Wednesday, October 29, 2014

YAWP

You guys, I'm tired.  It's been a long week.

(This is the part where the teacher lists everything they have to do, expecting everyone to be impressed, and then starts to hyperventilate because it turns out listing everything you have to do is pretty stressful.  If you've heard it all before, skip to paragraph 10.  If you want to pinpoint the exact moment where my voice starts to shift up an octave and I reach for a paper bag, start at paragraph 7.)

This Sunday, I wrote four letters of recommendation, which took about six hours.  I was pretty proud of myself, and sure that I'd be a) in good shape and b) rested for the week to come.

On Monday, I taught for 160 minutes, supervised during lunch, met with a student about his Personal Project during the second half of lunch, graded an assessment that had been handed in late, moderated short stories with another tenth grade teacher, wrote another letter of recommendation, worked on some tenth grade curriculum stuff, and planned my lessons about five minutes before they happened.

Saturday, October 4, 2014

Bicycles

A few weeks ago, I bought a bicycle.  It was a sort-of impulse buy -- I was actually in the shopping complex as moral support for a friend who was buying paint (and why would anyone bring me to help buy paint? It shows a tremendous amount of faith in my decision-making abilities), and while we were there we wandered into Decathlon, the Chinese equivalent of -- well, I'm not even quite sure.  It's something like a combination of Big Five Sporting Goods and Target and REI, and it has bicycles, and I bought one, and it was delivered two days later.

I say it was a "sort-of" impulse buy because I've actually been planning to buy a bike since I arrived in Beijing.  A confluence of forces -- exhaustion, cash flow issues, a quiet but intense terror of riding a bike in a city -- had kept me from doing it so far, but there was I at Decathlon and there was a beautiful olive green cruiser with my name on it right in front of me and clearly, it was time.