One Teaching week left

As we get ready to celebrate the New Year we’re left with only one week of teaching left until the Final Exam week. Today I’ve been giving all my classes a pre-exam test which covers a number of the topics that will appear in the Final Exam.

I have one more test to go this afternoon and then it’s time to get the drinking shoes on and get ready to welcome in the New Year. We then have the next two days off to recover, leaving us with just one full week of teaching left. Having already covered everything that will be in the exam next week will all be revision so should be fairly easy.

Once the exams are over, I have 2 days to mark them, and then we’re outta here for 4 weeks holiday. I can’t wait. It’s getting far too cold here, and I miss my tan. Malaysia here we come!

Evaluations time

The Midterm Exams are over, marked and returned to the Students. Now it’s our turn to be examined.

Last week the students had to fill out questionnaires on us and this week we’ll have other teachers in our classes doing an evaluation on us. Once this is all done then we should find out at the end of the week if they want us to stay on and teach next term too. Hopefully they will and we can settle in for the next 7 months.

The students threw us a Thanksgiving Party on Thursday which was fairly new for me as being from the UK I don’t actually celebrate Thanksgiving. They gave some speeches, sang some songs, played some games and drank some beer. We were given a big piggy bank each and each student put a short message in it thanking us for teaching them. It was all very touching.

Making Connections, Marking Tests and Writing Exams

This has been a fairly long week. Admittedly the piss up on Wednesday night to celebrate the election win for Obama didn’t really help matters.

I’m still really enjoying the teaching though am finding it hard to make a good connection with one of my classes. The other class I teach is great and we can have a laugh and a joke, but this class is just dead. Having never taught before I don’t have any well practised tricks up my sleeve to turn the situation around and without verbal feedback from the students it’s hard to know how well I’m doing as a teacher.

In a week or so’s time the University will be asking the students for feedback on us so they can decide whether to extend our contracts or not. I’ve got my fingerscrossed.

As for this weekend, I need to mark 28 reading and vocabulary test papers, 30 creative writing stories, write a pre-mid term test and the mid-term exam paper for grammar and writing. Thankfully next week should be fairly straight forward as after the tests I’ll be helping them revise for the mid-terms.

The Mid-term week, the week after next, means no classes so for the first 3 days we just need to invigilate a few exams, but the thursday and friday will be marking time. Hopefully by then we’ll know if we’ll be staying another term or not.