Work Horse

Yesterday may have been my worst working day so far. I arrived at the academy shortly after 2pm and did not leave until 1am this morning. We are to begin testing the students next week and so I had to compose a huge stack of written examinations. On top of that, our older students will be participating in a speaking competition on June 17th that requires them to read 7-8 English novels. Guess who else has to read all those novels...?! And lastly, it is our school's policy that each student submit a 1 to 2-page diary each week, written on a topic of their or our choice. This means that I have a mean stack of notebooks cluttering my desk that haven't even been touched let alone corrected.

Next week we will administer all of the tests, which means I will also have to mark all the tests. Once that is done it will be my turn to write the written commentary regarding each students loquacity on our almost-monthly report cards. As of yesterday our enrollment was just shy of 300 students.

This all means that I may be buried beneath a mountain of work for a short time, but I promise to resurface sometime in mid-June. Last night I considered consoling my silent complaints with the fact that, at 1am, I wasn't the last person to leave our academy: there were still students half my age studying in our "listening lab" and my boss was still teaching a class to our high school students. Alas, that fact merely perturbed me all the more. If ever I thought it was tough being a student in Canada I'm now ready to admit that I was wrong. I've seen the dark side of the moon. It's not pretty. We had it good -- REALLY good.