Saturday 14 July 2012

The Saturday Update

I know that I am getting to say this every week but this week really has been manic.  I guess it seemed more so as I expected it to be relatively relaxing with it being the last week of teaching for the year.

At school we said goodbye to year ten.  So on Tuesday I but on a dress and heels for the first time in a long time and headed to the Treue ship in Bremen for the prom.  It was, as it always is, great to see all the kids dressed up to the nines.  All of them had made a huge effort and really enjoyed the night.  Then on Friday we had the presentations / leaving assembly which was really lovely and emotional.  I will really miss my group.

Wednesday was Nico's birthday.  We had quite a quiet day, a nice dinner watching some of his birthday DVDs.  The real party is today so we have family and friends coming round later and lots to get ready for.  

Wednesday was also the union meeting and protest.  The political and financial situation for teaching in Bremen is not great at the moment and there will be just 75 new teaching positions for the next school year.  This may sound like a lot but when applied to our school, we have three teachers retiring, my contract officially ending, and three teachers on or soon to be on maternity leave.  To cover these jobs next year, we have been allocated two new teachers!  The most shocking part of the day for me was hearing of three schools in Bremen who have no head teacher at the moment and won't be given new ones for next year!  It was a great feeling of community taking part in my second protest, let's see if it changes much...

The worst part of the week came at 3am on Thursday when our smoke alarm went off, and I don't mean the kind of going off where the battery is low and it beeps occasionally, I mean the full on wailing siren, scare the hell out of you going off.  After the initial panic, we realised there was no fire and disabled the alarms, but not knowing what had done it and being so full of adrenaline meant little sleep afterwards and being exhausted all the next day.  When we looked it up, it could have been a bug, dust or humidity, but then it seems strange I've never heard of this before.  We haven't been brave enough to plug them back in yet...

In an amongst all of this, I managed to keep up to both my targets for the week as well as those from the week before.  I've stayed the same again this week but I'm pleased with that at the moment, I'm planning to focus more on the diet and exercise when the holidays start and I have no other distractions.  For next week, I'm cutting out cheese (unless it's part of a recipe) and want to build up on this week's start by doing zumba twice next week.  I've also managed to strike another item off my 28 things list...more on that tomorrow!

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