Happenings.
I’ve found my way back to the blog, the journals, the chronicling of our time in this strange little country.
What’s happened since I last left you all? Well, plenty, and not much at all.
Trials, tribulations, tragedies and victories. Unfortunately, it’s looking very much like some of our plans are going to fall apart unless the intensely time-consuming and hundred foot high hurdle process of obtaining our visas doesn’t pick up speed, yesterday.
Also, we’re finally beginning to run out of cash, partly due to the fact that we haven’t been paid yet. Worry not though, dear readers, all is not lost. There is enough to eat, and what work we do have covers our rent.
Plus, we’ve picked up some private lessons outside of the cheerful German School hours.
So what’s actually been happening? There may have been previous mention of the German School having a nice, week-long holiday in store for us and in fact, all of our oh-so-lucky students. Despite the fact that we’re not sure we’ll be paid for said holiday time, and that it arrived at precisely the moment we realised it was time to actively start being immensely poor.
This means that we spent the week mostly at home, fighting off a minor bout of the flu, and watching movies. Honestly, I am using this unlimited download, cost free connection 24/7. Were I being as disgustingly greedy with the bandwidth in Sydney, my father would have apoplectic fits about the monthly bill. Australia is intensely backward when it comes to the whole internet thing.
Time passes.
Back to work then. Finally, after some severe rearranging of my timetable the Year 11 students began to show up for their classes. Almost all of them, actually. This has been a very, very welcome change from teaching the younger lot - not that there is anything wrong with the kids, of course. It’s just nice to have a class I can be sarcastic, ironic, and subtle with.
I can throw them off-centre, and tell them all sorts of inappropriate things, without it being a huge issue.
By inappropriate, I simply mean “If you have a problem understanding anything in this test, feel free to ask me about it - but realise that I won’t answer, I’ll just kick you in the shins for bothering me.”
After I give them a second to absorb this horrifying information, they start to clue in that I don’t mean it, I confirm that fact, and they grin widely. However, the first few seconds of translating what I’ve said are intensely amusing to watch.
The younger class of Czech students seem to have just finished processing the idea that I’m not some kind of entertaining distraction that was handed to them for a couple of weeks. This means that they’re beginning to view me as a real teacher, and the tasks I set them as real work. A whole slew of peaks and lows come along with this, in that now it’s harder to convince them that learning is worth their time, but also, I can get their attention back when they start to dissolve into general conversation amongst themselves.
There might be a slight fear factor attributed to that latter statement, as the morning after we arrived home from London (more on this later), was the first time they’d seen me remotely stern or grumpy. You see, our flight came into Prague just after midnight, and we got home an hour or so after that. At this point, my “oh God I’m flying through the air in a metal tube with wings” adrenaline was still running in the background, and it was impossible to fall straight to sleep. The poor children were my first class, at the delightful hour of eight in the morning.
I drifted into the room, drifting being all that my three hours of sleep (and no coffee) allowed of my body, and began the lesson. For some perverse reason, they had picked that day to be their most inattentive, having decided earlier, as a group, in a secret meeting, that ignoring me was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Plus, they were all yelling. Plus, I was exhausted, alright?
So, I raise my voice a bit - nothing.
Further - nothing.
I rap my knuckles upon the desk of the kid in front of me, painfully hard - even that damn little girl ignored me, studiously.
The frustration and annoyance builds over the course of this time, hits some kind of hideous craggy peak, turns into unbridled rage, and I hit the little girl right in the face. Blood spattered across the kid next to her, the chair she sat upon tilted backwards and she slammed her head into the desk behind her. Before I knew it, the windows all smashed inwards, and the Queen of England burst through, quickly proclaiming me to be a Knight of the Realm. Peace was restored to Earth, no one ever went hungry again, and Satan himself agreed to pay my rent.
Alright, so I didn’t hit anyone, but what happened afterwards is all true. Or, at the least, it would make a great Matthew Reilly novel.
