Life Update

To all my adoring fans who hang on my every word: I apologize for not posting recently. No excuses. I have got to get back on track.

The past month of November was great, and December is shaping up quite nicely as well. Even though I am teaching straight through until January 12th (no break for Christmas or New Year's) the schedule does not seem so daunting because everything is fairly planned out. Next week is my last week of "actual teaching," since the week after I will review for the exam, the week after that is Christmas and NDZF (my school) is celebrating "English Week" full of songs and skits that Sophie and I must help our students prepare, the week after that is the exam, and the final week will be "American movie" week since we want to help out our stressed out students with a relaxing class, plus I will cover Sophie's students since she will be with her parents in Beijing. Please ignore that terrible run-on sentence. It's not like I'm an English teacher or anything... I am looking forward to the Christmas pageant, it seems like it will be a fun experience. I am not looking forward to giving exams, because based on how our classes are run I think it should be an oral exam—which is not easy to assess. Plus giving grades will be tough because we haven't been giving assignments or quizzes and I basically have nothing on which to base a grade. I also do not necessarily know the name to the face of all 250 of my students, and in addition I have to give out their grades with their CHINESE names which I don't know at all so I will definitely have to get creative with that one.

After living here for over three months, I definitely have a routine down, however, it's not very regular. I am accustomed to my weird teaching schedule: I teach at different times every day (but I always end at 4:35.) Monday and Tuesday evenings are reserved for lesson planning, but I often have a dinner adventure first. Sophie and I have our favorite restaurants but we (along with a various rotation of friends here in Nanjing) like to explore different restaurants in our area: new options seem to be never ending. Since Thursday night starts our weekend, we often go out Thursday to a local bar. Friday is reserved for catching up on sleep and life (and was supposed to be saved for blogging but you can tell how well that has worked out for me) with Saturday for adventure and Sunday as a return to work and lesson planning. I guess with that schedule it seems like I have plenty of free time, but it seems like I never do. There are always people with plans and random errands that take forever to fill my days, but no complaints here!

Hopefully this is China Doll's glorious return to systematic posting on the blog. More coming soon, I promise!