Xmas Party

Hey everyone! I hope most of you are alright after all these storms I'm hearing about. That one that caused all the blackouts even made the pages of the Bangkok Post. It's sorta cooling off here, in fact I'd qualify some days as "comfortable". Believe me this is not an effort to make anyone jealous, I would love to go sledding or have a snowball fight right about now. (ps thanks for the snow pics, keep em coming!)

Anyway, the I Can Read office where I work had a xmas party for the kids last Saturday where they all brought in presents and drew numbers to see who got what. The lobby which is usually pretty empty was filled with kids and parents all in Santa hats which was pretty cool. Eventhough it was so close to Christmas, I still hadn't really felt like it. At least not until that day where all the kids were running around opening presents with Christmas carols playing (and me in a santa hat of course). A few of my kids brought me presents too even though I've only been teaching them for a week. I got a box of chocolates and a weird little dog on a string (apparently it's a cell phone caddy). Aside from that, the teaching has been going great. A lot of the kids are really bright and I think they should have no problem moving up through the levels. One thing that's kinda getting on my nerves is that the classes are always missing two or three kids. It's normally not a problem, in fact with a lot of the classes it's better to have it smaller. They behave a lot better and it's easier to gauge how far they are in their learning with more individual attention. The problem is that the parents sign their kids up for make-up classes which are steadily increasing in number. The woman in charge of scheduling them is starting to pile them on. There are a lot of problems with this over-abundance of make-ups that affect the quality and effectiveness of the program that I won't get into. That's not what this blog is about. Instead we'll get into why I personally feel this is an issue. Wednesdays are a very light day for me. I only have one class and I've been using the down time to set up my classes for the week and to do some of the paperwork. Well.. this coming Wednesday I have to do not 1, not 2, not 3, not even 4, but 5 make-ups. 5!!. That's absurd. I asked the lady in charge of scheduling if she was familiar with Ebeneezer Scrooge but she didn't. She thought it was funny that I had so much extra work and didn't know why I couldn't see the humor in it. I guess I can.

My plans have changed a little and now I'll be waking up early on xmas morning to catch a bus to Pattaya where languagecorps is having a big Christams dinner. I'm actually kinda excited for it. It'll be a gathering of languagecorps alumni both new and old, and it'll be good to see some of them again.

much love,
j