Teaching the TKT Course

My late evening pre-int students have asked for more ‘energy’ in their lessons (I suspect that means games). On Friday evenings at least, for the next few weeks, I’m afraid they’re going to be disappointed. With a 9am-9.30pm split shift, they’ll be lucky if their teacher is still awake.

It is, however, my choice to do this. After endless postponements, the TKT course is finally up and running, and I’m team-teaching it with another teacher from our centre. Hence the 9am start for the morning session at centre 3, followed by my regular evening shift at centre 1. The break in the middle isn’t really long enough to go home, so lunch in Backpackerville…

So far, it has only been a week but I am loving it. The TKT (Teaching Knowledge Test) is a modular test run by Cambridge aimed mainly (though not exclusively) at non-native speaker teachers of English. There are three main modules, which we are teaching, each consisting of eighty-minute tests containing eighty multiple choice and matching questions, covering everything from grammar and phonology to classroom management, learner motivation, assessment and language acquisition.

It is, as this suggests, all theory and terminology (the glossary provided by Cambridge runs to forty pages), which must represent quite a challenge to the intermediate+ level students we have in the group. In my post-lesson feedback last week the training manager and I both agreed that they are going to need a great deal of review and recycling. Last week’s introductory lesson saw them go quite quiet during what should have been fun quizzes introducing some of the terminology! But they are a lovely, friendly group, and clearly very motivated – two of them travel eight hours overnight to come to the class!

With no previous teacher training experience, it could be quite daunting. But the training manager has said he wants it to be a training experience for us too. So he’s asked us to send him post-lesson evaluations each week, and later in the course he’ll observe us. And teaching a truckload of terminology to non-native speakers isn’t so very far from what we do normally – they just happen to be better at it than my beginners! Road-testing materials on Adrian and Phil in the staffroom has been fun too!

And it finally gives an outlet to all the stuff that’s been washing around in my head for the last 3 years of Masters and Delta. It kind of confirms my thought that in the future I want to be a Delta tutor, and, when I finally go home, a tutor on the Open University’s linguistics courses.

Postscript:

It seems trivial to be writing about anything other than Japan right now. However happy things are here, the situation there is constantly in my thoughts.

Who Let The Sheep In? - Our First Vietnamese Lesson

I couldn’t look at Carolyn and Amy, sitting either side of me. The urge to giggle was becoming unbearable.

The previous hour and a half of ‘Survival Vietnamese’ had been baffling enough, struggling to make sense of address forms and any number other than 3 (333 being the name of a brand of Vietnamese beer, it was the one number we all knew already). But then our teacher, Ms. Khanh, began to introduce the six tones of Vietnamese. One by one they were added to a diagram like the one below, with examples from the vocabulary we’d learnt earlier. Then the drilling started…

Ma… ma… ma-ah… maah… ma-aa-argh… Eighteen English teachers? No. We had been transformed into a flock of mildly embarrassed sheep. And Carolyn was starting to add a touch of vibrato to her ma’s for that extra hint of sheepiness…

(yes, I know the dotted line for the Hanoi ma is missing. It went AWOL somewhere in the process of converting to PDF).


The follow-up activity lost me completely. Momentarily distracted, by the time I zoned back in, the ‘Identify the Tone’ Quiz was moving too quickly for me to keep up. I’ve got a feeling the next fifteen weeks of lessons are going to be a bit of a slog.

To be fair, I had been doing alright earlier in the lesson. The basic forms of address Ms Khanh presented, weren’t too complicated if you’ve already struggled with Japanese politeness forms, and if, like me (and Ms Khanh apparently), you are prone to drawing pictures and diagrams on the board which make sense in your head as you draw them, but which are greeted with furrowed brows and perplexed expressions from your students.

