When Will Schooling Be Done?

So here’s a break down of my week. I get up every morning at 7 to get ready. I get ready, and then I eat breakfast with my host family and get my lunch for the day. I leave no later than 7:50 because I’m kind of far from where my classes take place. It’s about a 35 minute walk to class, sometimes longer on really hot or rainy days.

I have classes from 8:30am to 5pm Monday through Friday, and then 8:30am to 12:30pm on Saturdays. From 8:30-12:30 is language class (Romanian for those who don’t know what language I’m learning, or at least attempting to learn).

I have technical training from 2:00 to 5:00, but it’s in another village, so the break is used to travel to the village and lunch. The PC drives us to the other village, we finish class at 5pm (sometimes later if the teachers talk a lot), and drive back to my village at the school where we take our language classes. We don’t get back until about 5:30, so I don’t get home until 6.

One day a week, every PCT travels into Chisinau for hub site day. This is when we get general training for the PC, such as safety issues, gender roles, and anything else the PC wants us to know to integrate well. These are particularly long days. My training group has to leave Cojusna at 7:30 to be in Chisinau by 8:30, and we usually don’t get back until 6ish.

Weeks are very long, especially since I only get one day off. I miss the days of weekend being two days. Sigh. And technical training can be kind of hard to sit through sometimes. This training is teaching us how to teach. And while I know it’s necessary and all since I will be teaching, it can be kind of repetitive since I went to grad school for this and I taught. But I’m trying to keep an open mind. Afterall, I have never taught a foreign language. And I have gotten a lot of activity/game ideas to use in the classroom. And with all the talk about different strategies and activities, I have been remembering more things I learned in grad school that I can use as well.

We are also learning a new format for our lesson plans. And it requires a lot more details than I’m use to including in my lessons. For example, in addition to include an outline for the lesson (which is all I needed when I taught before), we need to include the names of the methods and approaches we use in the lesson. It can be hard stay motivated to do something that I never really needed to do when I was teaching last year.

But I did learn recently that we will leave our lesson plans with our cooperating teacher when we leave PC. So the lesson will be a reference for someone else even after we’re gone, making have more details more important. So I think knowing that the work going into my lessons will be less for me and more for a teacher here will give a greater value to the work I put into it.