School update

It seems strange when I think that I’ve been here three weeks. Feels waaaaaay longer. This week I went back to work, and slowly but surely I’m starting to get a routine of sorts going. Work is still not sorted out, but that will be an ongoing thing. I’m not sure if I mentioned this, but if the principals had their way, they’d be hiring at least four of me (limited by the management board). So, the problem is trying to figure out exactly what they need me to focus on because there’s so much for me to do. At the moment we’ve got a plan to work with until the end of the semester (January), which will buy us time to put together a better long-term plan that we can work with for the rest of my contract and beyond, whether I stay here or someone else comes in. It’s rather confusing on a lot of fronts. One example is not actually knowing exactly where I fit in the school. I’m part of the English department (I teach an IB English class and “English” is in my job title) but at the same time I’m not (I’m also supposed to work across all departments). Mostly I’ve been sorting stuff out with the school’s head of curriculum and secondary principal (who are a married couple). So far we’re working well together and I’m developing rapport with them (have found out they’re practising Christians who started out in the international teaching business as missionaries and have a lot of good Adventist friends).

So, this temporary plan won’t be implemented until we’ve had a chance to sit with the entire English department and tell them what I’ll be doing, which is due to happen Monday afternoon. As such, I had a lot of freedom with what to do over the past week. The international (American) middle school English teacher took advantage of having me there and for a number of periods I supervised her students while she took them out one at a time to do some reading tests (the results of which will actually be able to help me with my job further down the track). Another middle school English teacher is a few weeks out from starting her maternity leave and she’s been absent a few days, so I’ve done a couple of internal relief lessons as well. Both situations have given me a chance to get to know some of the kids a lot more. I was pretty horrified my first week at the general lack of discipline and order across the school, but things have improved this week. The kids are still typically noisy, but if I’m super strict they are manageable.

Not much else to report, but I’m slowly starting to get to know my colleagues. I have had a couple of chats with the IB Russian teacher, a local who has spent the past 20 years living in the US. In one of our conversations I asked her whether she’d be available to possibly tutor me in Russian and/or Azeri. We talked a bit about language acquisition etc., and today she sat with me at lunch, and as much as possible, we conversed in Russian (which is not that much considering her English is fluent and my Russian is very limited: “The soup is delicious” was about the extent that I got to).

Sorry there aren’t any photos with this post. I’m not really taking any at the moment. If things work out (i.e. the weather is nice and I’m not feeling really lazy) I’ll try to get some more over the weekend.

Love Annie