Blogs from Buckinghamshire, England, United Kingdom, Europe - page 15

The last couple of weeks have been fairly uneventful. Work has been going well, despite the fact that the kids are pretty wired because Christmas holidays are only 2 weeks away. This coming week is going to be insane. All of our year 7 - 9 classes have Maths progress tests, which means that we'll be spending romantic evenings marking test papers. All of the papers have to be marked and grades entered by Friday. On a lighter note, we have our staff Christmas party during the last week of school. It's a dinner and dance being held at a hotel not far from the school. It should be fun! Next weekend we're going to be preparing a big Christmas meal with the other people we live with. The plan is to have a big festive ... read more

We're completely knackered! That's about all we can say! For some reason this past week has been incredibly busy. We had a hell of a start to our week on Monday. We went to catch the 7:30 am bus, but it never showed up! We ended up having to take a taxi to work when we realized the bus wasn't coming and we'd be late if we didn't do otherwise. We later found out that our bus had broken down on its way back from its previous run. On Wednesday night we were at the school by 7 am and then didn't leave until 8 pm. We both had to create exams for our year 12 class (Will had to make a Statistics exam and Bri had to make a Core 1 Algebra and Functions exam). ... read more

Today was a fun day! We spent the afternoon at a fair in Buckingham with our house mates and another friend, Melissa. We left Aylesbury at 2:30 pm and spent a few hours at the fair. We haven't been to a fair in ages! It was fun just walking around, going on rides, eating bad-for-you foods and playing games. There are a few standard rules when you go to a fair: go on rides that make you feel sick, play games where you get ripped off by carnies and buy cotton candy! Will, Melissa, Ebony and Damien went on this crazy ride that went REALLY high into the air and upside down...we can't think of what the name of it was...I (Bri) was the official bag-holder for that ride! I finally decided to go on a ... read more

Guess where we're going!? - SPAIN!!! Well, Barcelona to be exact. The English school year includes a one-week break each term, and the first break is October 20th to 28th. Tonight we booked our flights, hotel and tickets to a few attractions. We fly out of London the morning of Saturday, October 20th and we will be returning Friday, October 26th. We purchased a 5 day 'Barcelona Card' which gives us free entry to many museums and attractions, discounts at some shops and restaurents and unlimited travel on public transport. Some attractions we may visit are: Museum of Decorative Arts, Natural Sciences Museum, Botanical Gardens, Picasso Museum, the temple of the Sagrada Familia, the Perfume Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art. We can also go on a guided walk of the Gothic Quarter, or of ... read more

This week was pretty "normal" and laid back. We went to a PD (professional development) training course on Monday in Aylesbury. It was actually quite useful. It was geared towards overseas trained teachers new to the Math teaching profession. We got to sleep in a bit since we live in Aylesbury and didn't have far to go! The rest of the week at the school went by pretty fast. We are always happy when the weekend arrives! Tonight we plan on going out with our housemates for dining and dancing. We're going to a Pad Thai restaurant, followed by some drinks and dancing at a local pub. There may be another teacher from Canada who works at the same school as two of our housemates coming out with us as well. It should be a fun ... read more