Friday, October 8, 2010

surprise

I've been enjoying my break. I went into school today because in theory a couple of girls show up at 1:30 on Fridays for "English Workshop," which is me stumbling around trying to find something English-related for them to do. They haven't been showing up recently, but over time they have, and it seemed respectful of their (slight) extra effort for me to be there.

My classroom, though, had been re-arranged into a standard Chilean classroom. Normally I have 25-35 writing-chairs in there, and twice a week there's a Spanish-language writing class in there and I have to rearrange all the chairs. Those chairs are now gone, and there's the standard rows of 2-person tables. There had already been 3 stacks of those tables stored in the room, but where did all the chairs come from? From the trash and notebooks left behind, there had obviously been a full curso in there, not just the writing workshop. Okay, that's a little weird, but while I was waiting, I stacked up the tables and moved everything around, thinking that if I didn't do it today, I'd have to do it Tuesday morning.

On my way out to go have lunch with Sara, I ran into Paloma, one of the girls from 1-A. When I went back into the room to lock up, she said "Don't go into my classroom!". I said, "Your classroom?" and we bantered a bit, and when I came back out we talked some more and I discovered that 1-A has actually been moved from their classroom into mine, and theirs is currently being used to store "papers." Since the national standardized SIMCE test is coming up and the teachers have been collating piles of photocopies, I'm guessing their classroom is being used as secure storage for the tests. (My classroom has cheap hollow-core doors and a bad doorknob lock, while the main classrooms have metal doors and deadbolts.)

So who knows if I have a place to teach next week. Plus Friday is Teacher's Day, so no classes then. Ah, Chile!

2 comments:

  1. This has happened to me twice, once for a bird exhibit and now for a science fair. I ended up co-teaching all week and working with some groups outside.

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  2. if you're testing, maybe you can just work in the hall outside the curso classroom? otherwise, smells like an excuse to take another week off... want to do some editing work for me? ;-)

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