The last month has been incredibly rewarding, absolutely infuriating, and just outright exhausting.
My kindergarten has been preparing for the English Festival event that we're doing this coming Tuesday. First off, the two 7 year old classes were supposed to do a musical. The school wanted to do Hansel and Gretel. They had a DVD with a professional showing of kids doing it. Excellent, choreography, costumes, and scenery ideas done. The only problem was that the musical was done in Korean. So the Korean ESL teachers and I set to work translating. We had it done in a few days and we made scripts for the kids. We picked the parts based on who we thought would be best, of course. I handed the cast list to the Korean teacher and she told me it wouldn't work. The kids whose families have been with the school the longest get the best/biggest parts. It didn't matter that those particular kids probably couldn't do it very well. The casting was going to be based on...seniority...not skill. From that moment I washed my hands of the whole play. I had put a lot of thought into how to put on a really good show. And the school didn't care. All they wanted was to please their biggest money makers.
The parents weren't satisfied though. They called and called. "Why is my kid a munchkin? Why doesn't he have a bigger part?" The school decided to divide up the lead roles among a few kids. Just switch them out. We had 2 Hansels and 3 Gretels. For a 15 minute play. We even drew names out of a hat.
It wasn't enough to placate the parents. The school had to cancel the musical.
Besides the musical, each of the ESL teachers was given a class and we were told two prepare two pieces for the performance. We had a month. It should have been no problem.
A week later, we were told we had to prepare something for the special English classes too. Okay...but the performance for the special class kids was a week before the Little Campus (the English kindergarten). So now the time to prepare was cut in half. (This actually didn't apply for me. Turned out that my special class performs on the same day as Little Campus). Still doable. And the performance, earlier this week, went okay.
Yesterday, with 3 practice days left, we were told that the entire show wasn't long enough (they had to fill all the time from the cancelled musical). We were to combine the two 7 year classes and combine the three 6 and 5 year classes and come up with four more songs (with choreography) for each to perform. That's pushing it with only three days to go. Thankfully, I have the 7 year olds who are a bit quicker than the younger kids. Plus, two of the four songs we decided on already had a bit of choreography that the kids knew. I came up with the choreography for the other two on the spot as we were teaching them and we finished learning it today. Phew. Okay I can breathe now.
JUST KIDDING. Recall that my special class is the only one performing on Tuesday. This morning, my supervisor told me that since I'm the only class, I need to make the performance longer. Add another song. And give them more lines to memorize for their personal introductions. This class doesn't speak English and I've had a hard enough time trying to teach them the two original songs in broken Korean with two hell-raising 5 year olds in the mix. I expressed the imprudence of her idea given we only had two days left to teach the kids and make it performance-ready. No luck. I have an hour today and an hour on Monday to whip these kids into shape.
To say that I'm nervous for Tuesday is an understatement. The quality of my kids' performance directly reflects on how well I've taught them. My kids and I have invested a lot of time, patience (lack of?), and hard work into this show and I want my kids to do well. But given how unorganized and last minute much of this has been, I'm pretty worried.
That's not to say that this has been a completely negative experience. Since I've been spending an increased amount of time with the same kids, I've gotten to know them better and I feel like I've established relationships with them. When I ask my kids to sit down while we're watching others rehearse and they all dog-pile me in the attempt to sit next to me or curl up in my lap or hold my hand, it makes me feel like this whole fiasco was worth it. When Mary and Suzy sprint away from the bus to come hug me goodbye, I don't feel like the figure who stands in the front and speaks in tongues anymore. When the girls come seek me out because they want to be in my class it makes me feel good. They aren't just those kids anymore. They're my kids now.
Overall it's been an exhausting month and I'm so ready for my vacation. We'll be spending Christmas in Hawaii with Alan's family and I can't wait to have a week free from children, language barriers, and work. After Tuesday, it'll be time to let loose and relax.