And Carolyn and I won a lolly each in a numbers game. Ms Khanh called out a number and you had to hold hands with that number of people. If you couldn’t find a group to join, Ms Khanh dotted your arm with a red board marker. We escaped with only one dot each (thereby winning the lollies) by standing hand-in-hand in the corner looking nervous, and just reaching out and grabbing the hand of the next nearest person whenever Ms Khanh called out a number greater than two.

If nothing else it’s going to be interesting comparing these lessons with my other language learning experiences, as well as mentally making notes on and stealing ideas from Ms Khanh.

Japan

I know I sometimes give the impression of being rather blasé about earthquakes but I'm not really. It's actually more a mixture of practicality and not letting fear rule your life.

 Tonight my heart is in Japan. It is, and always will be, my second home.

Afterthought...It's not such a bad life...

I should probably say (before this blog gets blocked!) that the previous post was more a reflection of my experiences of Women's Day in Italy than Vietnam. That nightmare weekend near Paestum... 

Life is actually going pretty well here at the moment. Work is getting more interesting with level testing and teaching the TKT course starting this week - I'm very excited about that!

And the days off - when not spent going into school to plan aforementioned TKT course or just slobbing round the house because it's too hot to do anything - have involved open air swimming pools, hour long massages and sitting reading in coffee shops...It's really not such a bad life.

 

International Women's Day

Current status: Accepting flowers from students through gritted teeth, and muttering ‘Don’t get me started’ as people shout ‘Happy International Women’s Day’ to each other across the staffroom, before asking each other what the hell it is, why don’t men have one, and – the real killer – why is it international? Ask Pip a stupid question and you will get a very sarcastic answer…

After enduring two years of the Italian Festa della Donna, I had, perhaps naively, entertained hopes that here in Vietnam, if it was marked, it would be a rather more political affair. Vietnam is, after all, still a nominally communist country, and communism has historic ties to the date. The 8^th March 1917 was deliberately chosen as the start of that year of revolutions in Russia because of the demonstrations due to take place to mark Women’s Day. OK, different countries, different regimes and nearly 100 hundred years of water under that bridge, but you see my point?

So I was a little disappointed last week when my students described something very similar to the Italian version. A sickly sort of middle ground between Mothers’ Day and Valentine’s Day, but with (to my admittedly jaundiced mind) a darker undercurrent. Give the Little Lady some flowers and chocolate, pat her on the head, tell her she’s bella, and turn a determinedly blind eye to the lump in the middle of the carpet from all the crap you’ve just swept under it.

We may lack an awareness of the day in Britain and the States, but at least when it is marked it tends to be with the sense of anger and righteous indignation that it really deserves – that equal pay has still not been fully achieved, that political representation is still not truly representative, and that rape is a weapon of war. For a far better argument than I can give here, take a look at Mariella Frostrup’s article in The Observer last weekend [Feminism's Global Challenge]. Tell me, please, how giving flowers, or granting a day’s free admission to Graeco-Roman ruins really contributes anything to redressing those imbalances?

It's not about hating men, it's about justice - for everyone. So, for God’s sake – no, for the sake of both sexes – stop simpering and get angry! 

Cats with Thumbs - awesome!

Just come across this on Oye's Facebook page - awesome!

Another YouTube Masterpiece!!!

Tet Visitors

Chúc Mừng Năm Mới!

Midnight. The air is filled with the sound of church bells, the boom and sparkle of distant fireworks and a smell of incense heavier than I have ever known outside a temple, let alone out in the open air. Over beyond the lake, the upper half of the Cantavil building has suddenly been covered in twinkling red and green lights. And from the neighbouring balcony, Quy shouts ‘Happy New Year’ to me, as we hang over the railings to watch the people milling down in the street, setting light to fake money, mirroring as they do so the candles, incense sticks and offerings being burnt in neighbours’ courtyards.

Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year, (2011, the year of the cat) has begun.

