What a week!

I'm so glad is Friday!
First: Thanks, Anja, for the book's suggestions for my beginner student. I try to buy both books in amazon as I usually do, but one took ages to arrive so I downloaded using e-mule. (I mean the student's book and the teacher's). That saved me a tenner and a week, not bad. The book is a good one I did made a copy for my student and he's slowly, ever so slowly, starting to get a grip on the crazy language. I do feel sorry for him because it's very hard to learn a new language from scratch but the poor guy is struggling so much... I'm sure can teach him but I'm doubting very much if he's going to learn something at all!! After all, learning English was not his choice in the first place. Well... I'll do my best.

My other classes are going fine. After all this months I'm finally getting the hang out of teaching and my classes are running much more smoothly and I don't get all stressed out for little things like being asked how to say something and forgetting the word in English. I used to totally freaked out if i couldn't remember something, specially if it was something silly. Now I don't fret anymore, I do my best to squeeze the word out of my brain and if that fail, then I write the question down and bring the answer the next class. That's far better than try to cheat and then live with the fear of being found out.
I still try and do my own homework with the classes, in particular with the grammar that I'm going to cover. To forget one unusual word is bad enough, but to get the grammar wrong would be too much. So I still take some time before every lesson to check what I'm going to do.

Now I agree to take 2 more students from next week. This time I'll be teaching them Spanish. This are the wives of 2 foreign employees at one (Finish) company where I teach a lot. I think one is British and the other from Finland. As usual with me (by now you know my "never good enough" attitude) , I'm not totally comfortable with this as I'm not a native Spaniard. When people go to England they want to learn their language from a real English native (whatever that means) not an Australian. So, I don't really know if this ladies will be happy with my Argentine's accent. At least I can emphasize with them living in a foreign country and trying to learn the new language to deal with doctors, teachers, etc etc.
... being there, done that, got the t-shirt.
On top of the language I can help them with the foreignness of living abroad and the pitfalls of a different culture. Native teachers take their own culture for granted and sometimes find hard to explain things that are totally puzzling for a foreign. I'm sort of in the middle as I'm not totally local myself and I've lived so many years in Bristol.
I hope.
I'll let you know how does it goes.

All this work will take me closer to my financial goal, which is to earn €1,000 a month. of course, I'll give myself a whole more year to achieve that because this is the last month of teaching before the holidays and I achieve enough and I do deserve a rest.
School finishes here just after the Sant Joan's fiesta, in 2 weeks time and with that all teaching seams to end too, mine included. I do welcome that as it's getting increasingly hot and I need a rest.
In actual fact schools are almost over and the kids only have half day work since the first Monday of June.
P. goes to school at the usual time in the morning but after lunch they don't have any teaching whatsoever, they can choose to stay at school mostly playing or go home. I'm very glad that P. choose to stay because that means that he's having fun with his classmates and I do prefer him running around there than sitting at home watching tv or playing with the PlayStation by himself. He arrives home at around 4pm, tired, hungry as a wolf, all dirty and sometimes with torn clothes but happy as Punch.
Today he just came back with a red bandanna with Chinese characters up on his head. looking as if he's part of a rapper's gang.
Is a pity that next year he'll go to yet another school!!
(I feel guilty about this too)

Now I'm off to try to find an optician to get new glasses. My eyesight changed in the past few months, even before I left England, and now I have to take small print an arm length away from me to be able to see it. I'm definitely and officially old.