The Life of a Desk Warmer

Ironically, I'm not at my desk today. I was given the option to go in for 8 half days of my choice, so I gave myself a four day weekend. To be fair, I was out every night from Wednesday to Saturday though. But now I feel nursing a hangover at my desk along with facebook, solitaire, watching really bad kid movies, checking the sports ticker and highlights, I have done little to no work at my desk. I've organized my library for my structured reading classes, and that took a day and a half, when I was hoping it would take three or four.

This concept of desk warming (but this season I'd call it desk freezing) is the dumbest thing ever. I haven't asked why we subject ourselves to wasting away at our desks, and I doubt I will. Perhaps if I knew what I was doing at the beginning of the year I'd start lesson planning, but both my CTs for the upcoming month are on vacation, (they apparently desk warmed or went to a training course over Christmas while I was doing winter camp and in the Philippines). My ambition is starting to get the better of me though, I'll be re-reading a textbook from teacher's college after this to hopefully kick start my aspirations to rock this year. I've remodeled my teacher's philosophy a while ago too and I plan on sticking with that. But desk warming is just so tedious.

I made a list of things to do the first couple of days if I got a headache from categorizing and organizing upwards of a thousand books. Once that was finished there's nothing to do but waste away. I tried writing creatively (this blog doesn't count) but I'm a true believer that art makes art and I'm not getting any sort of catharsis from Atlantis 2: Milo's Return (raise your hand if you even knew this movie existed... that's what I thought too).

This is one of the downsides of teaching in Korea. I just wanna work with kids, teach them stuff, hear them running and yelling in the halls, and feel like my job isn't a cubicle job.

Funny kind of relevant story to end this post. I took the morning off last Tuesday to play frisbee with some people at Haeundae Beach. As we were throwing the disc around, more and more Koreans started coming to the beach. They were in high school uniforms, suits, jogging gear, and regular clothes. I didn't think anything of it until one of my friends said, "Don't any of these people have jobs!?" and its true. You'd think in between 10 and 11 in the morning people would be in meetings, micro-managing someone, or playing on their smart phone, not feeding seagulls or taking millions of selfies on the beach. Once again though, I'm not gonna ask questions, if I've learned one thing here its just go with the flow, especially when you have a question that's longer than nine words or starts with why.