I can't help but wrinkle my nose at Han Jin-An teacher lately.

(i.e. my 61-year-old male co-teacher - and I wouldn't mention age and sex here if it wasn't important, if it didn't give him a huge number of privileges and leniences that younger, female teachers would never dream of.)

I'm pretty sure I've ranted about him before to all of you, but it's just that lately I keep on walking past his classes and seeing in the windows while he's "teaching" - and it really, really looks like he's not teaching. Granted, I sometimes give my students free time if they have done well and finished the lesson early, and maybe he's doing the same thing -- it's just that every time I walk past his classroom, 75% of the students are sleeping and the rest are on their cell phones or mp3 players while Han Jin-An teacher appears to be reading something silently at his desk.

I had a required teachers' training a while ago, and it fell on the day all my classes are with Han Jin-An (ergo, he had to teach all the classes that I usually manage). Afterwards, I heard from Mother hen #2 (for anyone who cares to look back at the high school yearbook) that he had complained all day about how "힘들다" (difficult, laborious - there's no perfect english translation) it was. But what was so hard about it? The 40 students he taught that day are the same students he teaches 3 times a week (not counting the hours he's supposed to be teaching with me), so he should be somewhat accustomed to them, right? He should have developed a teaching strategy? He knew in advance that I would be gone, it's not like I sprang it on him.

Sometimes, when the C-level students take their English tests, they only make an effort on the material that I taught in my class. The rest of the questions (the things they should have learned in Han Jin-An's class) they just leave blank. Not always - sometimes they make an effort on other questions, sometimes they leave everything blank - but it happens enough to make me wonder what exactly happens in his class. Has he completely given up on teaching them anything? Does he not care that there are some students in his class who do want to learn, if only he would teach them something they could understand?

Some of the students who were in B-level last semester and dropped down after the mid-term have complained to I Young-Gyung (who teaches B-level) that there's no way they can get out of C-level. It makes me so angry that Han Jin-An has made no effort to adjust his teaching methods to the students' needs and that there is nothing that I or even the immovable force can do about it, because he is 61 years old and male.