fatigue

Maybe because it's only 5 weeks before Xmas or because 2 months in Catania is enough for anyone, I am beginning to miss home and am looking forward to returning. It's still mild here (where is the snow? Come on, it's November). And I am now working my maximum contracted hours, so I feel quite tired. I am spending less time preparing, thankfully, as I now have more confidence to work through things without spending hours looking at it beforehand. But still, it takes up a lot of time. Perhaps I am just workshy.

I have started doing a little Xmas shopping online - normal things that I can have sent to the UK from the UK. It is, I'm afraid, too bad if people are hoping for exciting Sicilian Xmas presents as there aren't really any, except food items and the chances of them breaking and going all over everything in my suitcase are too high. Never mind. Well it is the chance to support some favourite wildlife charities of mine, as I am really only interested in supporting wildlife because it seems it is increasingly being destroyed by morons. I follow many wildlife organisations and wildlife supporters on Twitter and so I suppose when I read their tweets about nature, etc, I see a lot of stories that are depressing all at one go. But also, it is encouraging to see how many people are equal fans of birds, bugs, animals etc and go to great lengths to help them. There are some beautiful photos of birds, animals and wild places that are a joy to see on my Twitter feed. I have recently started following someone in America who has posted lots of photos of the very colourful birds that come to her garden. At the moment they are battling with lots of snow and there have been some very snowy squirrels!

The other morning I heard a blackbird somewhere and some sparrows, so that was a welcome change. They are around somewhere, but I suppose in the noise of the day I do not hear them.

We have kind of finished doing zoos with the teenagers but I am still doing them with the higher level. They did not seem to know a lot of details about endangered animals so I am going to direct them to the WWF website and also Marwell and Whipsnade zoos, which were mentioned in the textbook. That way they will see some lovely animal photos plus find out about the endangered animals and what is being done to help them. Maybe the level of English is too high but I think they can get the gist and it will be educational.

I could not help smiling the other day when we were doing a passage called the "Helpful Dolphin" with the teens, about a dolphin that helped a girl in the water. They had to choose the correct word to put in the gap and one student gave the answer as "I was a dolphin" instead of "it was a dolphin". Now I am not laughing at this because it was all part of the student's learning experience, and it was an easy mistake to make, but what did make me laugh was his class mate's reaction, because he said, in Italian, "sei un delfino?" "Are you a dolphin?" in such a way that everyone started laughing and I had to bite my tongue because it was making me chuckle.

I am sure my teaching is going okay but I feel there is much to improve on and having inadvertently seen how much the students are paying for the course, I don't know if I feel they are getting their money's worth! I know it is an ongoing learning process but I also wish I had time and energy to think how to improve. I made the mistake the other day of assuming the students knew something, when they didn't. It was compound adjectives, so something with two words like right-handed or well-known. The example (about zoos) was "A thick-billed parrot is a parrot with a thick bill." I read this out and felt it was so obvious that it was patronising. But in fact it wasn't obvious and when I left the students to do an exercise to explain what a man-eating tiger was (a tiger who eats men, ie people) they did not get it. One of the students said to me they don't have the compound adjectives in Italian and I realised I should not have assumed it was obvious.

Probably the answer to everything is lots of fresh broccoli, fruit, water and general relaxation.