high-low

I woke up early to finish working on my lesson for the day and revisit my paper due today. I walked a different way to school—through the square in my neighborhood and it took me almost 5 minutes less time! It’s far more direct.
At school, we had a lesson on pronunciation. We’re going to learn phonemes—it’s like a whole new alphabet, with more letters than Korean! During our break, we got pastries from the shop down the street. Then we had a lesson on teaching speaking and different possible ways to encourage student talking time.
I forgot to mention yesterday that we suddenly have a new girl in our class. Her name is Laura and she’s from the Canary Islands.
We had lunch at the usual pastry shop. I had a croque monsieur. It was delish, but tasted rather unhealthy.
After lunch, we had time to work on our lessons. I finished mine and then started thinking about tomorrow’s one-on-one lesson. Oh SHOOT! I forgot to tell my student to bring a writing sample AND I forgot to get her number/email! Erwin let me use his phone to call and text her.
I had to watch Dalia’s lesson before doing my own. Mine was about someone important to you. I did Pictionary for a warm-up to show relationships. Then we read some articles on someone special for 4 people. We did exercises on the articles and grammar. Then we wrote our own articles. I gave an example for mine using Natalie. Overall, my critique was very positive. Erwin said I have a good natural ability to be patient while students work on answering questions and that I’m a very personable/ friendly teacher. He also had lots of good pointers on how I could make my lesson better (and agreed with some of my own critique). Most of his ideas were rather enlightening, like drilling people’s mistakes with the whole class and changing the seating arrangements when there are only a few students. Also, he said I need to do more monitoring. It’s funny because I feel like I was always big on that in Korea, but I’m afraid to invade the adults’ privacy. Also, a big problem was my lesson was short. I know the exact moment I second guessed my timing and skipped an exercise. 55 minutes seems like a stretch after 40 in Korea. Oh well. Overall, I had a good feeling about my performance in the lesson.
I got on the subway to meet my friends at Pizza Marzana? (however you say “express” in Spanish). They’d found a version of the shop by Sagrada Familia. I had to transfer trains and take a type of train I hadn’t been on before (S instead of L). I figured it out though. Sagrada Familia is not as tall as I’d expected, but much more detailed and intricate and fascinating than I’d thought. Its towers are so unique! I can’t imagine thinking them up. Also, I like the adornments on the outside, especially the birds. I had to wait for my friends in the rain and wondered if they’d decided not to come. Nope!
We had a really fun dinner. Steph and I both had risotto and I shared some of Mikaela’s salad. Then we all had dessert and were very busy laughing and discussing how glad we all were to be together on the course, until we got the bill. Steph realized her wallet was missing. We looked everywhere for it and realized she’d taken it out earlier. We’re 90% sure our waiter took it at the end of his shift (we’d gotten a second one part-way through the meal). That put a bit of a damper on our mood. Looks like it's true that Barcelona has some of the world's best pick-pockets.
At home, I decided it was time to do my laundry. I had to get Rik and Alix to show me how the washer works again. You have to push in the dials and then pull them out. Also, I needed help finding the drying rack. They said it’s often too cold for clothes to dry inside. Too bad I picked a rainy day for laundry! Also, I forgot about half of the things I wanted to wash when I started the washer. AND I feel a BIT awkward about hanging my undies out to dry in the living room. Oh well. Alix wants to have dinner or drinks to get to know each other some time. I think that’s nice and I’m looking forward to it.