New position, and I ain't talking yoga!

Just when I started to feel bad about going back to the safe choice of teaching, my director approached me with the marketing opportunity I thought I'd missed! Turns out the place I returned to teach also needed someone to save the drowning student activities program.

However, we all know that new roles mean new stress! I'm getting through this by dialing up my pupil and aural cavities to maximum: observing like a mofo.

My first task was to submit an event calendar of both suggested and chaperoned events at my school. I've learned that modifying said calendar is a daily occurrence, but what ultimately matters is the face-time of announcing the week's events to students: a lot of them have a one-week sense of time, so my clandestine manipulations stayed unnoticed in shadow.

A regular part of the position is classroom announcements. By popping into 25 classrooms, I introduced myself to 350 people in one day! I think I get through the reluctance to talk in front of groups of people with two pieces of advice. The first is that no one really wants to laugh at a speaker for making a mistake; there's always empathy, considering that public speech is super high on the list of phobias. The second is, in the case that people do want to laugh at a public speaker, you gotta beat them to the punch and make them laugh.

Another long-term perk is that I also get to spend lots of hours with the desk staff instead of teacher time. I get to glean an occasional facet of being a student from another country. They're not magically dumped into a classroom, after all. There are visa concerns, scholarships, home stays, agents, other schools, and the occasional discipline problems, and my school has a person for each of those worries. Each student needs to be handled by 3-5 people, just at school!

*cackles maniacally* If ONLY...

Unfortunately, countless hours of manpower are wasted in calculating student attendance. The amount of admin work an absence creates is almost as much as being present and under care of a teacher! I'm shocked by how acceptable students think it is to miss class just to ask about their attendance. Luckily, my only part in that is haranguing students to cut their 30-minute smoke breaks short. Yes, they take 30-minute smoke breaks. No, I am not kidding.

My next goals are to plan a skit competition, get some student clubs properly up and running, and get our website and Facebook page updated on time. The best part about the latter two tasks is that I can apply this back to my own budding interest, Grammar Pimps.

I'm glad that I have the opportunity to do something new, while also seeing a new aspect of students. I wish I could say I've put the observations into meaningful action and gotten better at things, but that's a challenge on its way.