Richard's Travels

It’s Monday afternoon and I’m back in the office after another exhausting weekend at ila. I’ve planned my lessons for this evening and simply can’t bear to turn my attention to next weekend’s lessons as I probably should be doing, so instead I’ll update this blog with has been rather neglected of late. Teaching seems to be going fine – some days go better than others, of course, but I’m more or less beginning to find it easier, sometimes even enjoy myself, and in my most optimistic moods even come close to believing that I might actually have taught someone something useful or valuable.  But let’s not get too carried away…

The normal routine of ila life, such as it is, was disrupted last week by halloween festivities.The older students were required to design on paper and then execute a carved pumpkin. Eighteen students around an A3 piece of paper was a pretty worthless exercise, but somehow one of my classes produced a good enough design to be rewarded with an actual pumpkin, which lurked in my class until my poor teaching assistant took the thing home an hacked a few bits off the outside. The great attraction of the weekend, though, was the haunted house – two classrooms filled with creepy stuffed monsters and wierd halloween skeletons etc. The lights were turned out and halloween noises blared from a CD player. Into this room my junior and senior classes were pushed howling and screaming, while more sweaty hands than I thought possible fastened themselves to my arms, trousers, shirt and tie. And just in case our own thousand children weren’t able to generate enough hysteria, kids from another branch came to visit, so the place was an absolute shambles. The juniors also had a costume competition, and I also made what I thought was a rather lame effort but which proved to be absloutely terrifying to the kids:

Juniors 3A

Juniors 3B

Seniors 2