First day of teaching - 17.09.07

17.09.07: So I had some really weird dreams last night which I believe to be caused by the strain of my new job. I went in to the office early to prepare for my afternoon and evening classes but didn’t end up really planning that much. I mostly familiarized myself with the lesson and found a few activities. In the end it all worked out: I had only three students in my elementary class so I had to adapt all of my activities anyway. I was to meet one of the directors of the franchise for which I am working at 1.45 at a metro station and was early as usual (I haven’t gotten a feel of calculating metro travel times yet). While waiting I realized that I didn’t know what they look like and didn’t know if they knew what I look like so I almost went and asked some woman who had been standing around the same place as I whether she was waiting for me. The building that I am teaching in is a school during the day but moonlights as a language course, In my elementary class are two boys and a girl who for their level seem to know quite a bit. The boys, of course, were difficult to control even when I made one sit by the girl. The problem was that only one of them had a book so I had to loan mine out so I couldn’t separate all of them. After class, which actually did go fairly quickly, I did a little preparation for my next class at 7.15 and then walked a little around the neighbourhood and bought a shawarma sandwich and “Old Miller” beer to have in the park. The neighbourhood is quite nice with several parks, is fairly quiet and has slightly older and better looking buildings that most other neighbourhoods I’ve been in on the outer stretches of town. My next class went fairly well also so it was a successful day. There are six people in the class and only five showed up tonight so that made it more difficult as most of the book material is based on pairwork (which, of course, works better with even numbers). Susie, a girl from my same group of interns, works at the same school so we finished about the same time and made our way back to the metro.