Week the Second (August 30th - September 6th)

After a generally lazy day on Saturday (recovering from the busy time out and about the day before), I went to work on Sunday in high spirits, ready to meet the rest of the returning faculty. And a great group they are. One exciting facet of the returning faculty was the relatively high number of young (i.e. my age to early-thirties) guys on the returning staff. Our cohort of new faculty was forty-seven teachers strong, but only nine of us were male, and of those, only four were under thirty-five. Good odds in the dating game, but not so good for finding wingmen and having guy time. The returning faculty gave some balance there. Given, the returning teacher population is also very female-heavy, but that kind of goes with the territory in my profession.

Our department rocks. Just throwing that out there. We do. The English department was in shambles after last year, the curriculum was completely scrapped, and half the faculty quit or was sacked. We came up with a curriculum for grades 7-10 from scratch, a concept-based curriculum in tune with the IB system, within just a few days, a curriculum that, according to our subject area coordinator, brought the school’s director to tears (the happy kind) when she showed it to him. Exciting stuff.

I have two new loves in my life. The first is the gym in our apartment building. I’ve been doing a light cardio workout and an intense weight-training workout every day since September 3rd, and I’m loving it. Ramadan ends on September 30th, followed by a four-day weekend. When that weekend starts, the clubs will be poppin’ again, and I’ll have just finished four intense weeks at the gym. Look out ladies! Funny thing about the gym, though. There is a ladies’ gym and a gents’ gym, as would be expected in the Middle East. Access is granted via a gate key, the same one that admits us to the building after hours. My gate key works fine to get into the building, and it also will admit me into the gym… the ladies’ gym. Obviously I haven’t gone into the ladies’ gym, but I tried swiping it on the ladies’ side when it kept getting denied on the gents’, and despite twice having the management supposedly change the code to switch which gym it would let me into, it still thinks I’m a woman. I’m gonna try just switching out the card altogether tomorrow, but for the meantime, I’ve been using my roommate’s card (he’s a Physics teacher from Delhi, India named Vijay Singh (no relation to his more famous namesake).).

My other love is our school library. It is relatively small in book numbers, but the selection is stupendous: classics, modern bestsellers, young adult lit, and niche books popular among literature connoisseurs. In addition, we have a nice selection of class sets of novels and dramas, which my fellow English teachers and I have raided for personal enjoyment and for figuring out which books we want to use in our classes this year. I’ve read seven books in the past week from the library and class set store room, and I’ve got a stack of books to read next on my nightstand, as well as a list of books to read in the coming year seven pages long (and growing). I’m in hog heaven. Also awesome is the fact that the library orders one thousand new titles a year, so it is rapidly expanding. Even more exciting is the fact that faculty is able to submit suggestions for that order. I’ve already got about twenty-five books on my list, and I’m sure that will grow as the year goes on (although at least one of them was on this year’s order… I’ve already checked it out). Vicky, the librarian, is absolutely great, and I’ve got a feeling we’re gonna be seeing a lot of each other.

We started Ramadan this week, which means no dancing, no singing, no loud music, and no eating or drinking (including water) in public from sunup to sundown. It takes planning to be able to eat at midday, since any food you get from a restaurant has to be take away, and most restaurants aren’t even open during the day. Most businesses close around midday, so even going to a grocery store is often not an option. It takes some planning, but we’re starting to get the hang of it. One good thing is that our first four weeks of school will have a shortened day, so we’ll get to ease into the school year, as well as enjoying the four-day weekend that comes at the beginning of October.

At school, some things are still up in the air. We don’t yet have keys to our rooms, or even know which rooms we’ll be teaching in. We don’t have our rosters yet. And our fire drill procedures are kind of in between versions. Big construction is starting at the school on Monday (a performing arts center, another classroom wing, and a new cafeteria). And school starts tomorrow (Sunday, September 7th). But we’re resilient and gonna roll with the punches. After all, as Confucius said, punches are the spice of life. At least, he would have if he had thought of it.