Changes are afoot

I think some rejuvenating of this blog is in order...

Changed the background/template to feel new and more modern for me :)
Haven't blogged for at least 3 1/2 years.... think I might start for the rest of this year.

Big changes ahead...
*First major change being that I'm getting married in 3 1/2 months.
*Packing up all my stuff in my flat to eventually move in with my new husband
*Potentially changing cities to be closer to family

That's quite a lot of big changes to all happen at once I think.

I'm quite excited about the future and what it holds.
Can I stay on top of things this year?? I hope so. I also hope I remember to not do everything in my own strength and to lean more on God and his strength. He is my peace and calm. :)

On holiday :) Yay

Man, time goes fast.
I thankfully got a job at the start of the year, yay God! So now I'm living and working in Auckland, which I'm surprisingly enjoying more than I thought I would. It's so nice being nearer to family again, and now I appreciate more fully the North Island winters!! We're currently in a cold snap, but I know that it's not as cold as it was down south, so I try not to complain too much :)

Most exciting thing of the moment - being on holiday! Love being on holiday, so much. It feels like an extended weekend! :) I just wish everyone else was on holiday too so I could hang out with them!
I've had a crazy busy term, both at school - with so much work to do; and emotionally - it's been a roller-coaster, and I think I'm nearly out the other side, but I'm sure it all makes me stronger! At least now I know what to prepare for in term 2 next year (hopefully they'll keep me on!)

I'm kind of looking forward to term 3, but want to enjoy some time off first and get my head out of school for a bit!! :)

...and now, I'm going to sit down and indulge in some reading :) There's no point being on holiday if I can't indulge a little!! :)

School's nearly out for the year

Two more weeks to go, then school's out.
I'm really enjoying these last few weeks. Everything's just a little more relaxed; I've planned units that have a purpose (so the kids understand why we're studying them), yet are hopefully still enjoyable and appropriate to the end of school year.

I'm looking forward to next week when, let's face it, we'll just watch movies! Not all week. But the last 2 periods of the week! Yay! I'm looking forward to it as much as they are. No planning for me, no working for them. We're all happy.
It might seem like a cop-out, not working. But seriously, trying to get them to do work at the end of any term is hard enough, let alone the last term, after we've had exams and everything!!

My Spanish classes are doing food units - cos that always gets them interested and motivated! And my English classes are doing static images and stereotyping - which is quite fun. In the class doing stereotypes, most of them had never heard the word 'stereotype' before, and if they had, no one could tell me what it meant. But they all knew how to do it! I put up heaps of stereotyped images on the board, eg, of country stereotypes, gender, jobs, etc - and they could all identify them straight away. For example, put up a picture of a man with a beret, moustache, stripy shirt, red neck-scarf, and drinking wine - they all instantly identified him as French, which was great. They already knew stereotypes without knowing the word.
It was then cool cos we could move into huge stereotypes involving countries. Recently, a video came to my attention about Radi-Aid: Africa For Norway, Radi-Aid. (Go watch it, if you haven't already). It's great, and really challenged my class to look at what they think about their stereotypes, particularly in this case, what they think about Africa. Cutely though, some students asked me how many heaters the Africans managed to send to Norway. :)

Anyways... fun lessons aside... I'm really looking forward to the end of school. It's a fun time of year.

I don't have a job lined up for next year. I should be worried. But I'm kinda not. Well, not yet anyway. I'm just planning on looking forward to the Christmas/summer holidays, spending time with friends and family.
Then I'll worry about a job after that.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still applying for jobs now, but I haven't had any luck really. It's not a fun job market at the moment, for anyone, but especially language teachers.
But there's no point me stressing about it when there's nothing I can actually do to change it. I do my best; make up my CV's and send them out; I wait patiently; I do what I can. I just want to enjoy life and not worry about all those things. And if I end up not being able to teach next year, well, I'll worry about that next year :)

2 more weeks of school...  then I'll be going home for Christmas. Yay! :)

23 days to go

Not that I'm counting actually - I just counted the days now to put it as the title :)

In 23 days, I'll be leaving here, traveling for 2 days to get home. Then from there, who knows?? It's a little bit sad. Well, actually, it's a lot bit sad. I've really come to love and appreciate Timaru and the people here.
I haven't loved and appreciated the freezing cold winter at all, but everything else has been great!

I have 3 weekends left here and they're all booked up; my weeks are looking a little busy too. The time has gone so fast!!!  There's lots of people I want to make sure I catch up with before I leave, but I also have to pack my whole room/life up here, finish writing reports, marking exams, etc, and planning the last 2-3 weeks of school!! There's so much to do and so little time. And soon I'll be gone. I probably won't be back for a while, unless I get some grabaseat flights for a weekend! :)

I've made some really good friends which I wasn't really expecting, to be honest. I had kinda figured that it would be hard to make friends in the space of a year. But as it turns out, the people I met were awesome and very welcoming, inviting me to hang out with them even though they'd only known me such a short time!
I hope that wherever I may be next year provides me with such good friends. I will be happy! But can I have such luck 2 years in a row in 2 completely different places??!

