I can’t remember why I originally agreed to do it, but I did, so I ended up working on Saturday afternoon, when I should by rights have been sleeping and lazing around. I taught a single, 90 minute class at an English seminar for elementary school kids. What’s worse, it really didn’t go well!

The classroom, if you can call it such, was a large gymnasium/meeting hall that had been partitioned off into three sections with some tacky pegboard partitions, with a different class going on in each section. That was bad, because you could hear the other classes, and in any case the size of the room made it very difficult to be heard.

Add to that the fact that the children ranged in age from 6 to 13, and you have an almost impossible situation.

However, the worst thing was the lesson plan I was required to follow. This specified all the activities and time taken to a micromanagerial degree, and compounded this by being absolutely crap. The so-called games were both pointless and uninteresting. You couldn’t even call them games, really: they weren’t fun.

There was one interesting event, though. Near the end of the class, I noticed some mud on the floor of the classroom. That’s unusual, because as I have mentioned before, you have to take your shoes off before going into school. On the other hand, children manage to get messy pretty easily.

Then I noticed the smell—this wasn’t mud, but faeces. I suspected a dog, until I realised that it was one of the children. Horrible! So the class was, quite literally, a load of shit.

Still, it’s finished, and I’m getting paid for it. That’s the bottom line.