The new semester will start for me next week sothis week was actually pretty busy. Yesterday I had training with some people from Cambridge for the newest of their coursebooks and the day before that was a teachers meeting at CCAA. Since the start of last semester when I started to work for more than one school I haven’t really been having much of a good time working for CCAA, the terrible training a few weeks ago was probably the lowest point of the semester for me. The teachers meeting this week wasn’t really any improvement from this, I didn’t really expect it to be though. My allotment of groups is now at my lowest ever since I started working for the CCAA group 8 years ago, there’s been a lot of asskissing by newer teachers to get more groups and seeing as they suck up to the person who makes the schedule a lot of people have noticed these few getting more and more of the available groups. It’s probable that either me or Roberta will leave this semester to spend more time on other projects. I was only at the school less than an hour and got to hear other teacher’s complaining about the situation there too, but they won’t do anything about it as most of them are only really there to make pin money. As the only native speaker I expexct to get a lot of shit thrown at me and this last semester there was definately a lot of shit hahahaha!! With the Cambridge school all set to start now and the franchiser all set to do some major promo work in the city to give us a boost I’m not really all that worried about what happens during this semester. It’s a little sad though that they let things get so bad
As they say, all good things must come to an end…
As I said above, Roberta and I attended a training course that lasted the whole morning with some reps from Cambridge Uni press. They were talking about the new Touchstone coursebook and giving some ideas about how to use the book and stuff. Also they were talking about their website and things that had been added to the Touchstone pages in the Brasilian version of the site. It was a lot of fun and very relaxed, I got to meet some of the other people from the other Cambridge schools too. It turns out that we had missed a Cambridge Day in Brasilia which was shame as I like to attend these events and seminars. The presenters took a list of all emails so we could be added to their database and get mailed when events are going to happen in our areas
I took some time to chat with our franchiser at the end of the meeting about the start of this coming semester and picked up some stuff for the school including Hippo. Hippo is a teachers aid that gets used to work with small children in the Hippo and friends books that we will use this semester from the supplier. He’s actually very cute, I think Roberta would keep him if the had half the chance hehehe!! I’ve never seen a puppet used in a classroom before so this should be interesting, I wonder how the kids will take to him