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This is the worst conference I have ever attended. I am not an avid conference-goer, nor do I consider myself an expert in the art of informative speaking. I do, however, give myself enough credit to identify a large room full of English teachers, fidgeting uncomfortably with cell phones and fingers and god knows what else, as victims of a decidedly uninformative lecture. Something is broken here. A Saturday is slipping through our fingers, wasted and murdered most foul.

Anna Song, Anna Song, your voice drones and drones and kills seconds painfully, torturously. Your song is an aria of verbal slaughter. Already heads are starting to nod under your knives, eyes close in somatic resignation. Read the slides, word by word, articulate the obvious and turn the unpredictable joys of teaching into a litany of broken-English boredom. The new curriculum is a mirror-image of the old, with, of course, the addition of in-book Korean translations of new English words which is suck a clear fucking necessity that I can't believe nobody thought of it sooner. But of course, you're not talking about that, Anna Song. You're reading the slides.

This room breeds cynicism and my heart is bitter and my face is peeling off and - WHOOPS! - I was writing and not paying attention and Belinda evilly volunteered me for a silly demonstration and I had to find the flashcard that was the opposite of good (BAD!) up on the stage, which was difficult because I teach French and not English, but I won a free T-shirt anyway. The massacre continues and the T-shirt is white.

Now Anna Song is gone and now we're singing the 'Color Song', a sea of hands slowly flapping in the sweet stagnation. Belinda is on stage, looking thoughtfully at her stack of color cards, hoping beyond all hope to win a T-shirt of her own after enthusiastically and accidentally headbutting the lecturer's assistant in the boob. Where does the green go? On the dinosaur! Green and Purple and something and Red. Turquoise and Yellow and Blue. Nobody trusts Turquoise - it's sandwiched and guarded by Red and Yellow to ensure it doesn't try to start any shit on its own. The Color Song is a particularly filthy bit of subversive racism and I won't stand for that sort of thing. The Color Song will have no place in my classroom. The Turquoise children will roam and learn in peace, free and unmolested.

My temperment has shifted from bitter to ludicrous by now, in case you haven't noticed. Just like foreign teachers in Korea go through a series of stages - the honeymoon period, the fatalist regression, the comfort of settling in and routine, the declining race to the finish line - the bored conference-goer experiences a similar timeline of ups and downs. Right now I am hopeful, past the halfway point of the schedule, halfway incredulous that any loving God could level this kind of Saturday upon his children. On my left and right, Belinda and Sam are mooing and clucking loudly, making animal noises along with Alyce Chong. A cat says "meow." A horse says "woof woof." A Chris says "chants are for chumps." A Sam stage-whispers "Steak!", trying to secure some kind of well-earned reward from Sue for these long hours of maligned punishment.

It's break time now, a slim mercy, and I sit outside smoking a cigarette. Impossibly, this is a Saturday with better weather than we've seen in weeks. And predictably, we're spending it in a conference hall (this is predictable because I've just spent the past hour writing about conferences, and how much they suck. I thought I would explain this since the theme of the day is 'pointlessly rediscovering the obvious'.). Perhaps I am swinging back into bitterness now. Perhaps my mind is sinking into the sweet blackness (black! That's a color... or shade) of oblivion.

Now we are learning how to be Herald Leaders. "Introduce this puppet to the class. Cover your face with this puppet and talk with a different voice!" Leaders apparently need to exhibit the warning signs of multiple personality disorder. This is a leadership skill I can identify with, right here, right now. I don't have a puppet so I think I'll talk to my clenched fist, Mr. Clenchy.

Chris: "Mr. Clenchy, do you want a drink of water?"

Extra emphasis on each syllable of each word. We're leaders of teaching, after all.

Mr. Clenchy: "Shut the fuck up and pour a whiskey into my drink-hole!"

Chris: "MR. CLENCHY! That isn't Herald appropriate language at all! Repeat after me: 'No, good sir, water is not my libation of choice. I desire the sweet nectar of the South, a Jack Daniels on the rocks. Now, if you will, noble educator, please to be pouring an alcoholic beverage of favorable repute into my drink-hole.'"

Mr Clenchy: "......."

He is gone, vanished. He is a hand again, a hand whiskeyless and alone.

People are ditching the auditorium in droves. They sneak out, they strut out unashamedly, they leave for greener pastures. The fields here are wastelands, strewn with the corpses of bright-eyed idealism and the husks of shells of people who used to be teachers. Dispair is softly setting in. This, my friends, is the nadir of human accomplishment, the crux and the triumph of senseless bureaucracy. We've built ourselves up with machines so we have more time to brutalize in conference halls. The drone continues.

And, sweet love, merciful rock of the ages, we're leaving early! Sue is a flagship in these dark ages of human tragedy, a beacon of hope against the sharpened spires of ineffectual seminars. As the Station Wagon of Glorious Escape flees the unspeakable crimes of Saturday, I only have eyes for the Outback Steakhouse. True retribution is cooked medium-rare.

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I wrote this across four pages of my conference programme, scattered paragraphs reaching deep to pass the time. The reader will be depressed to hear that Sue did not respond favorably to our Outback Steakhouse plugs, which I read to her passionately from the backseat of the car; she laughed and then drove us all to a cheapo Galbi place instead.

Posted by Chris at 05:37 AM >> Commentations (1)