Kristen has been given an assignment teaching two classes of communication skills, which means she gets to focus on speaking and listening. This is right up her alley and much easier for her than the writing classes she was also teaching last year. Apparently her spelling skills are only…. Well lets say that they are not great (she blames switching from French Immersion to full English streaming).
Because she has already taught this course, she has to spend less time prepping. Because she is only teaching two courses –rather than four- she has more time to mark during school time, and less assignments to mark. She has to spend the other blocks as a teacher on call but so far has not been called on to sub. All in all she is much happier this semester with her teaching assignment then she was last year.
Paul is only teaching nine hours a week. The rest of the time he is working as the head teacher, helping the other teachers prep, plan, organize themselves and solve problems. Two teachers are also teaching at different schools (in Tianjin and Wuhan) so he has to coordinate with them as well. The program has apparently caught the eye of the chairman as he has asked us to prepare to expand to all the schools by next year. In order to do this, Paul has been tasked with creating a "student resource book" (a textbook basically!) and a teacher resource book. Vicky, the Science program’s Chinese assistant is now working almost exclusively with Paul on this. It is really exciting work, but also a little daunting. Apparently they want to have the textbook polished enough to publish by the end of 2012-2013
school year!
So far, things have been pretty smooth and we have managed to get through almost two whole weeks of school without having to bring ANY homework with use after school is over (a real feat!). Hopefully (but doubtfully) we can continue this trend.
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