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Published: November 19th 2012
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Well it’s been an incredibly long time since I’ve written… But, after attending a professional development session this weekend on “Digital Presence,” I decided that I need to be better at blogging. The presenters said that it will especially be beneficial when I’m applying for a new job. They said that whenever they look at applicants, they google the person and see what they can find. They hope to find a website / blog for their personal life and one for their classroom. So I’m attempting to get both started! So this will be my last post on this blog, since I want to switch to a format that is less travel-blog-like and more life-blog-like.
I will try and sum up this year in Baguio so far in this last post… The school year has started out pretty well. I had pretty much the same classes as last year, so I knew all of the students, which was nice. Nothing really new in the whole teaching world this semester opposed to last. Although, we've decided that it might be time to move on to another school after this year. It’s not that we don’t like our jobs, we do; we
just want a change. It has been a great two years here and we have learned so much. Brent has been a great school to get us into international teaching. But now we want to move on to a more high-caliber international school. We have applied for Search Associates (an international teacher recruiting company) and will hopefully find something from that. It’s possible to just get interviews via Skype, so we’re hoping for that. But if we can’t get any in the next couple weeks, we’ll be going to Bangkok the second week of January for a teaching fair (similar to the one that went to in Iowa to get these jobs at Brent). And then hopefully we’ll find something there! We’ve found quite a few schools in the Search Associates database that look pretty great. Shanghai is at the top of our list now. There’s a Lutheran school there called Concordia International School that looks awesome! That’s actually where the presentors from this PD this last weekend were from. We had done a lot of research on the school (and thought it was great) even before I went to the PD, and now that is definitely our top choice
school. There are a few other schools in Shanghai that look pretty great and a few in Korea, too. Hopefully something will come up!
A few weeks ago we had fall break. We decided to stay on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. The first few days we went down to the beach and just relaxed. Then, for the last few days, we went with the Brent driver and his family up to northern Luzon. We rented a van and then had the Brent driver drive it, and he brought his family with, too. We went to Sagada and Banuae. The famous things to see in Sagada are the Sumaging cave and the hanging coffins. I originally thought that the hanging coffins were really old, but they actually still do the practice of hanging the coffin (with the corpse inside) from the side of the mountain. That was a little creepy because they’re hand-made, wood coffins that have dead people in them and they’re like right in front of you. Not my favorite thing to see. The cave though was amazing! It was something that definitely would not have been allowed in the US because it was so
dangerous. We had to literally climb down steep rocks (no path) to the bottom of a cave. It reminded me a lot of when I climbed Mount Sinai in Egypt. One wrong step and it would have resulted in us falling down steep rocks. At the bottom, there were pools of water. It was so cool! Words can’t really describe it, so look at the pictures : )
The other town that we went to was Banaue. It is famous for the rice terreces. The rice terraces are actually one of the things in the “1000 Places to See Before You Die” book. There wasn’t much to the city, but the rice terraces were incredible! The pictures do not do them justice. Apparently they were built over 2000 years ago.
Overall, it was a pretty good break. It was a little more expensive than we thought, because we had to pay for the van and a driver, but it was nice to see more of the Philippines, since, chances are, we won’t be back next year.
I also made it down to the beach another weekend just with the girls. We stayed at a different place. It
wasn’t very nice, but we only paid about $7 each, so it was worth it. The other girls tried balut (google it), but I just couldn’t do it. We spent lots of time in the ocean and reading on the beach. Hopefully we’ll make it down to the beach again in the next couple weeks.
Brandon put on a school production this year. The first that Brent has done in a LONG time. It was called "Christ Night." He directed a scene that was a Passion Mime and then the IB theater students each had to create a direct a scene that was Bible / Christ related. It turned out really well, and I think the school and the community were very impressed.
Another thing to highlight about this semester was this professional development that I went to this past weekend. It was quite exhausting (we left at 1pm on Friday and arrived Manila at 10pm, then had session from 7:30-3:30 Saturday and Sunday and then arrived back in Baguio at 11pm Sunday night, and then had school the next day), but totally worth it. I went with three elementary teachers from Brent. The session was led by
two middle school teachers (and tech guys) from Concordia Shanghai. They were incredible. These guys (probably in their mid-40s) were WAY more tech-y that me and had so many cool idea of ways to use technology in the classroom. However, most of them were only beneficial if you were at a 1:1 school (each kid has their own laptop), which unfortunately Brent is not. Like I said before, they did emphasize a lot about our digital presence, hence the reason why I’m really going to try and be better about blogging. Not just post something when we go on vacation, like I have been the last couple years. I’m going to do my best to update it each week with more than what we did. Hopefully it’ll be semi-interesting : )
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