So as I said, it's a bit sad.
But also, it's possibly exciting. I mean, I don't know where I'll be next year (still applying for jobs and waiting to hear back, etc, etc). I'm hoping to get a job in the North, cos that would be ideal basically. All my family's there. But anywhere in the North is closer than where I currently am :)
I'll have the chance to make new friends, start new hobbies maybe, explore different parts of this amazingly beautiful country!!  It is exciting.

My goal for the next few weeks, as I'm saying goodbye and packing up this short chapter of my life, is to try to fully embrace the changes. Have no fear of anything. No fear of where I'm going. No fear of who I'm leaving behind. No fear of the unknown.  - It doesn't sound all that hard, but it is!!

1 John 4:18 - Perfect love drives out fear.
         (totally abridged and probably taken out of context)- but still true. There is no place for fear in God's perfect love. Yay. :)

Lunch

Today a real gentleman took me out to lunch.

I say 'real' because he was so chivalrous, what you'd like to think a gentleman is like. He opened every door for me -including the car door for me to get in; made sure I walked on the right side of the footpath, he even ate off the back of his fork - like my mum tried to teach us to do when we were young!
He paid for my meal; he drove me round, not minding to take any expenses on himself. He basically made himself available to be my chauffeur, tour guide, whatever, for a few hours. It was so lovely!! It was not asked of him to do all this, he just offered.

This gentleman is the 83 year old father of one of my colleagues.

It was so nice to be treated like that, even if it was by someone older than my own grandfather. It's also kind of sad to think that a lot of the young men I know don't know how to be chivalrous. They may try, but they have nothing on this man!!  It was a very pleasant day.

...(in all honesty though, NZ's not so big on chivalry, and us girls aren't used to it and don't really expect it, so I imagine we'd maybe get frustrated at being waited on if it was all the time!)  :) We're such contrary beings :)

Teachers...

Hehe no, no, no.
No juicy bits of gossip. No betraying of identities of slagging anyone off. Just observations.

In the staffroom, the majority of staff, both teaching and non-teaching, will sit and chat to anyone, no preferences. But given the choice, they'd always sit with the same people. We are all creatures of habit.

Teachers are people too. Well, duh. But I think that sometimes we forget that, even myself as a teacher, and kind of expect teachers to be perfect role models in society. Ok, so teachers are and always will be/should be role models, but they're still normal human beings!!! I need to remember this some times and not expect the superhuman from myself or other teachers :)

Sometimes I notice how similar some staff can be to the students we teach. Not everyone of course, just a few. Some act just like I would expect the 'cool kids' to act at high school. Making mean jokes as a means of excluding people, yet being really nice to another staff member they approve of, etc. I don't really like this behaviour, it's quite childish, but thankfully rarely displayed and only ever by a few people. It leaves me with a somewhat anti-social sentiment... if people are gonna be like that, I'd rather not be around them.

But the heroes. :)
Obviously there are awesome people too. The majority of teachers are, in fact, amazing people. I admire so many of the teachers I work with. I love seeing what they do, how they handle different problems and react to different situations. I love talking with them about problems I might be having with certain classes 'cos they're always so full of useful advice and suggestions of things to try! They're great people. Yay for teachers!! :)

Over it

I'm kinda feeling a bit over it all today.
The seniors have gone, and I wanna be gone too.

My one class that always causes me no end of grief was thankfully better today. There were a few away, which always makes a huge difference, they did the work and one boy even said he'd learnt something new. Yay!
But the class I always looked forward to, now they're the ones starting to spin out of control. They just won't shut up!! I put them in a seating plan, but several of them are determined that it won't succeed so they're making a point of talking and distracting those around them so that it won't work. I used to plan work for this class and it was never enough, they'd churn through it so fast. But today, I had song lyrics to go through looking for poetic language features, I figured we'd finish early and had something else prepared. But no. They just won't stop talking, completely ignoring me. At one point I just stood in front of them for 5 full minutes singing quietly to myself to keep me sane. It wasn't till I made the comment that they'd be making the time up at lunch time that they wanted to get the work done. But even then, it was a pretty poor effort.

At this point in time, I want it to be over. I want to be on holiday. Even a few days off where I work from home. I just don't want to be here, being disrespected all day.
Why do I even want to be a teacher? What kind of life is this? Where the systems we had in place at the start of the year no longer serve their purpose, the students are testing boundaries again and in a more annoying way... it's just all hard work.

Life's not meant to be easy, I know that, and the start of your career is always the hardest. But honestly, I have 4 weeks to go this year, and I've not once cried or been really upset about anything in my job. But today, I almost feel like crying. I'm done.

It's going to be a long 4 weeks.