First Week Back

I think this has been one of those disastrous weeks that you just have to accept is not going to get better and try to move on when Monday comes around.  It was always going to be tough what with it being the first week back after the Christmas holidays.  We only arrived back on Friday, so still had jet lag to contend with come Monday morning.

Lots of my classes have been moved around - my year 5 class was split in half because of the differences in English skills - two went to a new class, with 3 other children, which I am really enjoying teaching.  They are a fun group.  The other lad from the original group has been stuck in with a brand new boy who speaks absolutely no English at all.  The original lads English is pretty good, but not good enough to go up to the next group, so now I have a class with 2 children with completely different English levels. Impossible to teach!  Boring for one, really hard for the other.  Nightmare.  The plan next week is to try teaching them together for 2 lessons, and separately for 2 lessons per week. We will see how it goes.  A tricky one though.

At lunch time on Monday, Matt managed to throw out his back and had to go home.  He ended up being signed off for the whole week, and has had to go in for physio several times. He is back in tomorrow, but it was a really tough week for him. He couldn't even move for 2 days at all.

Yesterday, we went out for a couple of hours to an enormous, 3 story building, full of camera shops. That was fun wandering around, and I bought a monopod, which will be useful for Sri Lanka, when we go on safari.  I took my zoom lens to someone who had been recommended, to see if she could fix it.  She has the lens now, saying it will be a couple of days, but only £20 to fix, which is great.  Matt and I went for a coffee afterwards in Starbucks.  I realised about an hour after we left that I had left my phone on the coffee table, went all the way back, waited for 45 minutes for the manager (who luckily spoke English) to find CCTV, and then had to watch a video of an old man, watching us leave the table, then go straight over and steal my phone.  I was quite upset on the train back.  A stranger asked if I was OK, and if he could help me, and that was the thing that pushed me over the edge when I got home - someone being nice to me!  We spent the rest of the day getting a new SIM card (same number though) and a new phone.  The Chinese are very efficient when it comes to things like this - from theft to being completely set up with the same number in half a day - pretty impressive.

This morning we went to the gym.  Matt managed to go some gentle exercise, which is great - he is improving a lot.

So, not a brilliant week really.  But looking forward, next week can't possibly be worse!