Our classes run in three sessions: a morning session, an afternoon session, and an evening session. Each morning or afternoon session is four hours straight. Oh, that's not too bad, I can do four hours ...but we had morning and afternoon, with a forty-minute lunch break. Eight hours of teaching on my first day.
The students don't much like the four-hour-stint ... but when we ask why its not changed, we are told this is the "Turkish Way" of doing things.
So after a wearying weekend, Peter is straight back into it this morning, with (four-hour) morning sessions on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. In his tiredness, he was trying to clean his glasses with a little pink microfibre cloth. When that didn't do a good enough job, he went into the kitchen to try rinsing them off. Then he went back to the bedroom to try the cloth again, but it was gone! He got into a bit of a flap and had me running around with him from room to room looking for the mysterious vanishing cloth. Finally I stopped to have a good look at him, and sure enough, perched neatly on his shoulder on his black shirt was a little pink cloth, right where he had put it so he wouldn't lose it ... looked pretty cool, I thought!
There is some confusion about my weekday lessons. I am supposed to be having an evening class - two or three-hour sessions - Monday to Thursday, but it doesn't start yet, and no one seems sure when it will. The Director of Studies says probably Thursday. Another 'authority' assures me it won't be til the end of October.
In the meantime, I am laying low. After staying out of Peter's way while he was getting ready for work (other than helping to find the pink cloth), I gladly climbed into the two-step yellow tub for a leisurely shower. I had just got thoroughly wet when I heard some sort of alarm, or siren, a whirring, humming sound, or... and there seemed to be a bunch of people cheering, saying "Oooohh!" Then I remembered. I had set my cheap'n'nasty Nokia phone ring-tone to "Surprise", and it was sitting on top of the washing machine where its vibration sound echoed into quite an alarming sound.
I dragged myself out of the shower, dried a little and answered the phone - holding my breath hoping it wasn't the Director of Studies with a new class for me. It was (poor) Peter. He didn't know what classroom he was in, and the Teacher's Assistant wasn't in the teachers' office nor was the information on the white board where it should be. However, the information was on our computer if I could just tippy-toe out to the loungeroom and look for him.
Could be worse, could be me over there teaching this morning.
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