I was reading some of my very first blog entries this morning, from all the way back in June. I was interested to read about how my teaching was back then, and how excited and happy I was with most of my day's classes. It sort of highlighted how dull my days here are. I read about how thrilled I was to find the students interested and motivated, and I didn't write about discipline issues at all. Fast forwards nine months and I'm bored, undervalued, and feel like this work might be making my teaching worse rather than giving me valuable experience. It's tricky because teaching is definitely what you make of it, but there are also a lot of restrictions in place here that are... well... restricting. I am trying to use it all as an opportunity to learn and improve, but a lot of the time now, I just feel tired. Back in NZ I'd teach for three hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, every day. And I had to plan every lesson, and had a minimum of technology available to me. We weren't even able to print things in colour. Here I teach for 45 mins at a time, often no more than three or four times a day, there's a huge touch screen in the English room, the computer is a touch screen, everything is done via power-point, and all the books come with interactive CDs. I do a minimum of lesson planning, and even then, my co-teacher teaches over half of everything anyway. So, my work load is way reduced, but so is my reward, it seems.

The kids are nice, and I enjoy interacting with them, but it is so different being in a public school. I don't think it's something I'd choose to do again. I think that in the future I'll stick with dedicated language schools in the hope that at least the materials will be better, and that the student's will actually be there to learn English. Don't even get me started on the quality of a lot of the teaching materials here. The English used in them is awkward, I'm not allowed to teach grammar (which means my own knowledge of the subject is stagnating), and sometimes the books are just plain wrong. For example, we were looking at a "culture" bit of the 1st grade book, which was about famous things in Australia, one of which the book said was 'Bonti Beach' in New South Wales. I tried to tell my Co-Teacher it was spelled "Bondi", but as usual he didn't even listen. His reply when I said it was spelled wrong? "Oh, really?! That's good!". Sorry, what? And then! He was doing the bit about America, using the map on the book's interactive CD, and I was thinking, 'Hmmm, there's something wrong with that map of North America...'. And then I realised, it was in French! New Mexico was 'Nouveau Mexique', and so on. For goodness sake! Can you not even put an ENGLISH map in the ENGLISH textbook? It's not like maps of the USA are difficult to come by - why was it in French? I didn't even both saying anything about that one :)

I'm really hoping that after-school class goes well today!
And here's five for today:

1) The American map in French actually made me laugh :)

2) My little buddy came up to me after class to ask if I'd come play with him at lunch time. He didn't use a dash of English, but man can that kid mime!

3) I played with my buddy at lunch. He like to run races and despite being about as tall as my elbow, he can almost beat me. I think I'll start letting him win... it's a bit mean to win all the time, isn't it?

4) I got two lovely messages this morning, one from Jenni and one from Brook. They really brightened up my morning! Getting out of bed seems to be getting progressively harder, so to wake up to awesome letters from friends is the best :)

5) I think it's been above freezing all day today. Progress!