One more thanks to all those who donated to our English Resource Center Project. We purchased all of the books and additional resources during the month of September and have been using them. The textbooks have been much better to work with than our old ones and are much more appropriate for the level of students at school. It has also been great to have additional audio and visual resources to use besides ones I have made or found on the internet (since those were few and far between anyway.) My students find the Ukrainians with British(ish) accents on the audio discs hilarious and the woman who is the narrator for the DVDs about Great Britain even more so. I have been over with the teachers a number of times how to operate the new audio players, aka this is how you plug it in, this is how you select the track, this is how you play, this is how you pause, this is how you play again, this is how you stop, this is how you unplug. They are still asking for directions, but I think they’ll get the hand of it eventually… fingers crossed.
The roof of one of the two buildings at my school is currently under reconstruction. By the end of last spring, most rooms on the third floor were molding and dripping due to major leaks in the ceiling. The entire second and third floors of the building have been closed off to students due to fear of injury/being in the way, so all classes are taking place in the other building. It was unclear at the start of the year if I would be allowed to use my classroom on the first floor, but since the lunchroom next door is in use, they let me continue my classes there. I have no idea what would have been the arrangement if that had not been the outcome. The consolidation to one building, however, has resulted in a crazy schedule that involves 2 shifts of students. The first shift begins at 8 am and goes to 1:30 pm at which point the second shift of students arrive and study until 8 pm. When I heard about this at the teachers’ meeting before the beginning of school, I had visions of me stuck at school from 8 am to 8 pm, teaching children before the sun had fully risen and well past sunset. Luckily, my 2 shift schedule is relatively harmless except for a couple of days in which the two shifts make it possible for me to teach 7 classes in a day. For those of you who have never been teachers, the only way I can describe that many classes to students between the ages of 12 and 17 is as a shit-ton. My schedule, however, also involves some days where I don’t have to be at school until 11:45. Not too shabby. The roof reconstruction was supposed to be completed by November, but everyone knows that is simply a complete lie and most are banking on completion by the New Year, I believe this is also a bit too optimistic.
