Christina and Joseph left on Sunday for Canada and arrived safe and sound by all accounts, leaving me with... well, just leaving me. *sniff* I have the bunnies, the house and the garden to look after, plus the occasional stray cat and babka to fend off. And for those out there who are wondering who is cooking for me, then I am going to give this answer: me. I am cooking for me. It might not be much, Gordon Ramsey will not turn up at my house to swear at me uncontrollably, I will win no awards through my cooking non-expertise. But I will survive. Just about.
Right now wifey and son are able to communicate (they have a phone!) and they are able to travel because a very nice, wonderful, awesome person has lent them a car to drive around for the time being. So far, so good. They'll be visiting family, friends and churches, and I should be joining them in October for a couple of weeks, hitting the ground running.
It's a busy time over there, but it's a busy one over here too, as we start on the new school year minus a few of our 'regular' students, since they've gone off to boarding school. Our new church building's landlord is putting in new windows so that we won't freeze during the winter time, Vilo has given his first sermon last Sunday, Mark and Liz will shortly be heading off to England and the amount of lessons I have as an English teacher has gone up. Teaching teens is... interesting... to say the least. The teaching methods here are a lot different to what we would deem as 'normal', in that the teacher speaks at the front, and the class regurgitates it later, without really thinking too much about it. Canada and the UK do things differently, encouraging the student to think and so it's just another thing that we take for granted. By asking what a teenager thinks about something, you'll get a response, but not when the same question is directed at a group. Discussion and arguing your case just doesn't fly here, so as a teacher there is a steep learning curve which also seems to include embarrassed silence. And there have been ones that refuse outright to do anything and talk happily away in L1.
Yeah, ESL teachers have lingo too.
It's difficult, but then, it wouldn't be fun if it was easy. That's kinda another reason why we're here too.
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