I haven't been this busy since graduate school, and it's been a difficult adjustment. I've been waking up at 4:30 or 5:00 every morning to get to the school early enough to make copies, plan lessons, and take care of the dozens of e-mails and administrative demands before my classes start. I leave work around 4:00, which is great, but I just come home to cook dinner and do more lesson planning until bedtime, which has tended toward 8:30 or 9:00 lately. The past two weeks have felt like two months!
As a result, I've had to cut some things out of my life. The first to go was the gym, not so much because I couldn't find an hour to work out a few times a week, but because I'm supposed to be eating a lot and couldn't find the time to cook all the additional food. I've also stopped studying Spanish at home (and I quit my conversation class for other reasons), although I feel like this is mitigated a bit since I have to speak Spanish at work every day. I have some really low beginner ESL students, so I often have to translate for them, and it's made me much more confident about my Spanish than anything else since my last trip to Guatemala. I've also been reading some of the Spanish-language books from my classroom's literacy cart during our independent reading time. It isn't much, but I've learned a few new words here and there. I've also picked up a little more French out of necessity, since I have some students from the Congo and Senegal who are still very new to English.
I expect the workload to increase in the next few weeks because I'm going to be the school's LPAC (Language Proficiency Assessment Committee) chair, which everyone says is very time-consuming. I'm not sure where the time will come from, but I'll find a way to make it work.
In spite of the crazy workload, though, I have to say that I love my job. More specifically, I love my students, and the reason I'm working so hard is because I don't want to let them down. Currently, I have kids from the Congo, Nepal, Egypt, Sudan, Senegal, Honduras, Mexico, El Salvador, Ghana, Ethiopia, Korea, Iraq, and Pakistan, and they're all just awesome. I love learning about their families and cultural traditions, and I love teaching them new words and new ways to use language. It feels good to be useful. And I'm also hoping that this kind of international exposure will help me with my foreign service application, of course!
On that front, I'm still plodding through the recommended reading list. My long commute means more time for "reading" thanks to audiobooks, and I finished Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking last week. I thought it was interesting and can see how it would be useful on the job (any job, really), but it doesn't interest me as much as the book about the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire that I'm reading every night before bed on my Kindle (also from the reading list). World history has always been my thing.
After Blink, I started listening to The Instant Economist, which is a basic introduction to economics. My college economics course was very a long time ago, and it was also a terrible class where I learned nothing. I took it at a rural extension of a small-town central Texas community college while I was still in high school, and the only economics professor they could find was a farmer with a heart of gold who didn't seem to have a clue what he was doing. I made an "A" in the class, and to this day I can't tell you one thing that he taught us about economics. Nice guy, bad teacher.
I've been wanting to learn about the subject for a while now, but I've had a lot of trouble finding books that didn't have a major ideological slant. Personally, I believe in a strong free market for most goods and services, with the exception of a few basic necessities, such as health care and utilities. I think mixed economies do the best job of balancing public and private interests. And I feel like my views are very practical and centrist, but most of the popular primer books on economics out there were rabidly libertarian, and Ayn Rand makes me want to throw up, so...they weren't an option. The Instant Economist aims to be more level-headed, though, and while I can't say I agree with everything it says 100%, most of the arguments seem reasonable and are viewed objectively from multiple perspectives. A lot of the information also isn't new to me, so I guess I either learned something in that college economics course or have just absorbed the information through reading the news.
I haven't given up on my goals, and my current job is satisfying, so I'd say things are going quite well right now. I just have to keep going!
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