First Day

T + 10

So the time has finally come to do what I came here for; to start my professional career overseas; to actually teach some students some ICT in my classroom. 🙂

As much as INSET days are useful, actually getting down to the job is much more my “cup of tea”.

My timetable is mostly year 10 to 13 with one year 9 class. The day is made up of 7 periods plus a morning and afternoon registration. The day starts with registration at 7:55, I wanted to entailing a 7:15 departure for the 10 min walk to school to get in early enough. Getting up in the dark (sunrise is at about 6:50am) for the first time in months was a challenge, but sunrise is quick here so it is broad daylight by 7am.

I have a year 10 tutor group. Today was a tutor session followed by an Assembly conducted amidst a horrendous downpour reminiscent of my time in Lord Bills. This is supposed to be the dry season so the weather is very unusual at the moment.

Later I met my year 11 class, unfortunately my HDMI laptop doesn’t interface with my classroom projector and two-thirds of the classroom computers weren’t seeing the network hence no logins. After a lot of sorting by the Network Technician we sorted out the logins, but you need to be prepared here – I taught HTML coding and by the time the logins were sorted the we were able to do some coding. The class (of 10) were much better behaved than in the UK, and in our double we got a long way and were experimenting with hexadecimal coding and fonts by the end.

My other lesson of the day was Year 13 a small class (3 students) and again were working well.

Early days and I am sure that more trying times will come.

I ended up leaving earlier than expected due to power cut, which is still ongoing. As I write it’s an hour before sunset – it’s going to be an early night I think 😦