SATURDAY, 1/10/15

Judy has a half-day of professional development sessions today. It’s part of the make-up time from the APEC conference holidays back in November. It’s a session on classroom management (discipline). After nearly 39 years, Judy’s not that fired up about another session on how to handle a class. It’s held in a small classroom and there isn’t room to move, and certainly not pull out her computer and work on other things. She’s beginning to count down how many more of these she’ll have to participate in.

After lunch, the musical cast meets and rehearses for 3 hours. They get a ton of good work done, but of course, there’s never enough time.

After rehearsal, Judy and Shannon head over to Sanlitun, where Dom and I meet them at Homeplate BBQ for dinner. We get caught up on some of Shannon’s adventures in Sydney at a job fair. She’s working hard putting together her faculty for next year.

International schools have all the same problems as other schools, parents, scheduling, money, equipment. They have an added problem in that their faculty turns over frequently. We’ve been impressed with the quality of the teachers here, but many of them are constantly looking for their next destination. School staffs where we’ve taught in the past haven’t been so itinerant. It’s hard enough finding good teachers and holding them, but in this environment, the pressure to get good teachers is especially heavy.

SUNDAY, 1/11/15

After 6 days of classes, rehearsals, and professional development sessions, Judy has a ton of computer work to do. IB teachers are required to assess each student in four different areas of learning, and since Judy has all the elementary school and half the middle school, that’s a lot of input.

I spend my time making some of the final contacts and airfare purchases for our summer cruise in the Mediterranean. Making these decisions 6 months in advance are based on some assumptions we’re making obout when we’ll be able to pack and ship our stuff out of Beijing back to the US. I hope I’m guesses are correct.