No Water, No School

Three updates in one week- I should get bonus points for this one. (And you'll get bonus points too if you leave me comments!) This has been kind of a strange week at school. We began by having parent-teacher conferences on Monday and Tuesday, so we had half days of school both days and then conferences in the afternoon and evening. Overall, they went fairly well. I didn’t have any parents attack me, but not all of them spoke English so it was kind of strange having meetings through a translator.

The way ICS does high school conferences is a little different than most schools. The parents come in and sit down with all of their child’s teachers at one time. So instead of the parents ganging up on the teachers, it’s the other way around. I ended up meeting with a lot of parents since I teach both middle school and high school, but it wasn’t too bad since I had other teachers in there with me. Between the conferences I didn’t get much done because they had decided to use my classroom as one of the 2 places to hold conferences- they think my room is neat, nicely decorated, and doesn’t have much mold. :^)

After spending 13 hours a day at school, by Wednesday we were ready for a weekend. But Wednesday too was a crazy day since the election results were being tallied in the US (Tuesday night for them). The history teacher set up a computer playing the news online all day. When I was in the middle of converting mixed numbers to improper fractions with the 7th grade, one of the juniors burst in my room and told me Obama had won. Nobody wanted to do anything after that… the 7th grade were cheering, glad he won solely because they like his name better… they think "McCain" sounds too much like "McDonalds."

And then things got even crazier. The director came in and said that our water had been shut off and would be for a couple days, so there would be no school on Thursday. Everyone was thrilled until we found out we will have to have school on a Saturday sometime to make up the hours. But then we went back to being thrilled. It was nice to have a day off… I was thinking of finding something to do in Seoul or somewhere, but when the weather wasn’t great I decided to spend it sleeping in, reading a book, getting ahead on lesson plans, and making amazing fried rice. So this Friday was kind of like a bridge between weekends. This weekend I'm at the Hawkins' and I can relax more now that I got so much done on Thursday. My opinion is that we should have a day off every week! :^)