TGIF

It's Friday!
Today was a particularly long Friday because beside teaching 8 periods of eighth graders, I had professional development for two of my free periods, I planned with my co-teacher Douglas for Monday's lesson during my lunch period, and I stayed after school until 6:00 to talk to parents at the report card distribution for my old year 11 students.

Funny/frustrating moment at IPEKA today. I haven't talked too much about how IPEKA's administration can be difficult to deal with at times, but today is a good example. We got a notice on the school message board at 2:23pm which announced that we will be having a school service/gathering on Monday to plant trees as a follow-up to the "I go green!" seminar some teachers and administrators attended today. Between some unclear communication and the short notice, there were some irritated teachers. In general, expatriate teachers are better at complaining than the Indonesian teachers, so sarcastic comments popped up on the message board almost immediately. We all want this school to be a better learning environment for students, and it's frustrating when that doesn't happen.

We're getting into rainy season now (it rains every other day or so), and while I've heard that it can get kind of miserable later on in January and February, right now I like it. It's much cooler (I don't start sweating immediately when I go outside), and the rain clears up some of the smog. I've seen seen the mountains to the south of Jakarta twice in the last two weeks, and I didn't even know that there were mountains to look for!

I'm going to Bandung this weekend. A teacher who's accompanying a student to a competition invited me to keep her company. I'll let you know how it goes.

I realized recently that in the last three months I have taught 119 tenth graders, 120 eighth graders, 108 eleventh graders, and about 40 seventh graders, which comes to a total of approximately 387 students. And 387 names that I should have learned. Actually, I count it a mark of progress that I thought I was on the wrong floor today because I saw students whose names I know.