It has honestly felt like I’ve been creating lesson plans since the moment the semester started. Like I mentioned in a previous post, I’m teaching sixteen hours this semester—four preps—and all of them are content courses. They told us volunteers always teach oral English, with the occasional content course. Apparently my situation is a bit different. However, I like it this way. Even though prepping for content courses is considerably more work, that’s what I’m used to; that’s what I’m comfortable with.
Unfortunately, I am still planning lessons only a couple days in advance. I’d like to get ahead at least a week or a week and a half. And midterms are coming within the next couple weeks. It’s hard to believe midterms are so close. After midterms, I’m going to get ahead in my planning. First, I should probably focus my energy preparing those.
I’ve got a few really good anecdotes from teaching so far, plus I have been brainstorming some ideas for blogs to write, so I’m hoping that when I get a VPN and full access to my blog (as well as some more free time to write), I can publish some things people really want to read.
A public notice: I will henceforth never refer to my living space as an apartment. Most people know I have a penchant for British vocabulary. Well, they do not use the word “apartment”—only “flat”—which, it should come as no surprise, I prefer tenfold. It’s easier to say; it’s faster to type; most of my students are used to European foreign teachers, who use British English; a couple of the foreign teachers on campus I’ve befriended are Europeans who lived in Britain for some time (so they’re heavily influencing my diction).
My flat is coming along nicely. The volunteer living here before me never cooked, so I have been spending a lot of time cleaning it. I wanted to make it clean enough that I was comfortable to say that I live in it. Also, if I am living in a place, I want to claim the messes there as my own. I am nearly comfortable owning the space and claiming it for my own. My other goal for the future is to publish a lot of pictures of my flat, so everyone can get an idea of what kind of space I’m living in. (If I was more technically inclined and/or had a better camera, I would make my own PCV Cribs episode. That would be a lot of fun, but I don’t have a camera that could film something like that.)
