Phew! Friday

Man, feels like only this morning I was feeling the Monday blues, and now I'm happy it's Friday evening. Where did the in-between time go?

Well, yesterday was my lonely day at work - there were only three people in the teachers' office, including me! The vice-principle sent me home at 12, but I got a good four hours of solid planning done for winter camp, like my co-teacher asked me to do. I've gone all hard-core and am designing a lot of my own material. It made the time really fly! Only I get in to work this morning, and he's like 'Oh, here are the texts books for winter camp'. I was like, 'but you told me to plan winter camp yesterday? I've done lots of planning and none of it involves those books....?', and he said 'Oh, winter camp. I don't know the dates or anything yet... sorry. Here are the books'. Hmmmm, ok. 

So, I've looked at these books, and it's my opinion that they are way above the students level. They are books about writing paragraphs and essays... these kids can barely write a regular sentence. And when I say barely, I mean most of them can't write a sentence. They can not even write 'I like cats', or 'I like to go to the park'. They will instead write 'I like cat' and 'I like go park'. I seriously don't think they're ready to move on to paragraphs or even essays if they can't write sentences. I've seen what happens when they try to write more complex sentences, and it's unintelligible. Well, I have adapted the first chapter of the easiest book to fit into my existing lesson plan. Hopefully that will do.

Things with Mr Beak were better teaching-wise today, but worse from a communication point of view. He really doesn't listen to my questions, and is always trying to reassure me, when I'm asking for information, not reassurance. He acts so nice, but for some reason I just don't like him. I very strongly get the feeling he is acting nice because it is his job. Not that I think he doesn't like me or anything, I just get bad vibes. Not bad as in creepy serial killer bad, just like I'm a job he has to do, and he doesn't see me as a real person. Which I suppose is fair enough, he probably never asked to be made to teach with a foreigner.

Anywho, weekend, yay!