The longest day at work / English Festival

I spent about 13 hours at work today. That’s by far the longest in one day I’ve stayed at work. I started work at 9am today; it was earlier than I needed to be at work too. I was supposed to start at around 10am, but since I told some teachers that I’d be there early in case there was any problem, I would help with that. But there weren’t any problems at the beginning. I had time to sit back and to enjoy breakfast undisturbed, and I went around the school to see all the classrooms and to see what was going on. I found my room, the one that I would be working at the whole day. It was a nice setup by the students and all of it looked fun. They put a lot of work into it and I could really tell.

It didn’t start off too well though. I was working with 3 native English speakers, but one of them happened to show up late and I missed the opening ceremony. I thought that wasn’t very cool of them. But it turned out that they were there early, but they were waiting at the station for the other two who showed up even earlier than they did. I felt bad because I sent a student to look for CP who was waiting at the station, but CP came to school without the student that I sent. So that wasn’t very good, although I know that CP would have just come to school without me sending anyone to get her. My instincts were right, but I didn’t want to appear rude and not do anything about it.

I was pretty much busy from this point on. I was jumping back and forth from room 308, and the gym. I wanted to catch all the dramas, but I ended up missing a few because I needed to fill in for the native speakers and watch the tables in our room while they got lunch and such. I didn’t want to miss any, but I missed two from the same grade and I heard that I missed the best one too. So I wasn’t very happy with that. I did catch the last one, which was very good and very lively. I thought they did the best, but they had a minor mistake at the end that messed up their perfect performance. They weren’t happy because it was a technical mistake.

During the day, it was pretty warm, but later when it was time to do the gift exchange out on the field; it got really cold really fast. I’m not sure why, but it’s really starting to feel like winter now. It’s really cold and I think that it’s a bit early, even though it’s December already. Everything seemed to finish really quickly. I’m surprised at how time just flew by today.

Before I knew it, it was already time for dinner and since I didn’t find out any information till the very end that there would be a dinner for the teachers. I knew that we did something at the end of the event last year, so I stuck around for that. My instincts again were right and it was pretty much the same menu as last year too. That was a bit disturbing, but I think that’s what I can expect from every event. It was so predictable that I even called we would have a birthday celebration for two teachers. Dinner seemed to drag on forever though. It didn’t seem to go by really fast. I was really stuffed too and had eaten a lot, which seems to happen a lot after school events.

After that, the teachers cleaned up for a little bit. The male teachers did the clean up work outside, while the female teachers cleaned up the room we were in. It was just a little clean up work since the major clean up day would be on Monday. They just wanted to get rid of the things that would smell really bad if left out and things like that. Then after all the clean up work, the teachers took a look around at all the rooms and displays. They finally had a chance to enjoy it after the event was finished. We spent some time in the Santa Barbara room, looking through the scrapbooks that the students put together about their trip to America. It was really nice and the students really go all out on it. It was really great to see. Now the time was about 9pm and we were all still at school. I think the first teacher left school around 9:30pm, which is a bit late if you ask me.

I stuck around because most of the teachers stuck around too. I think we were all waiting for someone to leave before we did. I mean all the big teachers had left before I did. I was one of the last people to leave the school and I was helping another teacher with her things so that she could leave too. But we didn’t end up leaving till around 10pm. Now that’s a long day and since it takes me about 2 hours to get home, I was one of the last people to make it home. How stinky is that. But it was a good day. I enjoyed myself and that’s all that matters.