Finally, vacation!

Finally on a month long vacation period after what seemed like an incredibly long six months. I definitely do not like the school schedule that this school uses. Now that the school day is longer than most schools and the school year is longer than most schools, we’re essentially working an extra two weeks a year for free. Fortunately this is the last year for me. The extended school year that we have with the new schedule is just one of the problems that comes with working for a company school – they have little idea about what education is and teachers are generally not highly valued in the status system that is a large part of living in a mining community. Well, so much for my end of the year complaining.

Baseball. I get a week of watching baseball in the mornings on ESPN from my satellite connection. Today is the Mets and the Yankees. It’s a day game in New York, and the weather there is great – it’s great here in Sumbawa today as well with a nice 80 degrees at 10:30 am. If Indonesia had baseball, it would be almost paradise. With three weeks in Bali coming up as soon as the kids get their school reports at the end of next week, I’ll have internet access at home so I can follow baseball better. One of the key things that I’m looking forward to in retirement is having internet access everyday. Being able to use the internet at school just doesn’t cut it as I don’t have anywhere near enough time to follow what I need do professionally on the internet, and forget about personal stuff.

So on my second day of vacation (the first was spent as it usually is – playing games on the computer), I did lesson plans for fifth, sixth and eighth grade math classes for next semester. Tomorrow, I’ll do the Seventh grade math and then the seventh’eighth grade social studies class. I’ll do the 2-8 grade computer classes when I get to Bali and have some online access so I can use my del.icio.us account to post links there to go with my plans which will be online at the school’s website. I like getting lesson plans done early in the vacation as there isn’t enough time to do them when school starts. As you can see, teaching in a small school means doing extraordinary amounts of work for lessons. Even more in this school than in the other two small schools where I taught. Compare this to the lesson plans I did at the medium size school in Lahore where I had to plan for three levels of math each week.