An Update

Things are more or less the same as last time I posted—we still don’t have a house, but I’ll spare you the recap of the three possibilities we’ve seen in the last few days, and the various reasons they didn’t work out.  We’ll see two more options tonight and tomorrow morning, and we’re really crossing our fingers that one of them works out!  We now know that at the end of the month there’s a definite possibility: the twin to Contender #1 will be vacant right now, and we could definitely live there.  It’s far enough that we couldn’t walk, but it’s a very good price (3,000,000/month plus utilities), and we already know what it looks like: simple, but spacious with lots of light.

Anyway.  That would be another two weeks in the hotel, which I am really praying we don’t have to spend.  In a lot of ways it feels like life is more or less on hold until we have a house:  we haven’t unpacked, haven’t bought some things we know we’ll need, haven’t settled into a routine…you get the idea.

On the other hand, the last few days have been really fulfilling for me in terms of teaching.  I’m beginning to get a better feel for how the classes should run, what material I’m expected to get through, what the various textbooks are like, etc.  I’ve also taught the same classes several times by now, and that helps a lot.  I think I may really enjoy this!

All of our observed teaching practices were with a high school that doesn’t employ foreign English teachers, and so although the students were learning English on a regular basis, they were typically of a very low level.  I don’t think I had one class that made it through everything I had on my lesson plan, just because the students needed more practice and more modeling to understand the concepts.  It was very difficult, and very frustrating.

Here, classes are two hours long (which seemed like a lot at first), and I feel like I’m really accomplishing something.  It’s really satisfying, especially with kids, to see the difference between the beginning and the end of a class—communicating something by the end of the class that they didn’t know at all in the beginning.

This morning I taught a Tiny Tots class, which is 3 and 4 year olds—they were hilarious.  We were working on animal names, and for each one they acted it out: meowing, making fishy faces, holding up bunny ears, etc.  When we got to “turtle,” I wasn’t exactly sure how to model it.  I held up the flashcard, and they all got down on the floor and moved around really slowly…adorable.