Warning, I'm about to rant - Amanda

If you're a regular reader of our blog you'll know that we learned that our entire semester's lesson plans are due at the end of the month. I've been busting my butt to get them done because it's freaking me out. Yesterday I finished, I was proud of myself and felt a wave of relief. Are they as detailed as I would have done for my TEFL course? Nope, but they asked for the basics and that's what they got. This means that the rest of the week and weekend can be spent focusing on preparing next week's power points and creating the midterms. However, about 10 minutes ago, as Genie and I passed each other between classes, she let me know that our schedule for midterms has changed. This means that days we thought we had off for midterms are now class days and we lose an entire week of classes for the midterms thus ruining my entire week of work on these lesson plans. I'm a little pissed off...ok more than a little. Changing testing dates would NEVER fly in the States....NEVER!!!! What am I supposed to do now? Scrape everything I did? Of course not but sometimes I can be over-dramatic and I needed to get this off of my chest. I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet but I'll figure it out.

Nearly everyday there is something at this school and MediaKids that pisses me off...and it's never been the students (except for our M2s at times). The school and MediaKids have slacked on all but one of Genie's science labs. They don't get all of the materials or they get the wrong materials. Our liaison between our school and MediaKids who makes all of our copies messes them up 90% of the time and can't be trusted to accomplish the littlest task. This week we were also surprised by our MediaKids curriculum consultant for classroom observations. He told us that he was always going to warn us when he would watch us...guess what, he didn't. I got about 5 minutes heads up before he watched my first class of the day. It was my M1's which was fine, he got to see the wifi issues we've been complaining about, and I did my best to maintain my energy while nursing a migraine. I found out this week from Mediakids about some vocab app that my students are doing and apparently once every few weeks I'm supposed to play a game with them. Well, I got this game and it's only for PC...I have a macbook and MediaKids gave us ipads to use. I asked about it and was sent an alternate site to use, of course there are no quizzes on this app. I have sent an email asking more but have yet to receive feedback on that. Our school is competing in this competition in August and right now we are spending time choosing students to attend but we are constantly being pulled, last minutes to watch groups speak/perform to help make these selections. It would be one thing if they told me about it in advance but taking me away from my work time with 3 minutes notice is just plain rude. I wish I could tell these people off, I was just starting to get the hang of it back home, but here we have "save face" and not show our emotions. I think it's dumb.

I guess I should get back to figuring out how to cram 5 days of classes into 3 days so I can still have the rest of my semester stay on track.