In the early evening I’d been for a walk around the neighbourhood, exploring a bit more. I was surprised by how many people there were still around, and how many shops and street market stalls were still open. As I walked in what I thought might be the direction of the swimming pool Steve and Louise go to, I found myself in a narrow street overflowing with scooters, people, chickens alive and dead, and huge assortments of vegetables spilling across the road. Saigon (or this bit of it at least) certainly wasn’t the Tet holiday ghost town that staffroom rumour had claimed it would be. I should know by now to take such claims with a pinch of salt. Most of them are spread by people who have never actually hung around long enough to find out what a place is like during a holiday season.

In fact I was roused from my torpor and encouraged to go out for a walk, by the sound of drumming getting nearer. Investigation (hanging over the balcony) revealed a small procession of young men dressed in red wheeling a cart with a tin drum on it, accompanying two figures in traditional costume (also red) who were dancing and skipping from house to house, banging on doors, waiting to be invited in. They were slowly gathering a crowd of excited children round them too. Despite spending a lot of today trawling the Internet for information, I can’t seem to find out who these characters are meant to be. Are they the Kitchen Gods returning? (Just before Tet the Kitchen God leaves the household and returns to heaven to report on the family to the Jade Emperor). Or are they something else? Are they delivering Lucky Money or demanding it? I remember seeing a similar figure during the Chinese New Year procession in London, but I can’t remember what he was called. Please let me know…

I did video this little procession but the file was too big and it would’ve taken until next Lunar New Year to upload. I will try to copy a still from it instead.

In the meantime, and stepping back a further twenty-four hours in time, you might care to cast your eyes upon some of the 89 (yes, I know, I overdid it again, but even that is down from the original 140 odd) photos I took while wandering around the city centre on Tuesday afternoon. Not only do we have lights equal to or even better than Christmas, but the city is a mass of flowers. One of my neighbours at the other end of the corridor has a big pot of chrysanths outside their door. There are flower festivals in several parks and squares, and in the park by Backpackerville there is a flower market, selling everything from bonsai to chrysanthemums and sunflowers. This has also meant the frequent sight of people riding past with fruit trees tied to the backs of their scooters.

Tet is seen as the official start of spring, with bamboos, kumquats and other trees sold on the side of the road by people up from the country who sleep out with their stock. These are decorated with red and gold decorations (a bit like Christmas Trees) and Lucky Money red envelopes, along with their own yellow blossoms, orange fruit and so on.

As a bit of a marketing gimmick last week, the school gave all students a pack of Lucky Money envelopes. The students affected humorous disappointment that they were just packs of envelopes, and did not, in fact, contain any Lucky Money!

making learning fun

Love this video I just stumbled across on a teaching blog (Teaching Village)

Blog to accompany Tet photos opposite probably later in the week.

Earthquake!!

Delirious from lack of sleep, it took me a few moments, and the effort of looking around me to gauge other people’s reactions, to twig that the gentle swaying sensation I detected was not a figment of my imagination.

It was twenty-five past two. I was sitting in the cafeteria on the ninth floor, just tucking into my Cajun chicken sandwich. 200km out to sea, and 10km down, (ref:European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre) tectonic plates shifted a bit to rustle up a 4.7 magnitude earthquake to lift us out of our pre-Tet torpor.

It was a relatively small earthquake, lasting no more than a minute, and it produced a not unpleasant feeling that the building was swaying gently in the breeze. Two of the younger teachers (who clearly don’t have my vast experience of such things) got quite excited but I remained unfazed and soon turned my attention back to my sandwich.

But it does leave me wondering if maybe I am a factor. When I first arrived students told me that Vietnam doesn’t have earthquakes. Am I some kind of seismological jinx? It occurs to me that I’ve now been in Vietnam about the same length of time I’d been in Japan when the Niigata Earthquake happened in 2004. And I’d been in Italy just a couple of months longer than that before the Abruzzo Earthquake in 2009… Oh yeah. Stick with me, baby. I’ll make the earth move for you…

§       § §       §§       §§       §§       §§       §      

I was, as I say, delirious from lack of sleep (always a good starting point for yet another set of peer observers in your class – my beginners are beginning to feel persecuted). And this time I know exactly who to blame for it – my landlady.

