Inconsiderate

There's a new full-time teacher at one of the places I work. He is replacing a WONDERFUL teacher who has now left, and I miss her terribly. That place has become less sane, suddenly, up on the top floor where all the full-timers reside.

There aren't many foreign teachers there, and I haven't met the new guy formally. I have only met him in passing. I spotted him on campus as I was leaving last week, and passed by, smiling and saying hello. I pretended to be in a hurry and did not stop. I'd heard too much about him that isn't very flattering.

However, I suspect he is the person who uses my last classroom on Mondays before I do. He does not wipe the board clean after using it. He sort of swipes at it, and leaves bits of words all over the place. The board is a mess when I go in. The reason I think it's him (I haven't actually checked) is that the words are all in English, and I have never seen that handwriting before. To be fair, it COULD be a different teacher, but I really don't think so.

When I go into this classroom the first thing I do is to wipe the horribly messy board clean, even if I am not going to use it. Someone is using the classroom after me, and I don't want to leave it unusable. Generally I don't notice what is on it. I am too pissed off with the inconsiderate person who left it looking like that.

But last week when I turned up I didn't do anything about it at first. A bit later I wanted to write something, turned, saw the mess, and sighed, and my students (I only have four in my last class) sympathized and tut-tutted as I wiped it clean. As I was wiping, I spotted two words that had been left intact. The first word was this:

embarrased

I stopped when I got to it, and stepped back.

"Doesn't embarrassed have two esses?" I wondered, and saw that one of my students was already looking it up in her dictionary to find out what it meant.

"Yes," she said.

"Bad, BAD teacher!" I said, and went back to wiping. The students laughed.

Then I got to the next intact word:

exstacy

I paused, thought, and then wiped it clean, fast. I didn't even want to THINK about what that guy had been teaching in his class, never mind the fact that of the two words left intact on the board, both were spelt wrongly.

Is our new teacher an ecstatic, embarrassed, dirty old man who can't spell?

WHAT IS THIS MAN EVEN DOING IN A LANGUAGE TEACHING CLASSROOM?