The Highlight of my Week

So it's been a long week of, well, not actually accomplishing very much, but doing a lot of things.

At this point I have a pretty good idea of where I live and I can find the stuff that really matters: the grocery store (in fact, two grocery stores), school, the euro store, and ATMs. I'm also able to find places where other teachers live and wander around a smallish area without getting irrevocably lost. I feel like these are all pretty good things, but to call them "accomplishments" seems a bit... of an exaggeration.

I've also met lots of people, about half of whom I have forgotten their names almost immediately. I have a classroom and IDs to log on to the school computers, and I have some supplies to start the year and as of Friday I actually have a schedule of the classes I'll be teaching. Well, probably.

Something that I've been desperate to discover ever since I was hired way back in February is what classes I am teaching. So on Friday we were actually given our schedules. Except that apparently it's not uncommon for people to not even register for school until the first week is already underway. So the schedule I have now could potentially change, but hopefully not too much.

As of right now I am teaching 2 sections of World History (though because "high school" really starts in 10th grade here - and World History is a 10th grade class - it is possible and even likely that they will add another class of World History), 3 sections of US Government (which is actually not even going to be that anymore, at least not exactly, my wonderful department head and I looked at the syllabus from last year and thought that it resembled the US History class far too closely - so we proposed a new curriculum which we are calling "Comparative Government" that will look at different types of government, do some case studies of different countries, talk about civics and citizenship, and changing government through civil and violent means), and 1 section of Geography (which would be fun and a very small class, but if they do have to add another World History this little group will likely be absorbed into another section).

(boy, that was a lot of parenthetical commentary)

BUT - that's not even the highlight of my week. The highlight of my week was that today we went to the mall - which is really like a mall - and I bought a blender. I'm so excited to make myself a smoothie in the morning. :)