Illness is sooo inconvenient!!

It started off like every other day that I teach the vets: with dread and anxiety. I knew that they were going to ask questions I couldn't answer, and that whatever I did would be a waste of time. Ok, so sometimes I get a little insecure about my teaching.

I get to school, start to get things in order, and go to my first class. This seems to go fairly well, and then I have a little 10 minute break and go to my next class. This class was also alright, though the students were acting a bit stranger and louder than usual. Then came my time with the vets. This may have not been a bad time either except my group was getting 4 new students and the other group was getting 3 new students. This was still not the worst of it! Approximately one minute before the start of class, the other teacher gets sick. As the dean is away for the week meeting with the owners of the company in Lebanon, we have no other teachers to substitute; we also are unable to send them home and have them make it up another day.

The final decision was for me to teach all 50 + students at the same time. It doesn't matter that while the material that we are teaching them is the same, we were not at the same spot at this point (I was supposed to get us there today). I ended up doing the lesson that the other teacher had planned for her class with both of them. It wasn't the best, but it worked out nice enough. We took the students to the cafeteria, which echoes very badly. I had to yell to be heard by everyone, and I still had someone say that I needed to speak louder (I think he is hard of hearing). As I was walking around the class (very difficult with so many students), I found myself being rained upon. It seems that the air conditioning vent lets in water droplets. The students then had to move the desks to another location during class, which helped in wasting a little more time for them, though did nothing for the other students. Luckily the worksheet was long enough to keep most of them busy for almost an hour and 10 minutes or so. We left a little before the hour and a half was up, but not enough to make a huge difference in things.

The experience was one I did not want to repeat again. So when it came time to do the afternoon class, I had one of the students take the other teachers class. I gave him the answer key to the worksheet they were supposed to have finished and told him to write down any questions people had that he couldn't answer, and to bring them over after at least half an hour of the class had passed. He did come over a couple of times, but it seems that they didn't have a lot of questions. My class was a madhouse! They didn't bring me the recipes I asked for. They want to be able to bring them on Sunday. I told them that I was willing to starve for the weekend in order for them to have a little more time. I explained again what a recipe was because they didn't seem to understand the previous time.

I am glad the day is over; I can relax and do nothing for just a little bit. Tomorrow is another day. I will give an exam to a class that is not mine in addition to the teaching that I have to do. Ahhhhhhh!! It won't be difficult, but I really am sick of work; I don't want to do it anymore. I want to just hang out with them individually and tutor. Like at lunch time today. Me and a group of them sat around and ate sunflower seeds while I helped them with their English part of the time, and the rest I listened to them chatter away in Kurdish.