Bye, Bye VEMZ

I was deep in the middle of preparing my lesson plan for tomorrow's class at VEMZ (the Vladimir Electro-Motor Plant, where I taught a class last semester), when Galya approached me and said, Annie, I have some very bad news. If you know me, you know that obviously the first thing I thought was that my computer was unfixable, but no. (Still no word on its condition, by the way.) Apparently VEMZ called today (classes start tomorrow) to say that they "don't have enough money" for a class this semester. Sigh. I really enjoyed my VEMZ class, and I'm going to miss them.

This means that my schedule is going to become very interesting this semester. I was scheduled to teach at VEMZ on Monday and Thursday and to have three second-level classes here at the AH on Tuesday and Friday. I still have my Tuesday-Friday classes, but as the schedule and number of classes is set, there aren't any more classes open for me to fill this VEMZ vaccuum. And as my salary is kind of tied to the income the school receives from students... As if I'm not already poor enough! 

But never fear, there's still some work available for me. I will be teaching a conversation class on Wednesday evening (not sure of the level, but it's probably going to be a fairly advanced group, which I find exciting, having not yet taught advanced students). There's also a possibility that I will have a small morning class (yes, I did groan audibly at this) of businessmen from another factory, who are studying at an advanced level and need to prepare for an international trade show where the working language is English. But that's kind of up in the air. So we shall see.

Today we had the first part of a three day teaching seminar for local area English teachers. I find if kind of bizarre that part of my job requirement, as someone who has only had a few months of teaching experience is to conduct seminars where I instruct professional English language teachers on how to teach English. The last seminar in late October was pretty crappy (only about five teachers showed, and I was in a state of near-hysteria at the time and quite frankly remember very little of the whole thing), but this one (day one, at least) went pretty well. Today I gave a presentation on the use of realia (real-world objects) in the classroom in conjunction with written text. My realia consisted of the calendar designed by me and my mom, and the newspaper article about my mom, the calendar, and the museum it benefits. I also included a short "dumbed-down" version of the newspaper article, which could be geared towards low-level students. Afterwards, we discussed my hometown and the local wildlife refuge, and alligators (they were all very interested in alligators!). While it ended up being more of a discussion group instead of an Annie-as-teacher sort of thing, it went very well, and they all seemed really interested. I'm not as excited about tomorrow, when I get to introduce medical vocabulary and have the "students" (the teachers) perform a role play.