Nice woman, very helpful, but a bit of a faffer. And, like most Vietnamese it seems, she’s a ridiculously early riser. So it came as no particular surprise on Monday when she texted me offering to come round at 7.10am the following morning and collect the documents needed to re-register my residency with the local police.

Wonderful. Tuesday’s my day off. I do have to go into school for a workshop but that’s not until three. Do I really have to get up and drag myself downstairs to meet her sooo early? And, for a bonus round, all being well, she’d return at the same time on Wednesday morning to bring the documents back.

Now, there is one teensy-weensy little problem with this master plan. My passport is currently in some undefined location getting my visa renewed. Not sure the police will accept a photocopy. Hmm… oh well, we can try, and here – take my work contract too, legend has it that sometimes they’ll accept that instead.

7.10am ticks round and up she scoots on her scooter. She looks at the photocopy of the passport and frowns, pointing at the expiry date on the visa – 23^rd January. ‘It is old’. Yes, I know. I told you. My passport has gone away to have the visa renewed. Did she think when I said photocopy that I’d somehow manage to get one of a new visa I don’t have yet?

Anyway, off she goes to try her luck with what we've got. I hear nothing until I get to school later in the afternoon. Another text. ‘Sorry. The police won't accept photocopy and work contract. Please let me know when you have new visa.’

- So, are you still coming back tomorrow morning?

- No, I will wait and keep things until new visa comes.

- Right. OK. But what if the police come to the flat in the meantime?

The police periodically do sweeps of apartment buildings, checking that all the inhabitants are registered with them. With no passport, no visa, no work permit, no registration book, and now no work contract, I start to have visions of being thrown into some communist jail for the rest of my life, or being deported to die in a British snowdrift like great-great granny Mills…

- Don’t worry. If they come, just call me. I will talk to the police.

Then sometime later another text:

- Maybe I will come 7.10am tomorrow and give back work contract.

‘Maybe’??!! What do you mean, ‘maybe’?!! Do I have to get up at 6.30 again just on the off-chance?!!

Grudgingly, I set the alarm. I sleep badly, tossing and turning with an increasingly sore back. 6.30am the alarm goes off. I crawl out of bed and struggle into some clothes. 6.53am a text:

- Sorry, today I am busy. I will come 7.10am tomorrow.

Somehow I refrain from telling her precisely what I think of that idea and instead politely negotiate a postponement until 8.30am on Saturday, when at least I have to get up early anyway.

Signs That Tet Is Overdue

Signs that it has been a very long, tiring, sickly month since being told I hadn’t got the AC job, and that the Tet (New Year) holiday next week can’t come soon enough:

• The most interesting thing I could think of to write about last week was the purchase of a frying pan.
• A growing sense of paranoia and frustration at the lack of movement on all my strategic plans to get that next AC job. Coupled with lethargy from this cold that just won’t shift.
• I had to spend the whole of Sunday plugged into my iPod whenever I was in the staffroom, to stop me ripping someone’s head off. As it was, I managed to make an eleven year-old girl cry.
• I didn’t bother adapting or finding anything more interesting for my S6’s (13 year old advanced class) but made them do the book’s long (and very boring) listening and writing exercises about the Incas.
• Last weekend a trainee TA was treated to me jumping up and down and flapping my arms in front of her, shrieking ‘Stop running away from me, I’m trying to talk to you!’ She’d obviously got it into her head that when monitoring we couldn’t both be in the same part of the classroom at once.
• Waking up to dense white smog every morning is pretty depressing. To British eyes it looks like a cold, wet, miserable day in November. Only warm. And with more carcinogens…

