Fatigue

I am almost at the end of a busy week - I had outings on my two days off last week - and shall avoid that again. It can be too much. I'm not a night time person, and working from 6 pm to 10 pm does make me a little tired.

Dealing with the challenges of teaching this course also tires me, and I am doing some study too. Actually I have plenty of free time, and probably should have an afternoon snooze, but I have not done that.

Two things that are important in teaching is "flexibility" and "thinking on one's feet" - and feel like a piece of rubber, and I am forever having to think on my feet.

Tuesdays are not good training days. We start at 6 pm on Tuesdays and go to 10 pm - but it is one day that not all students turn up. Perhaps it is because for some reason it is hard to find a park on Tuesdays near the Woosuk building, and with two of the teachers breastfeeding new babies I know they have challenges getting to class on time.

But when you have only two students in the class at the start of the evening, it is a bit of a challenge? Do you continue the planned tasks that will not work as there are not enough students? What activity will have value for only two students?

My "bag of spare tricks" comes into play and we did role play. This style of activity is always good in an English class, as it gets students talking. The situation they had to "role play" was that of a person returning to their car, to discover a parking inspector writing out a ticket for them as they had been one minute too long and the parking meter had expired.

Another two students appeared - and they were set up to do the role play. Then a couple more arrived so I pulled out of my bag more role plays - they are always a lot of fun.

I am here to teach these people to "teach English" but their English is not good - so I spend time teaching English and making them speak. We have a "student handbook" and I get them to read the pages. They are supposed to have read them first, but when I get them to "read aloud" it is clear they do not know the pronunciation of the meaning of some words.

It takes up valuable time - things I plan to do are swept aside to concentrate on English pronunciation, word meaning etc.

Asian people have a lot of difficulty with some words - saying "r" and "w" words are a challenge too, and some was to put "ee" on the end of some words. They are learning "langidgeee" (language) so there is much work to do.

Anyway, one night to go and I am off for two nights - then a busy weekend (as always) but as there is a public holiday for Children's Day on Tuesday, I am off on Monday and Tuesday and then work - Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday in a row.

I think I'll have a few afternoon naps then.