I told the staff that I didn’t care if my students froze.

They laughed nervously but I think they understood.

The students were not so understanding.

The problem is that while the students get to sit for much of the class, my job is to stand at the front or rush around answering questions and putting out small fires. Because of this, I prefer the room to be somewhere closer to sub-arctic than sub-tropical. (The students, rather selfishly, prefer things to be more sub-tropical.)

I also feel that keeping the room cooler encourages students to stay awake. Once it gets warm and comfortable and cozy there’s nothing they’d like more than to put their heads down and enjoy a brief slumber and miss a good portion of the class. Or they are about to die of hypothermia because it’s so cold. Either way, they shouldn’t fall asleep.

My students have learned to bring jackets and have also quickly figured out which part of the room is the warmest, or at least out of the direct breeze of the air conditioner.

Of course, once speeches started today, despite earlier complaints that it was cold, everyone was sweating. By the time they stopped, class was over.

Mostly all I did was sit around today. There wasn’t much else for me to do.

During exams at the school where I work our main job, after writing the exams and recording the listening sections, is to sit and wait. We are not the exam proctors, but we are on call in case there are questions and/or crises.

During high school exams we at least get to sit at our desks and “do work” but during junior high exams our job is to occupy desks that are not ours and generally be loud and obnoxious.

Some of us, though, well, some of the others actually, do attempt to “do work”.

We sit in the tiny junior high teachers’ offices and wait to be called. Typically there aren’t that many questions, but that seems to alternate between years. In the past, we’ve discovered mistakes on exams that required us to enter the rooms and write the corrections on the blackboards.

The main hassle is the jhs teachers’ offices are tiny little rooms that remind me of the guard rooms at prisons. (In fact, the rooms overlook a large atrium that could be mistaken for a cell block, if you ignore that there are no bars or women in orange suits.)

Because the rooms are so small, even a quiet conversation between us becomes a disturbingly loud distraction to any poor teachers attempting to “do work”.

After that, we sorted our exams and I then spent the rest of the day sitting whilst I marked exams.

He was asleep in the back which meant, so long as he appeared to be breathing, I let him sleep and carried on with class. Ten minutes into class he finally woke up and realized he was somewhere.

(Note: If he hadn’t been breathing, I would have contacted proper authorities rather than continuing with class.)

The last day of the term is, traditionally, whether I want to or not, a day for study and/or play. The students finish review lessons and, in theory, are supposed to make pairs and practice things out of the book, but in practice they end up playing various rock-paper-scissors games and a version of football with erasers.

Today my classes were mostly outside of their homerooms which means students didn’t have easy access to their stuff. Despite my suggestion to always bring something to study for when they’re done with they’re assignments, the students never bring anything to study except when it costs them points. (Long story.)

Because it was the last day if the term, and I’m ready to be done with classes and get into exams and summer vacation, I did the equivalent of phoning in a lesson even though I was present in the classroom. This meant I checked assignments and answered questions and mostly ignored what was going on so long as sports and/or violence weren’t involved.

Or singing. I don’t allow singing.