Smog

• I’m missing Italy… Yes, you read that right… I’m missing Italy. Or more specifically, the light, the clear blue skies and the sea. Briefly worried that I would have to get Baggy, Oye and Jacques to give me a good email/skype talking to, to stop me teetering over the edge into checking flights to Rome.
• Instead, I’ve been spending late nights downloading Laura Pausini and Tiziano Ferro tracks from iTunes. Whatever that admission might do for my street cred, it’s actually been strangely soothing. A couple of days of those two on the iPod and I now feel much better.
• Some of the neighbours held an all-day party in the street yesterday. By the time I went to bed their out of tune singing was quite endearing. I was tempted to go down and join in.
• The neighbourhood kids have developed their own local version of Welly-Wanging… Flip-flop Flinging. All very professional and competitive, with lines chalked out and everything.
• And (fingers crossed) perhaps as Saigonites escape the city for Tet, the traffic will clear and the smog will lift – there are already traces of blue in the sky. Might not need to head back to Italy after all…

Chúc Mung Nam Moi 2011!!

Eureka! A frying pan that works!

I should perhaps explain. In the last few months Little Sis and I have both found ourselves in new apartments with kitchen hobs that refuse to cooperate with the other kitchen utensils. In other words, we have both unwittingly acquired induction hobs.

I didn't discover this until Christmas when Rachel tried to do some bacon in my new frying pan, only to have the hob just sit there, beep at us for a bit and then switch itself off. Since then I've been fretting about investing in any more pots and pans until I know exactly what I need. And not knowing the Vietnamese for 'induction hob' was a bit of a drawback.

Anyway, finally tonight I made a foray into the Japanese supermarket on Le Thanh Ton and found a whole range of frying pans bearing an I H symbol. Could this possibly stand for Induction Heat? The Vietnamese shop assistant giggled an apology. 'Sorry, I don't know. They're Japanese.' 

So with fingers crossed, prayers offered and good luck wishes from the British couple queuing behind me, I bit the bullet and bought one. And hey presto! I've just dined on a properly cooked fried egg made by my own fair hand! Yippee!!

Matt & the Lion

Not me or Vietnam, but can't resist! 

With Debbie temporarily back in the UK, Matt seems to be having a few boredom/sanity issues, if today's post on their blog is anything to go by...
http://ontheroadwithatoad.blogspot.com/2011/01/day-121-turkey-1712011-antalya-trip-to.html

Brilliant! Personally, I think he should continue the blog in a similar manner for the rest of their trip. Maybe a different poem for each town en route?!

1000th Visitor!

Sometime in the night this blog got its 1000th visitor! Not bad for just 2 months. Don't know who you are, but welcome!

Odds and Ends Cluttering My Head

• My TA tonight (quite genuinely) admired my shaggy mop (must get it cut soon) with the words, ‘Hmm, maybe when I am your age I’ll have my hair something like that!’ Don’t think she really understood the strange hysterical edge to my laughter….

• The building site opposite my apartment block has sprouted a circular double wall of tall metal poles and pilings rather reminiscent (in the dark at least) of an early Norman Motte and Bailey castle.

• Why does the flag counter at the bottom of this page bear little or no resemblance to the visitor stats provided by Blogger? Where is the Venezuelan flag Blogger indicates I should have? And why has the Australian one disappeared after just two days and been replaced by a French tricolour?

• In case any of you care – Vietnam is currently clamping down on Facebook again (not to mention the BBC so I can’t look at The Archers website). Even at work FB is more difficult to access, so I’m limited to old-fashioned email and Skype for contact with the outside world. Going slightly Cyber Stir Crazy.

A Bad Day

If the end of the previous post suggested the New Year got off to a bit of a miserable start, it has to be said that it didn’t immediately start improving much either.

The sore throat rapidly developed into a nasty stuffy cold complete with headaches, loss of lung capacity, broken sleep patterns and a lack of enthusiasm for anything very much other than lying on the bed with the balcony door open letting the breeze flow through.

