This week has been interesting to say the least. At school we are constantly talking about
being flexible and how especially important that is when working in a foreign
country. With that being said, here is
the run-down of our past two days.
Tuesday we showed up at school at 8:30 for breakfast to the
sound of several jackhammers breaking up the main lobby floor. After about 30 minutes, they decided that we
would take over a space in either a local coffee shop or in some conference
room so that we could continue. When
both of those options fell through, we got dismissed early at noon to go work
on our own. The hard part about that was
that we had hardly gone over anything, so the lack of information kept us from
doing much.
One of the ELL teachers graciously offered her time to sit
with several of us and help us create supplies lists for our classes, talk
about students, expectations, and several different things. She also took us to a teacher supply store
that we never would have found on our own.
Later in the afternoon, the Pre-K teacher (Lydia) and I worked on some
scheduling. We are very separate from
the rest of the school in many ways because we don’t go to specials or
anything. We are going to be able to
basically team teach, though, which is huge!
I only have 2 students as of now and she only has 7. We were able to put together a rough schedule
and feel like we accomplished something.
We were also able to look through a supplies catalog and order anything
we wanted for our rooms!
Justin was able to sit with the only returning elementary
teacher and talk through classroom management and discipline and get some great
tips! He reworked his schedule a bit, so he was happy with that as well.
Wednesday is a whole new story. They were able to reserve a conference room
in a different part of the city, so we met at the school at 8:30 to catch the
school bus. It was raining, and our bus
driver was not there. So the
administration headed over in a car to get things set up, only to find out that
there was no internet access, which was necessary for the majority of our
schedule today. So we got moved to the computer lab in the school, which meant
jumping over all sorts of construction and skipping steps on the staircase to
get there. We finally got settled in
there and found out that they in fact DID have internet at the conference
room. So we packed up and headed back
out to the bus. But we still had no bus
driver for a while. We finally made it
to the conference room around 10am. We
sat in a café for a while and had gelato and coffee (hot chocolate for me) and
then got going with meetings around 10:30 or 11:00.
The first announcement was something that we were all a bit
relieved about – school has been postponed until September 3rd due
to all of the construction and lack of being able to meet. So that means that next week we will be
attempting to have most of the meeting that we didn’t get to this week. This was especially comforting since we don’t
even know if we’ll actually be able to get into our classrooms Friday or
not. That is the plan, but of course, we
must be flexible!
We also had to get our lovely health checks done today at the
hospital – the first step in getting an alien registration card. We had X-rays, hearing tests, eye “tests,”
blood pressure tests, urine tests, blood drawn, and all of that fun stuff. It was pretty humorous to walk out with your
cup of urine and just set it on a tray with 10 other cups of your co-workers’
urine. A bonding experience, I suppose. Justin got hauled off to a different floor of
the hospital for being colorblind. They also
had the hardest time drawing his blood! Thankfully that wasn’t me or I’m sure I
would have passed out.
Tonight we are hanging out with the two other couples……Nick
and Sara and Miten and Maggie. It will
be nice to be able to relax and just hang out instead of feeling like there are
a thousand things we need to be working on for school.
We miss you all and hope and pray you are doing well!
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