Good news: I am less that an hour away from the weekend!


Bad news: My computer has at least a hard drive problem and perhaps other problems, too. Which means that I need to find a friend who speaks Bahasa Indonesia to help me buy a new laptop, since I'm tired of fixing a four-year-old computer. I'm not really that upset about it (all my files are safe, thank goodness); it's just the hassle that I mind. Everything here takes about 5 times more effort and 10 times more time.


Busy news: With the resignation of one of our English teachers, some teaching responsibilities have been redistributed to cover the holes. Right now it looks like I'll be helping 7th graders in "individualized instruction," which means another 100+ names to learn, bringing my total to more than 350 students in three grades. I'm kind of looking forward to it because seventh graders have an energy that gets lost by the time they get to high school.


I just realized that I may not have described my teaching responsibilites very well. If this will bore you, feel free to skip this paragraph. Most of my responsibilities are in eleventh grade, where I work with Karla. We're almost done with a unit on power in which we've been reading Animal Farm and Marked. Once a week, I and two other teachers work with tenth graders for individualized instruction, which is more of a support class for their English skills and classwork. Now I may be adding 7th grade individualized instruction, where I'll be in their classrooms once a week with another 7th grade teacher.


More busy news: I saw my tutoring student (I'll call him Daniel) for the first time yesterday. I'll be tutoring him three times a week. Teaching him will be something of a challenge, but it's nice to work with a student individually for a change.

Disciplinary news: I handed out my first "note of concern" today. A note of concern sends a student to "Special Afternoon Meeting" or SAM, which is basically detention during lunch. Actually, I wrote 16 notes of concern for students in the same class who were all five minutes late to my class after their morning break. Lateness is kind of a part of Indonesian culture, but it is frustrating to Indonesian and expatriate teachers alike at IPEKA. So I also made the students write down and turn in ideas to solve their lateness problem. My first note of concern should have come long before this since I've let things slide before, and I know discipline is one of my weaknesses as a teacher. With 16 under my belt, I think I'm over that hump. I hope SAM was a party today.

Tasty news: I made a really good curried tomato, bean and potato soup the other night, and I've been enjoying the leftovers all week. I would post the recipe, but I pretty much made it up, and I don't actually know what kind of beans I'm using since I don't recognize them and can't read the label.

More tasty news: I'm going to my favorite Korean restaurant tonight where you get to grill your food at a little grill built in the table. I always overeat there.

More good news: I successfully bought a pair of shoes last weekend. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.