite the sample reading for the Speaking and Writing parts, and create a whole new grammar section. Yikes! The deadlines are pretty close together... we only have about one week for the R/L and two weeks for the S/W.

What's especially hard is going from writing the books on our "breaks" from teaching, to teaching classes and dealing with the kids. On one hand, it's good to write the material we're teaching... on the other hand, we don't have much say on what goes into the material! So we see the flaws while teaching, but can't edit it much... Frustrating to say the least. What is also very frustrating is that some of the students in the level can't do the what their level books say they should be able to do. *sigh*

So when I did the books pretty slowly last month, my boss called me in and "nicely" asked me why. I expressed my frustrations but I don't think I quite made myself clear. Or it didn't quite translate. I don't know. After giving it another month to try the books out, next month I have the option of only teaching if I want. Hmm... it's tempting. But the conversation ended on a testy note... working slowly makes it seem like I don't care about my work. Bah.

I care about teaching the kids, not about freakin English grammar.