Teaching, marking, sleeping, more marking, more teaching

Learning to teach is a lot of work and often overwhelming. I spent a lot of time on the weekend trying to figure out how to grade some assignments and then on Monday I learned I hadn't done the marking right. Sometimes I wonder if it's me or the students who are learning more right now.

Every so often there are a few entertaining language moments when I am listening to the students' recorded oral presentations and I hear 'she rubbes her ears' and I look at a picture of a woman rubbing her eyes as she wakes up. Or when I read an assignment describing one guy's weekend activities and it ends with the phrase 'I fell down my dream's river' which I find is an interesting idea. Then when I was asked what the word scrapbook meant and a student asked me if it had anything to do with garbage and I had to smile. Sure scraps could mean garbage, but then I imagined a book of garbage souvenirs and tried to explain that idea to the students and they didn't really understand.

My teaching learning experiences are probably not so entertaining for students like when a bad photocopy job cut off three letters of every word on the right hand side of the page on their reading exam or when I used another teacher's grammar review in class and confused myself.

I guess I didn't work the entire weekend because I managed to get away to see my friend Alexis Normand perform at Café Vivant Friday night and then I caught the Troupe du Jour's production of the translation of Kevin Kerr's play called Unity on Saturday.