These past few weeks have been the absolute busiest days I have ever lived through. They were nearly humanly impossible. For some reason, having parent/teacher conferences, a HUGE charity event where we must provide a class project to auction off, we had a sports day, a third-grade expo, parent observation day, finals, grades and comments are due, among all of our daily duties. Who in the world planned all of this at the same time? Let’s make it worse, they lost our charity project. My co-teacher and I just don’t get along. And I don’t have a single minute to prepare for my new job.
This is the real story of jumping through hoops. For the new job I need to be certified for Canada. Apparently its not difficult, but all the red tape is crazy! I need to apply on a website that sends you endlessly in circles. One Saturday morning, I woke up early to have a conference call with my new principal to do screen sharing. She couldn’t believe how un-userfriendly it was too. We did get somewhere. I’m in the process, but I have no idea how long it will take. Its’ a lot of hoops for a job though.
Yesterday, when I came to work, there were a few surprises. Masks are mandatory. Ten teachers are out with COVID, and eight students in my class elected to stay home. That means I teach online and in the room at the same time.
Our school right now has no first grade, and ninth grade classes, and most other grades are down to 2-3 classes out of 6. I do not know why we are still open. Rumi and Raine are studying online, and I am still at school with half a class.
To make everything worse, we haven’t had a single day off since the first week of October. That’s a long time. We are all pushing it way past the edge. In ten days, the foreign teachers get a week off for Christmas, thank God! Some schools have gone to holiday early because of these huge COVID outbreaks.
I’ve never felt so tired, worn out and pressured. During our winter break there will be no rest too, as we need to pack and move to a different district. We haven’t even looked at apartments yet. We’ve moved six times since we came to China. I did not think we would be moving again. Exhausted is not even the most accurate word.
But on a possibly good note, the Womack family has a strange tradition of opening all of our presents before Christmas. We open them over time so that we appreciate them more. We are currently almost out of presents. I can’t help it. I’m the worst culprit. To get us even more in the mood, we went to a Christmas Market this weekend.
Smiling in Shanghai 