No, instead of punching, kicking, and crying, I did the next best thing. Stamped my feet. Damn near jumped up and down, I tell you. The floors being as strangely springy as they are in this school, everything within a five metre radius of me rattled and shook, desks and all. The people in the classroom below must have been unnerved. The kids around me certainly were. I’m not sure they were used to minor earthquakes of anger.
Attention regained, the lesson continued.
By the way, the kids are still very relaxed with me, and seem to be having a cheerful time - they’re just a little more careful about when I speak. I’m not sure why jumping about was so upsetting for them, but it sure was a heck of a lot nicer than the sheer red-faced-spit-shouting storms of terror that I’ve seen come from some of the other teachers, with whom all children are intensely well behaved. Oh, except Renee’s uncontrollable class - as you might recall, even by the Headmaster.
So, most things have gone smoothly from this point on. My trouble student, who hates speaking English, refuses to, etc, is gradually getting a little better with it all. The underlying problem appears to be that she, well, doesn’t really speak any English at all and this is embarrassing. However, we catch the same efficient, easy, cheap, 20 minute train ride home on Tuesdays - she has become much less irritating and frustrated since we’ve been communicating back and forth with a Czech-English dictionary.
Renee has started teaching pre-schoolers, and I think only she can describe that fully. I don’t think I’m able to fully relate the emotion I hear in tales of chasing small children around tables, or dealing with non-English speaking little ones who won’t stop crying. This isn’t to say that she’s been having a terrible time, it’s just that there are complications that come along with under 5 year olds, that we are unused to dealing with. In fact, she has been having a wonderful time, singing songs, playing games, and generally being a little kid alongside them all over again.
Aside from life at the school, other things have taken place, we’ve been to one of the most beautiful suburbs in Prague - which is seriously saying something. Skipped town for the weekend, had the flu again, and so on. I’ll get to all of that, really, I will.
Before I sign off for the moment though, and start uploading photos, let me just tell you about this extraordinary event…
…Walking to work, along the perhaps previously mentioned muddy path that cuts between fields and acts as a student-route/shortcut from the metro station to the school… I made a discovery that well and truly confirmed that we now live in a whole ‘nother country.
You have to understand this path though, about 30% of it is strewn with tiny rocks, which helps to ensure that you don’t slip and fall. The rest of it is packed dirty, stamped hard hundreds of thousands of times, by student feet. Sounds walkable, right? And it is, except that things are starting to change with the weather. As it rains more, the sun shines less, and everything is generally damper, colder, there is now a slick top layer of unbelievably slippery mud, about 2cm thick.
Given that the path dips and rises from time to time, and has large, goopy mud puddles strewn about the entire way… it has become far more exciting to walk it.
This doesn’t bother me so much, my oddly supranormal ability to find my footing means that I rarely fall over, if ever, regardless of the situation.
My dear Renee however, is a wholly different matter.
Hands up if you’ve ever seen her walking on her own. What’s happening when she’s walking?
If you’re not sure, observe this clip from 2:16 onwards. See what Belle is doing? Not the singing, but the casually walking through danger after danger, nose-deep in a delightful tale of some kind?
That’s how my darling walks, except that she’s far more likely to walk into a pole.
And so, I fear it’s only a matter of time before the mud claims her.
Anyway, I became distracted. The thing, that I found.
The largest mud puddle, treacherously wide, deceptively deep, and directly in the middle of the path, a horror of a thing.
I strolled up to it the other day, prepared to leap over it and carry on my merry way, only to discover that it had been shattered.
That’s how cold it was. The temperature was below zero, the pool of fetid liquid atop the puddle had solidified, and dropped a level in density, becoming ice.
Then of course, the students had trampled it. Revenge, I suppose.
All the same, I was slightly blown away. Not that I haven’t seen ice form naturally on the ground before, I’ve been to New York for Christmas after all.
It’s just seems a little different when it happens somewhere that you’ll be walking by almost every day.
