Miracle Worker

I will walk from a room filled with three year olds to one filled with older teens

I will grade all tests and enter them immediately
I will make whole lessons appear intact from thin air
I will test your students and place them in the most perfect level ever
I will never deign to desire lunch, dinner, or the toilet
I will make games and brilliant activities mixed with six pages of bookwork and explicit grammar

I will fix the failings of your pushing
I will push your child when you feel you can’t
I will provide them English-Speaking friends
I will give them extra grammar homework, even though I know they already have grammar homework that they never do
I will give them perfect writing scores
I will help them write literary analysis and persuasive essays at eleven years old

I will work harder and harder
I will be the first one in and the last one out
I will be on time at all times, never breaking character
I will sell your classes for you with my blatant foreignness
I will speak perfect, impossibly unaccented English
I will be an American stereotype

I will work on all the skills of English
I will discipline your child for you
I will be a perfect role model
I will never lose my temper
I will always do things on time
I will never be unfair
I will never make mistakes
I will make sure that none of my chairs or tables are messed up by the hundred bottoms that they host

I will teach your tiny child in complete sentences
I will hold your insecurities and theirs
I will prepare each and every student to study abroad
I will make my students pass their school exams, TOEFL, SAT, and AP tests with flying colours
I will make your student fluent in English
I will make every student a perfect achiever
I will know how to pass entrance exams in Chinese and teach them perfectly

I will do all of this for less than I made in a London bar
I will perform and dance and sing and sweat
I will never turn the air conditioning on
I will buy your child presents with my own money
I will never talk back to you
I am the English teacher you’re paying for, after all.

EDIT: This post was written in a two-week period with eight open door classes (i.e. parents come in and grade me during class). I have discovered, after my last one today, the following: In Korea, I was a good teacher if I provided one game per class. Now, the parents want us to be real PrescElementIddleIgh School teachers with the highest energy, the most perfect classes. We should be at once perfectly foreign and perfectly Chinese-speaking, with superhuman patience and endurance and glitter farts on command. For open doors, of course.