From the Silence

The last week and a half have been busy only with things not worth putting on the blog.  Specifically, Amanda and I were finishing off the last of our studies for this semester.  I had a few exams last week which I think I went fairly well in (but you can never be sure), while Amanda had to complete assignments for basically all of her subjects.  In the space of a week she wrote around 10,000 words on a variety of topics from government policy to a retrospective essay on "what I have learned".  It was rather painful and nearly all contact with the outside world had to be shut down in order to get it done.  We won't find out our results until the 5th of December, so here's hoping that we passed.  Once I'm done with this semester, I've got another year next year of uni and I'll have completed my major in philosophy and my minors in English and Writing.  Then we'll see where I go from there.

I was talking to the Principal of our school today as he's introduced a new schedule of timetimes.  Basically, we're getting two extra weeks of holidays at Christmas, and as such we have to make up those classes over the next month.  We will be doing this by shortening all the class times and breaks and squeezing in an additional lesson before lunchtime.  That will make 9 lessons per day for each class instead of 8.  To make things even more complicated there will be a different timetable each week to decide what goes into this additional lesson.  More timetabling fun and games - it seems to be the year for it.  So, what is the reason for this latest change? Well, it seems that because the local council received 30 million forints (~$130k AUD)  less than requested for the month of December, there just isn't enough money to pay to heat the school over Christmas.  In fact, the town council was only given a little more than wages, so it's going to have to default on the 65 or so million forints that it is currently in debt.  Amanda and I think that the council should have a serious "downsize" of government employees rather than close the school for two extra weeks but I don't think that's the way things are done around here.

In other news, the temperature has been steadily dropping over the last few weeks. It's often negative 5 degrees or so in the morning, and for the last couple of days it hasn't hit much more than 6 degrees Celsius at the hottest during the day.  The principal told us that it might actually snow next week, but maybe he was trying to cheer us up.  Even if everyone else thinks that the snow is annoying, Amanda and I still love it.

Our classes have been going well.  We've been getting a handle on the kids and (for the most part) have them under control, although there are still a few spats every now and then.  In my Grade 4 class, they're still obsessed with going outside or going to the computer room.  It's annoying to have to work through the objections every lesson but it can be a funny conversation.

"Hi Balint, how are you?"

"ANGRY!"

"Why?"

"Daniel!"

"Why?"

"No outside! No számítógépes terem!" 

At this point they're usually desperately trying hard to act as angry as they're pretending to be. I find it interesting that although the kids know the words "computer" and "room", they haven't managed to connect them yet.  I might fix that on Monday actually. If they're going to be angry with me, they might as well do it in English.

Amanda has also been having fun with her classes. She was teaching the Grade 1s about winter clothes today, so she brought in some of our coats, scarves, gloves, hats, pullovers and boots.  The clothes were piled messily in the back of the classroom and a pair of kids were chosen to act as mannequins. Then two different students had to listen to Amanda say one of the new clothes words and race to collect the right item from the pile to dress their mannequin. She said that although it got a bit noisy at times, it was awesome fun and the photos of the kids dressed in our oversized clothes look pretty adorable.

- Daniel.