I can't help but feel a deep sense of dread waking up every morning at 6 after a slightly-longer-than-3-hour sleep, and I really hate to have to translate the lesson plans that I have in mind onto word documents and sending them to my CTs (one of whom is too busy to entertain me, most of the time anyway) for formality's sake. Oh, and not to mention feeling demoralized when CTs go through lesson reflections at the end of lessons; especially when everything that you thought wouldn't go wrong went wrong. 

Other than that, I'm getting better at speaking to my P4 class of 37 students and P2 class of 27 young children. I've been really lucky because both classes haven't been giving me too much problems (discipline-wise) and they're more or less responding better to the instructions that I've been giving them. I'm learning not to spoon-feed the kids so much like how our teachers used to, and my colleagues have been helpful in suggesting ways to do so. It's really not easy to try to remember everything that's been said and apply them in our lessons, but I'm getting the hang of it. I think.

No learning journey's ever going to be easy, and the same goes for whatever shit we're going through now. It's only going to be tougher this 5 weeks (and the 10 weeks next year) since we're all hoping for good grades, but once it's all over, things are going to be much easier and we'll be able to better enjoy the teaching process (amidst all that fire-fighting work) for sure.

Push on, everyone! :)

And so, my 6-month long break finally comes to an end

After spending some of the grandest times of my life in HK/Indonesia/China/Taiwan/India in the past 6 months, it's finally time to get down to some serious work, regretfully. The third installment (out of four) of our practicum 'debt' was dished out to us on Monday.

first-day-of-school outfit

So far, it's only been a week, but things are crazy enough to drive me up the wall. There seems to be an endless amount of lesson plans and presentation slides that have to be completed. It's the first time that we'll be receiving a grade for our efforts (or lack thereof) so it shouldn't come as a surprise that all of us are feeling so stressed up about the darned powerpoint slides, amongst many other things. 

I want to say that I'm coping well, but I probably won't say that now because I'm really not. Not for now anyway. Hopefully though, I'll be able to get used to the hang of things in another 2-3 days. 

As for now, all I want to do is let out a big scream.