So Monday 3^rd January was, all in all, a pretty miserable prospect on paper. The abysmal End-of-Course tests were finally marked and reports written with sinking heart. This adult class has always been somewhat problematic. While observers have said that the students do seem to like me and want to go with me on the activities I set them, it took me a long time to feel that connection myself. This isn’t helped by the graveyard shift time of the lesson (7.30-9.30pm), my difficulty learning Vietnamese names and the fact that half of them never turn up. (One girl made it to the exam after missing the whole of the previous 6 weeks!) And then (the day before the AC job interview) I was told that someone in the class had complained about me – not enough correction of pronunciation (there is, I’m just too subtle for them), no clear focus to lessons (we’ve been on revision!!) and that I was late (LATE?!! ME?!! What? I’m never late for class, and frankly even if I was, they’re so late themselves I’m surprised there’s anyone there to notice). So, you can imagine my feelings about breaking the news to them that even those few who had actually passed had done so with less than flying colours.

Then sitting in the staffroom wading with treacly head, aches and pains and whatever, trying to plan the evening’s lessons, admin staff kept returning bits of the scores and reports to me, telling me I hadn’t needed to work out the percentages myself, and checking them all over again – which made me feel like an idiot. And these marks do seem very low? Yes, well, throw a KET (pre-int level) exam out of nowhere at an elementary class, and what do you expect? This disconnect between ability and exam has been something of a bee in bonnets all week, and not just with me. Hence the lesson plan and the resolution to incorporate exam practice a bit more into the classes. Thing is they are only General English courses. They’re not actually intended to be exam prep – so why use the tests at all?

The post-mortem itself was every bit as uncomfortable as I expected it to be, though to give them their due they didn’t turn it on me. They were just shocked and disappointed, comparing notes with each other. It wasn’t much of a surprise a few days later to hear that the next course has been postponed until the 21^st through lack of interest. But, in fact, they did forgive me enough to take me out to dinner.

We went to a close-your-eyes-and-try-not-to-think-about-the-cockroach-you-just-saw-scuttle-under-Tuyen’s-chair pavement seafood restaurant. Actually, cockroach notwithstanding, it turned out to be a very enjoyable evening. The food – various things in shells and claws that once belonged to things in shells – was excellent, particularly something called So Duong (?) which had cooked the inhabitant of something like an oyster shell in cheese (yay, for that French influence!). With the food cooked there on the street it came to the table so hot you couldn’t even touch the shells. In fact, one was so hot I dropped it and it scalded my knee as it bounced off the table onto the floor (no sign of cockroach doing victory dance)!

So, with the beer easing my sore throat, the horrible day did eventually end on a bit of an unexpected high.

New Year's Weekend

Rachel flew back to Tokyo on New Year’s Eve, leaving me to rattle round a rather quiet flat on my own. My local xe om drivers joined me in waving her taxi off to the airport – they’d been losing work while she was here. But at least they’d managed to keep themselves occupied by building a very pretty but essentially pointless little wall along the stretch of waste ground where they usually sit. Surprisingly, Rachel had been reluctant to take xe oms, insisting instead on going everywhere on foot or by four-wheeled taxi. And there was me expecting my intrepid friend to be up for renting a bike of our own.

Thursday 30th had been spent quietly pottering round the flat and discussing the impending doom to be visited upon my students when I give them their test results back. As a result of this abysmal test, and by happy coincidence a useful starting point in the campaign for the next AC job, Rachel had arrived back from Hoi An to find me writing a lesson plan aimed at familiarising our general English students with Part 2 of the KET Speaking Test.

Later we wandered down into town via the botanical gardens, which, contrary to what Lonely Planet seems to suggest, are not separate from the miserable zoo. We used the returning humidity as an excuse to escape as quickly as possible (despite the temptation to follow the signs pointing to Giraffe WC).

