Finally made it to the weekend. It's Saturday and Ami took off for an old college friend's wedding. That leaves me in the apartment alone for the first time. I've got CNN on now and am munching on potato chips and having a beer.
Had a good week at work. After a great night's sleep in Monday night, I felt good on Tuesday. I never really had jetlag at all. Just felt a little tired on Monday and then was well acclimated by Tuesday. I think my arrival time on Sunday had a lot to do with this. But anyway, work was good. Tuesday I did a few more observations of classes and then spent the afternoon talking to Greg and the other teachers and just getting to know the place a bit better. Wednesday I had to go to a local hospital for a health check and then was at work at 11 to watch a class before lunch and then at 3 I met with the computer guy, Ken, to go over what is so far the hardest part of the job, all the technology. Ken went over all the stuff with me and while I learned quite a bit, there is still more. A lot of stuff at this place gets done via computer: office communication, student-teacher communication, the grades, the attendance, some lesson plans, some of the handouts used in class, and probably a lot of other stuff. We have four computer rooms for the students, every classroom has a computer for the teacher, and all the desks in the teachers' room have a computer. It's a very wired up place.
Thursday I just went in and sat at my desk all day. It was the first day of testing for the students (each eight week session ends with two testing days), so I had a short meeting with one of the other teachers about the classes I will be teaching next week and then spent the day designing a few handouts, looking through the textbooks, and writing a bit here. And then Friday I went in and learned how the school grades the final papers students write during their writing test time. Depending on the level, students are given prompts and then have two hours to write an essay. After the time is up, the essays are collected and a team of four teachers set to reading them, agreeing on certain guidelines and giving them a score of 0-4 based on a rubric. It's a very efficient way to grade the papers and I think it's more fair to the students than it is when just one teacher reads them.
In addition to all the reading, we had a small potluck for the teachers and staff. I was asked to bring a bottle of wine and some of the others brought the same and food. I think I will get used to that part of the job. Anyway, was a good week with me learning a lot about my new place of employment.
Ami was busy too. She ordered a lot of stuff for our place and it's all been showing up during this last week. Pots and pans, a rug, two chairs that sit on the floor, a fan, drawers for clothes, etc. She also got the gas guy to come and hook us up, the internet and cable guys to do the same, and talked to the landlady about a few issues in the apartment. So all in all, we are getting settled in.
Last night Ami and I went out to a place called K-Texas. Was a bar/restaurant that is about a 2-minute walk from our place. I'm not really sure why it's got the name it does as the food was Korean but I did order a Texas beer which I think was nothing more than a Korean lager in a medium sized mug. They did have Guinness (which is NOT from Texas, by the way) but it was a lot more expensive than the Texas beer, so I went with that.
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