Long time no writing

---

So it's been a little while since I've written last. I've started to fall into a schedule which I'm not sure that I really like very much. It mainly includes me waking up on Saturday and Sunday wondering why I've taken this job. I love the students, the other teachers and the classes but I don't love the schedule. I believe I would rather teach the same time of the day many days in a row instead of having class from 2:30-8pm on M&F, no class on T&R, class from 10-6:30 on W and class from 8-6 on S&S. This type of schedule really messes with my head. I'm trying to get more tutoring classes so that I can have more of a normal schedule but I don't know how well it will work out in the beginning.

Unfortunately due to some sticky circumstances at the school our old principal has quit recently. There are a bunch of rumors flying around the school as to the exact reason for her quitting. She is a really great woman and has worked REALLY hard for this school. Probably too hard. This Thursday Cat, Russell, Craig and I all went with her for some tours around the city and lunch. She took us to two different beaches, a famous bridge, and some beautiful scenic places. I took some photos which I will most likely post later on. We also got to go out for some great Korean food since she's Korean and knows a lot about Korean food around Dalian.

Speaking of photos I have recently posted many more photos on my old journal entries. If you all go back and click on the pictures of the entries I believe it will let you scroll through them. Let me know if you are having difficulties and I will give you more information.

As for Koreans there are an awful lot of Koreans in Dalian. For the most part they are the wealthy ones in the city. Russell and Cat both have some of the Koreans that they tutor outside of Rockies school and they get paid a large sum of money to go to the Koreans houses. These houses are in the wealthy part of town which is a little far away from here but compared to what they get paid for tutoring the fee for a bus is nothing.

Lesson plans are funny things. When I first learned to teach in Boston it took me hours to write a lesson plan. Now that I'm here teaching lesson plans are very strange things. For K2-4 lesson plans have already been made and all we have to do is look in notebooks for the lesson plans of each class. For K5-8 I have to make my own lesson plans. Sometimes the books (especially K5-6) the students have will have things they can do in class in them and that will take up a good deal of our lesson planning but sometimes I still end up having to make things up from scratch. K8 is the class that takes me the longest to plan for because there's basically nothing for them to do in class in their books. This means that I have to make everything up myself based on what vocab and sentence structures I'm supposed to teach for that unit. Even though these lesson plans sometimes take me a while I notice that no matter how much I plan things out I don't end up doing that same thing in class. I either end up making up things for the students to do in the middle of my teaching based on whether they're understanding or bored or whatever or I switch the order of what I've planned for their lesson. There are a wide variety of reasons why my lesson plans end up changing in the middle of my teaching (or at the beginning of my teaching). Depending on how I feel, how my students feel, how they feel to me or their understanding level or simply the air in the room.

As for my classrooms and students I've posted pictures of my classrooms already and will soon post pictures of some of my classes that I took this past Wednesday. I'll take pictures of my tutoring students this next week as well. Like I said it takes money to pay for classes and tutoring and the ones here with the most money are the Koreans so our tutoring students are primarily Koreans. As for our cafeteria we don't have one. The school is on the fourth floor of a hotel and we only occupy some of the rooms on the fourth floor, the other rooms belong to guests of the hotel. Strangely enough the hotel is considered an upclass hotel not because of the quality of its rooms or anything like that but because it has foreigners in it (which around here makes a hotel a good one).

This blog was partially to answer some of the questions that have been sent to me and partially to catch people up with how I'm doing. My health is back to normal and I can hear again so everything's doing pretty well there. It's getting REALLY cold around here (mainly due to the wind). I felt like I was leaning into the wind in order to walk forward yesterday and it felt like the dead of a NC winter. I'm kind of intimidated a bit to see what the winters here will be like. As I am relaxing into a slightly more normal schedule it would help me if you all would send me some questions to answer in my blogs for me to keep them more up to date.

---