1. One of the lowest points of my teaching career was my first week teaching in Taiwan. I was hired to teach a class of 20 kindergartners full-time, and at that point I had ZERO experience teaching small children.
I arrived in a small classroom, letlagged out of my wits, and the school just left me there, in that tiny room, with an "assistant" who barely spoke English and several kids who cried almost continuously for six hours. Looking back, I really have no idea how I got through that first week. Between alternating bouts of insomnia and deep sleep I pondered questions such as "How do you make kids listen?", "How do you make kids line up?" and "How do you make kids stop pissing themselves?"
As someone (Nietzsche I think) once said: "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." Or is it stranger? Whichever one it is, I walked away from that first week with a newfound understanding of how to make kids listen, how to make them line up, and how to help most of them stop pissing themselves.
2. Not quite as low as that was the year I spent teaching at another private kindergarten in Hsinchu. My pay there was high, and I was only responsible for a class of 5 kids. Sounds easy, right? The trouble was that both of my bosses were hardcore alcoholics, and they were very threatened by the facts that I a) had higher degrees than them, b) could speak Chinese, and c) knew the business they were in better than they did. I ended up quitting before the end of the school year, and I haven't really been back to Hsinchu since.
3. Doing sub work around Seattle also wasn't fun. I had a steady job as a math teacher, but it wasn't enough to live on. I had to supplement this job by subbing in the Seattle, Shoreline and Lake Forest Park school districts.
Back then substitute teachers had to wait for a recorded notice at some ungodly hour - probably before sunrise - and only then would we know where we were working that day. Once you clicked "accept" or "decline" on the phone, you had a choice of either going back to bed or driving somewhere far in the cold. The schools where I got sub work were never near where I was living, and I'd sometimes have to drive to the north end of Lake Washington (about an hour away) to teach a class of kids I'd probably never see again. The work itself - minus one, disastrous job I shouldn't have taken - was OK, but the getting up early and the epic drives were killing me.
4. One time in Taitung I was asked to "help translate" documents for an upcoming international youth baseball competition. I ended up translating about 30 pages of small type for free, plus the speeches for the Taitung County Magistrate and other local dignitaries. I (foolishly) did this thinking that I'd get credit for it, and that it would help me advance through the local hierarchy, but in the end one of my coworkers took credit for the entire thing. She was given an award for her "efforts," and this award was given to her in public, at the same youth baseball competition.
Since then I have always insisted on either money or explicit credit for any translation work I do. This has made me less popular with certain coworkers, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.
5. A sixth grade class I taught last year was like a bomb waiting to explode. Their behavior was so consistently bad, and they were so consistently rude, that it was hard to get mad at them.
All you could do was shake your head and think, "Good luck with the rest of your life." I sweated my way through two semesters of their shenanigans, and I have no doubt that I'm a better teacher for having done so. Sometimes bad situations are a test, and other times bad situations are something to walk away from. Thinking of that class now, several months later, I'm glad I didn't walk away.
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