Hello everyone,

First of all, thanks for all your lovely birthday pressies and messages – I had a lovely day, in fact we dragged my birthday out for quite a few days!!

On Saturday we celebrated in Seoul by drinking for 12 hours straight, getting very drunk, and ended up in a nightclub where there were drunken girls taking their clothes off on stage (I don’t think they realise that if they went to England they’d get paid an awful lot of money for that!)

We crawled home at 6am on Sunday, and I felt sooooo hungover all day on Sunday I could barely stand up long enough to make a cup of tea, and my hangover was so vindictive it stayed around on Monday just to make sure I was still feeling crappy!!

However, I was nicely recovered by Tuesday, so that I could be smothered in love and presents by everyone around me (naturally!) I got tons of lovely presents, and after work we all went out for a posh dinner and some karaoke. We’ve had a sudden staff turnover – two of our Korean teachers left very suddenly and we’ve got two new teachers, who are really lovely.

Sadly, I have, after almost eight months of teaching, discovered some of the serious pitfalls of the job. Every three months we have exams and stuff, and usually all Cal and I have to do is write the exams and give the oral tests, but this time around, because the Korean teachers have only been here for a week and a half, we have to do all the exam writing, marking and the reports.

I’m sure most of you are probably thinking that’s pretty normal stuff for a teacher, but these reports involve so much maths! It’s doing my head in!!

For each child on the register, there are little tiny boxes for attendance. In each box there’s a circle if they’re present, a line for absence, a cross for lateness, a filled in circle for homework, an L for listening homework, and a grade for diary marks. Times that by 63 and you have three months worth of numbers to fill into the damn reports, and that’s just one child!!

Then times that by 8 classes, and you’ve got me with my head in the oven!!

I’ve just spent three hours trying to do two classes’ reports, and its exhausting!! AND I left my calculator at school, so I’m having to do mental maths with a little notebook – and the boxes are really really small!!!

I can see the headlines now, “Young girl struck down in her prime – forced to stay in marking on a Friday night”, “Tragic maths-induced stroke kills girl of 24” – it could so happen!!

Thankfully, my birthday arrived in the nick of time – at 24 I am now fully mature and capable of dealing with these problems – a previously 23-year old girl would almost certainly crack under the pressure!!

Hope you are all well, and if you haven’t heard from me in a while, I may be buried under a stack of reports, waiting for the neighbors to notice the smell……….

love ya,

seriously-mature-adult-Maya

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