First day

First day of work was strangely uneventful, it was actually so uneventful nothing happened at all. My first day of work was yesterday, and yesterday there was typhoon signal 8 in the morning. When there is typhoon signal 8 everything is closed and cancelled, and my school decided to cancel all classes for the whole day. So actually my first day of work was not my first day of work, it was only my birthday, and I had the whole day off!

So my real first day of work that should have been my second day of work was today, and I must say I liked it. My school is running on 7 weekday cycles which just means that the schedule is not week based, this makes a lot of sense since there are 7 classes for each grade, 7/7 evens up pretty nicely I think. So of course missing the first day of the cycle creates some problems, the three classes I should have had that day I need to press into my oh so tight (NOT!) schedule. I'm actually only having each class once per cycle and I only have S1-S3, which means 21x40 minutes per cycle at average. The problem is that their schedule is not that light and they only have free time when I'm the most busy, this is not too bad though but next week on Friday I gotta start working at 9.30 instead of my regular 11.30.

OK so basically I have 22.5 working hours per week but only about 10 hours actual teaching, I also have about 30 minutes per day when I will be socializing with students, this is at lunch time so I don't really have any lunch. The rest of the time I guess will go to preparation. There will be other things I need to do as well, probably on a cycle basis, but it doesn't seem to be too much.


Back to second (e.g. first) day: On the second day of the cycle I have to start an hour earlier because of schedule problem, however I only have two classes that day and both are before lunch, so basically I have nothing to do from 1pm and can go home about 3 (yes normal working hours is from 11:30am to 4pm :D). The first class I had was an S2 class and I started off really well with them, lesson was too short for my plan though, or perhaps my plan was too long for the lesson, who knows... The second class was an S3 class and even though there was some items of disturbance (some students that just couldn't stop trying to get attention) it was also a successful lesson.

At lunch I went to HQ, English Land, where students can go at lunch hour or other free time to... well... practice English. A group of boys wanted to play Transformers RISK and I tried to help them but the rules are really screwed up so even they knew RISK from before it took them the whole lunch break to set up the game. After that I spent the rest of my working day to figure out the rules of the game and jot them down in (what I think) a simpler way. We will see if we can actually start playing at lunch tomorrow.

Tomorrow will be a lot longer day though, with 4 classes and the lunch thing I'm actually actively working for 3 hours tomorrow. Friday will be like that too as will Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week (because of the 3 missed classes that have to be done at some point). So well, a little bit busy am I at least.