Shaking off the shrew.

Forgot my phone at home because I'm an idiot, but it's maybe all for the better since the Terrible Teacher started phoning me at about 6 last night -- she already asked me about seventeen times last week if she could bring her daughters up today for me to teach them while I was at work. I didn't answer the phone or call her back. I'm not getting paid to put up with her neuroses. I'm not going to answer eleventeen thousand phone calls at all hours of the day during my free time for the rest of my life because she thinks I'm an idiot and also wants to use me for the benefit of her children's education. Enough is enough. I didn't come to this country to Teach All Koreans English. That's not my purpose in life. I'm a human being with a personal life, whether she wants to respect that or not. And, guess what -- she really has no choice. She's ruined a pretty good thing she had going, which was basically a private native speaking English tutor for free, who came to her home once a week, by being obsessive and disrespectful. No doubt she's blowing up my phone right now, but I don't have to deal with it, because it's at home.

Coteacher mentioned something about how eager she was to have me over to her house last week at lunch, and I used the opportunity to grease the wheels of being publicly unhappy with this situation, by saying that she seemed quite, quite concerned about her children's English, and that I may just give her the phone number of a friend of mine who has an F2 and is allowed to teach privately. Coteacher said, "I think she's just interested in you." No. That's how she plays it off to you and the other teachers to save face for what she's doing. But it stops now. I may be a Westerner, but I'm not too bad at these little games. If she wants to continue pushing me, she's going to have to do it in public, or with the knowledge of the other teachers. I'm sorry -- I don't understand what you're asking me to do. Let's ask Coteacher to translate. Oh. Never mind? Well okay....

Can I come to your house tomorrow? Oh, I'm sorry. I can't. Maybe next week. Oh, no sorry. Can't make it then either. Maybe the next week.

I can do this ad infinitum for as long as it takes. I'll put up with a hell of a lot, but once you demonstrate quite clearly a complete lack of respect for me as a human being, that's pretty much the end of everything. When someone's doing you a favor, you don't treat them as though you're entitled to it. It's ungracious, and not a way she would behave with or in front of fellow Koreans. The same goes for "friends" who want you to perform when you meet their other friends, being "friendly" like a cartoon-character image of a foreigner is supposed to be, making the proper rounds to make sure everyone gets their five minutes of honest-to-goodness English practice. That kind of person can suck on a tail pipe, as far as I'm concerned. You're already getting the polite, subdued, Korean-friendly version of my personality. You wanna push a little harder and you're in for a surprise.

And from now on, anyone who wants their children to learn from a native speaker will promptly be handed an F4 or F2 visa holding friend of mine's phone number in response. I teach public school -- not private lessons. Looks like hard lining is the only way to go on this one.