Next stop Ben Thanh Market. Here we walked (literally) round and round in circles as she negotiated a bargain price on the souvenir lacquered plates and coasters she wanted. I’m not a big fan of markets generally; standing around in a crowded covered market is not my idea of fun, but Rachel’s eventual purchases were very nice, and miraculously they did fit into her rucksack when she packed later that night. It being her last full day I even allowed her to take me to the final geocache on her list when we got down into Backpackerville, but not before I took her to a proper shop and demonstrated the art of not negotiating the 160,000 dong (£5) for a print of an old propaganda poster exhorting the masses to ‘Grow Lots of Coconuts’ (or so the translation label claims).

Back home at the flat, we finally made it to Papaya, the really nice restaurant across the road – according to its website a local woman spent years working as a chef abroad before returning to Vietnam and setting up business here in her old neighbourhood. The food is really good (we particularly recommend the Stuffed Pumpkin Flowers and the Tender Beef in Lemongrass) and also pretty cheap – 2 beers, 2 appetizers, 2 main dishes, 2 portions of banana fritters and ice cream and a bottle of water came to about 330,000VND (£10?).

New Year’s Eve was appropriately dull and overcast (but no less humid) to celebrate Rachel’s departure and my own lack of enthusiasm for the festival. New Year’s Eve has to be pretty special for me to enjoy it. My normal instinct is to batten down and ignore the whole thing. So I must confess to a certain sinking feeling when I found myself replying in the affirmative to Louise’s text asking if I’d be going to Mike and Hannah’s party. Nothing against them or anybody there – just don’t like New Year’s Eve.

And the day itself always seems to be waiting. One long wait for that chime at midnight. And if you aren’t caught up by the anticipation, then there must be something wrong with you.

So I faffed the day away, doing nothing very important or useful, although I did finally get my UKNova account set up so that I can download proper telly without paying iTunes all the time. Though needless to say, in my usual way, (haphazard, hit-and-miss, teach-myself-by-doing, getting-it-wrong-curling-into-a-ball-then-trying-again) that alone took all day.

Eventually dragging myself away from Upstairs, Downstairs, the party was actually worth going to just for the experience of getting there. It is probably the first time in my life that I have wished a taxi driver good luck for the return journey. If Rachel and I had thought the crowds on Christmas Eve were mental, it was nothing compared to NYE. It is 3.1 kilometres from my flat to Mike and Hannah’s (I know because that’s what it said on the taxi meter), a straight run down Ton Duc Thang along the riverside. A clear run home when I left at 5am took 10 minutes door-to-door. On the outward journey it took us that long just to get round the roundabout by the ferry pier. The whole journey took 45 minutes through mostly stationary scooters, pedestrians and an awful lot of rather over-optimistic coaches. They were all gathering on the riverside for the fireworks at midnight, which ironically after all that effort I didn’t get to see because Mike and Hannah’s flat faces away from the river!

New Year’s Day dawned (not long after I got home) as dull, overcast and depressing as its predecessor. I think at some point I attempted to leave the flat for a walk, got as far as the corner shop and gave up. Lack of sleep left me stressing about all the prep I needed to do for Sunday’s kids’ lessons, and all the marking and report writing still to do for that abysmal test. And I was starting to get a sore throat as well. Yep, a really great start to the New Year, full of plans, hope and anticipation.

Happy New Year and RIP Nigel Pargetter

Happy New Year!

Sorry I haven't posted anything for a week or so - blame a nasty cold, New Year Blues and the death of poor old Nigel in The Archers!

But the cold is getting better slowly, the house is looking tidier again, the sun is shining and iTunes seem to have mislaid Friday's episode of The Archers. So as soon as I've re-read this article about getting the kids to make their own classroom resources (for an action research-y workshop next week), finished writing up the KET speaking test lesson plan, and got my money changed for the rent on Tuesday, ... I should be back in action very soon!!

Ciao!