Math with a Story

 I think that a few of my high school friends will be pleased to find out that for the past week and a half I’ve been a Physics teacher. Covering one on a Leave of Absence, anyway. So I’ve been teaching Physics. And not just y9 or y10 astronomy or light diffracting through prisms. Senior level, university-preparation Physics. So after 2 years of scoffing at my friends in Phy classes, calling it “math with a story”, I am now properly repentant. If I’d taken physics, I’d be more useful to the students now studying for their exams on their own without my assistance. ‘Course, I wouldn’t have had space for history if I’d taken all 3 sciences. So I’m not repentant. Just wishing I’d had more time, I guess.

This is the mid-ish point of the second very full week of work we’ve had. Somehow or other, there has always been a day off, interruption, or sick day somewhere in the first few weeks of our European teaching adventure, but this is a full 5 day week for both of us. Being a normal person with a full time job and keeping house is a lot. It eats up the time and energy and collapsing into bed at the end of the day seems to always feel well-earned. I don’t mention all this for a pity party because we don’t deserve one; everyone has a busy life. If your life isn’t busy enough, then you need a new hobby or two. And I can appreciate that every adult, family-life person we know has full-time work, either in an office or at home or on a construction site or something. Such is the nature of being all-grown-up. I don’t even mean it as an excuse for the longer-than-hoped-for gaps between updates and posts.

We’re coming up on the final stretch towards Christmas holidays here; they get a full week off before the big weekend. It’ll be nice to relax, go to some Christmas markets and festivals in town, etc. but it would have been nice to get paid, too. The students are antsy and so are the teachers. The school year here is broken up into 3 terms: autumn, spring and summer – and this is the last week of autumn term. So exams, tests, and final summative tasks are in full swing, as well as a horde of seasonally-inspired extra-curriculars that make it a very interesting time indeed to be strangers in the school.

We’re getting pretty pumped, too. We haven’t decorated yet or even done much shopping, but we’re enjoying seeing the lights up everywhere. Commercialism reigns here nearly as strongly as back home. Which I understand, I think. Church has been great, though, for helping us get our heads in good space for Christmas. No one does seasons of the church calendar like Anglicans. We’ve been going through a good advent study, well-chosen prayers and the like. Alyssa and I even joined the choir for the upcoming carol service this Sunday. I was the only guy at the first rehearsal, and complained a bit this weekend at a couple targeted individuals, and now there are three of us. Which is nice. I had really missed singing in church. It was a big part of my childhood that I had somewhat put on hold for a couple years, minus a brief stint at the Greenwood choir. I'm jealously hoping a little snow will fall in the next couple of days; just enough to dust the ground, to make the whole place seem a mite more festive.

At this moment, I am sitting in an empty classroom waiting for my second batch of 6th-formers to show up so I can not-help them study for tomorrow's exam. I haven't actually met any of this group of students; each time they are scheduled to be in my classroom, they all skip. They know it'll be a waste of their time and they don't come in. Which, to my mind is dumb since they need to keep up good attendance scores, but at age 17 I refuse to be anyone's mother. I've warned, followed-up and notified other teachers every time, like I will today. They are quite late now, and I'm confident that this has become an extra-long lunch break for me, since I have lunch next. I don't like wasting my employers' money out of principle, but a teacher does need to be here in case any of them show up to mark them late instead of absent. I've never enjoyed being paid to sit on my bum and waste time. But I am happy enough to take advantage of the peace and solitude of an empty room and a working computer.

Tonight's laundry night, tomorrow's home group, and so I've tentatively planned to try some photo-uploading on thursday, since I need to go to the pub to do it. Of course, maybe I can just bring the camera to work and do it during the day? I'll have to think about that one.

As always, we are grateful for your thoughts and prayers. Drop us a line/email or something to let us know what's up in Canada; we're just as hungry for news from home as I'm sure some of you are for news from away. Even if it's dull, that's cool. We're becoming English now; dullness is carving out a special place in our hearts.

More news from Away

It's been far too long and for this I apologize. I want to confess, right off the mark; no pictures still this post. I'm in a break right now at work and no camera to upload, and our usage limits at home wouldn't handle it, so it's a take-the-mac-to-the-pub thing and we've scarcely been going since we got wired in.

