Slight Change of Plans!!!

Wow....just when I think that summer vacation has finally started, a small kink is thrown into the works. It's a good kink, though (I think)....I was hired to teach English 12 in summer school at a high school on the west side of Cleveland. Their regular teacher can't do the first session, so I was hired, sight unseen and with no interview, over the phone on Thursday. I will have 6 students starting tomorrow, and I will teach until June 29th.

I went in for teacher orientation this morning. They handed me a textbook and a gradebook and said "There you go!" Nothing else - no other resources will be made available to me. Oy. Time to put my "winging it" skills into play, I guess! :-)

What's really interesting is that I don't have to supply lesson plans, either. It's pretty much "Teach what you think they'll need."

Luckily, English 12 is British Lit, and I'll be doing the first session - the Anglo Saxon period to the Renaissance (Beowulf to Shakespeare) - and I can teach that in my sleep.

I also have to have them read a novel. Now, these guys are here because they didn't do the classwork the first time around; I don't think that I'm going to have very much luck getting them to read something like Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. I'm going to have them read "The Time Machine" by H.G. Wells instead - it's a shorter book with a tad more action. :-)

I'm also still doing home instruction for 3 hours twice a week for a student with leukemia. She's catching up with her work quickly, but I'll probably be going out to visit her for most of the summer. Like summer school, it takes up a lot of my summer, but I can't turn down almost $25 an hour for either teaching job! Home instruction gets added to my bi-weekly paycheck, which is nice, but my summer school check will be paid in one lump sum...right before I leave for Knitting Camp!

As a nice bonus....I stopped at the Salvation Army store on my way home to look for summery-type skirts for work. I found 2 nice skirts for $3.00 each, but I also found some really nice, vintage (Fischer's Knitting Yarns), worsted weight 100% wool yarn! It's a beautiful red color, and I got 24 balls for $8.00! 33 cents a ball!! The balls are still in their original plastic wrap, so they're in pristine shape, and it's pretty soft! I'm thinking that I'm going to use them for the Bavarian Twisted Stitch Cardigan...