21:26 Saturday 7th July 2018
In Europe, the weekend is Saturday and Sunday. In Saudi, it's Friday and Saturday. They changed to that when I was living there in 2012, to help align their businesses with those of the west - an openly given economic reason. Even the government which habitially lies even when it doesn't have to, doesn't lie <i>all</i> the time.
In this house, during this holiday, for this family, the weekend is Saturday. I get a day to myself, the kids get a day out looked after by friends, the parents get a few hours off from cleaning and shouting...and I get treated to an astonishingly good meal at an expensive restaurant.
Bill Maher once described mobile phones as "food cameras"...and hopefully I'll be able to prove him right whenever I get to post this.
But after every weekend there is a week. Which for a teacher with a class means revising the previous week's work. Which in practice means teaching it all over again because they've forgotten. Which means, on top of the monday morning blues at sunday lunchtime, a lot of slightly tedious grammar has to be (re-)re-taught, before we can get to the interesting stuff.
Which involves making sentences about scenes from kid's TV shows. Did I mention I don't like kids very much? But I do rather enjoy their TV.
If you ever find yourself teaching, find something they enjoy </i>and</i> you like. Whether it's manga comics, fluid dynamics or church history. If you can manage to twist whatever subject you're teaching around something that appeals to both sides of the classroom, the actual process of teaching should be easy.
At least you know a few tricks to get them interested. But yeah, I was bored with language/English classes in grade school. It took me a while to finally understand what a gerund is and I can end sentences with a preposition!
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