Church:
We're getting good and plugged in. We've been to our new home group twice now and love it. There's something massively grown-up about it. We're figuring out that we are close to the younger end of the people in our church; the demographic seems to be young and young-ish working professionals. There are hardly any children or youth to speak of. Sunday evenings have been awesome, though we have as-of-yet resisted the urge to join the church after-party at the local pub, mainly because church already runs close to too late for us to get a good night's sleep for Monday morning. We're planning to go the weekend holidays start when we won't have work the next morning to regret the late night. Tonight, I (John) am going to some kind of men's dinner fellowship thing which should be really cool, and in lieu of home groups this week there's a big prayer meeting with all the groups at the church. Very excited about that, too. So we're getting plugged in and involved, step-by-step, even in the more social components of being in a new church family.
For example, we were invited(along with half the church) to a fancy dress champagne and Christmas tree decorating party by a couple of the only other Canadians in the church (from Calgary). Lots of fun, that, and a good excuse to memorize a few more names. Every person we meet is one more person we won't feel awkward sitting beside on Sundays, and that's going to be nice.

Work:
Alyssa had another interview, similarly far away and similarly job offer-free, which is totally cool. That's two or three interviews more than I've gotten. Probably 'cause she's prettier than me. We're both booked out into stable commitments until Christmas now, which is really cool. Going to the same school rather than a fresh one each day has helped us feel a lot less drained every evening. I'm covering a Physics specialist, though, which means that if I want to be useful to these students I may have to do some aggressive googling in my off-hours.

Life
We're learning some new things about living in our neighbourhood. For one, produce is more cost effective from the corner vegetable vendors than packaged up in a dozen layers of plastic at the grocer. And eating in, even a pre-fab frozen meal, is always cheaper than takeaway and usually almost as good.
We are very nearly out of TV episodes I have on my computer. When we hit the season finale of BSG S2 (which will be in five days at current rate of consumption estimates), the only thing to watch left will be a very dweeby anime series and Alyssa's not excited about it. So maybe we'll be spending more time at the library.

Travel
For those we haven't told, we did a big busy travel day a couple weekends ago; a bus tour that was going to take us to Windsor Castle, Stonehenge and Bath. We really ought to have expected it to feel rushed, but we did it anyway. Despite the hurried and frantic nature of the day, it was really cool to see a couple more of the biggest and most interesting places in England.
Windsor Castle, for those who don't know, is where the Queen lives. It's about an hour or so out of London. It was built about 1000 years ago by William the Conqueror and it is a gorgeous, quintessential kind of castle, The Queen was even there, though we didn't see her. We spent most of our time at the castle chapel, which aside from being gorgeous is also where King George VI and the late Queen mother, as well as King Henry VIII are buried. I actually almost stepped on Henry VIII without noticing. And it's the closest thing the British monarchy has to a home church, which is pretty cool. Then we practically ran through the State Apartments (where the royals actually live) before jumping back on the bus.
Everyone who's been has told me that Stonehenge is mildly underwhelming and they're right. Unless you're super-curious, doing the prescribed walk around the perimeter was enough for me. But worth going to see anyway. Because it's Stonehenge! One of the great wonders of the ancient world. I don't think you can get away with not seeing it. And compared to Windsor, cheap admission.
Finally, we ended the day with a stint in Bath, principally to see the Roman Baths and gaze on the Georgian architecture as we drove in and out. The baths were really crowded, and the whole museum complex they built around it would have kept us enthralled for a whole day ifwe weren't already tired and hungry. So we kinda sped through it and then roamed about until our pickup time looking for dinner. There was a big Christmas festival with german wooden shacks in town and so that whole corner of the town was a zoo, but a really cool atmosphere. If we're looking for a day trip or more even in the springtime, we may try to come back and give it another go. The buildings and the town were gorgeous, and we pulled out on our way back to London just before the sun went down,so we got a great panoramic view of a truly stunning little city.
In sum, we don't like bus tours, and in the future we'll plan and do our own thing, but the nice thing about a prescribed tour is it shows you stuff you wouldn't bother to plan to see, and that was really cool.

I hope I've been sufficiently lengthy to placate any readers' hurt feelings and I will endeavour to be much more regular in posting. Pictures coming soon. Thank you for your prayers and good wishes.