done!!

that's it, the semester's over, i taught my last course yesterday. this feels very good. i must grade papers, now, and meet with tons of students who have different questions, who must tell me about the book they read, who want to convince me to change their grades from an F to an A, who must take a test to be placed in different courses next semester... so, two more weeks on campus and then i'm really done. but not having to teach is a good start!

i had lunch with my chair on thursday. my only complaint was that i felt terribly isolated from the rest of the department because i'm the only one not doing literature. her only complaint was that i spoke too much and "during your first year, it's better to observe and listen"...

who cares. i'm almost on vacation :)

end of semester blues

i've caught at least 3 students cheating on their last test. one was very obvious. i thought about it for a whole afternoon, talked with a couple of other teachers, got a serious headache, and let it go. i don't care, it's their lives. plus, either i talk to the students one on one and if they don't admit it, i'll get in serious trouble, or i have to go through the "official channels" and it'll take forever and i'll be super mad. so there. i hate being a teacher sometimes!

new and improved

i went to this conference yesterday and today. you have to know that since i've moved to my new country of adoption, i've felt like i was on another planet, professionally speaking. the school system, regulations, education, research, problems, everything is different here and it's been interesting to learn how things work but i've felt very isolated too (and i've talked to several people in the field of TESOL who, when they left the US, felt the same. TESOL/ESL is a very US-centered field). plus i'm not working in my "area of expertise," which has been a constant worry since i didn't know if i should keep my old research topics or start anew with something related to my current job.

after talking with two important people at the conference (one from here and one from the US who knows exactly where i come from), here's the conclusion: i'll keep working on the stuff i know best, try to integrate some "sellable" stuff into my current job in case i want to go back to my old field some day, and look for another job in a year if things don't improve.

this is going to be tough because i feel very "removed" from my old "world." issues that were issues before are no longer issues here. i work in a different context that doesn't care about no child left behind or TESOL or TQ or english only or ... i work in a country where esl is seen as nothing more than "last resort help for people who can't survive without it and that we can't kick out at least not yet because they bring too much money in." i work at a school where we can't teach an esl course because it would lower the prestige of the university and so we have to call our course by a different name and also teach other things than esl skills and accept students who don't need esl help in our course in order to have the right to have a course for esl students. i am so sad for this school and for this country.

if i look for a job, though, it will be in this country, i don't want to go back to the US, even if i miss the professional environment a lot, and i mean A LOT. i certainly don't miss a certain president...

relief

i had lunch with one of the nicest people in my department, someone i think i can trust and who's been very nice with me. she's also new here, and we decided to have lunch together today. we talked... and talked... and talked... and i was very happy to realize that i was not the only one feeling somehow disconcerted at the way things work here. she also feels disappointed by the way we were in a sense lied to, during our job interviews, when we were told that this and that were going to happen and we would create this and we would change that and there were so many opportunities at this university etc... and in the end, nothing happens, every time we wante to do something we're told that we can't because it would upset someone or some other department, and in general, things are a mess. i was so glad to hear her say that.

in the end, she said she gave the department two years to make her feel the way she should be feeling now, the way she was promised to be feeling now... it amazes me that she left a wonderful job at a very large university somewhere else to come here (she transfered her tenure here). so she knows what she's talking about and i can see that it was not just me complaining about things but that there is a real problem in this university.

we also both think that this university needs to learn about drinking fountains and provide at least one per department!!!

moving in the right direction

two good things happened recently, two victories, in a sense. first, i met with the current writing center director and i'm now working with her more closely to get to know the writing center and the people working there so that i'm ready to take over next year. there's a lot of work that needs to be done and i've ordered a few books on writing centers because i'll need all the help i can get. the tutors seem nice and i'm excited to work with them more and more.

second, i decided that i really didn't like the way the class i teach is being taught (all sections have to teach exactly the same way)! next semester, only one section of this course will be taught and i've asked my boss if i could teach it instead of teaching another course as i was supposed to do. i explained my reasons (changing textbooks, problems with cheating, organisation of assignments, etc.) and my boss said ok. was supposed to teach only 1 class next semester and i don't know if i'll teach only this class or if i'll teach this class IN ADDITION to the other class i was supposed to teach, but i don't care much, i'm not terribly busy yet and it'll keep me busy during the long winter nights.

i feel a little better...

job hunting

i wonder if i should start job hunting again... i'm bored and i want to do teacher education, not undergrad babysitting...

blah

why am i not writing here? because i don't know what to think. i feel so much like a graduate student, still. i teach 2 days a week, and the rest of the time, i go to a few meetings here and there and i work in my office from time to time... i am not sure what i'm doing, actually. i still have tons of things to do to get settled here, like getting a new driver's licence, new licence plates, parking permits, health insurance, car insurance, home insurance, stuff like that. i guess monday is my "real life" day. tuesday, i try to work in the office. wednesday, i prepare my courses and do nothing. thursday and friday mornings i teach, and then in the afternoon i try to work in the office. that's about it.

i drove to school today, instead of taking the streetcar + subway. it's much faster (15 to 20 minutes instead of 30 to 45 minutes) but i paid $12 for the parking!

ok, on a happier note, i found two nice photographs (tulips) to hang in my office. i'll also bring my huge world map and maybe the guggenheim museum picture too... it feels so... dull, still. and yesterday, i was down in the big liberal arts office to give my transcript to someone and took this opportunity to ask about getting some "stuff" like enveloppes, paper clips, etc. because i have nothing at all in my office... and the nice person gave me the bookstore catalog and told me to choose the stuff i wanted and he'd go get them for me! pencil sharpers, file organizers, tacks, post-its, markers, book holders, note books, staplers, erasers, ... ... it felt like christmas :)

one last thing: yesterday i sent an application to tesol to be on the publication's committee...

day 1

first teaching day today. i was so sick to my stomach this morning, i almost arrived late!

13 students showed up (my roster says 25), 8 of whom are from iran! i hate first weeks, when students come and go and you start building something with the students and then you have new students coming at the end of the second week... so far, the students seem nice.

the schedule is one 50-minute course one day and one 110-minute course another day. so we start at 10:10 for example, and end at 11:00. and today, first day, a b*tch came into my classroom at 10:57 and screamed "my class is starting at 11:00, you know, you need to get out of here!" i said "no, your class starts at 11:10 and my class ends at 11:00." she said she needed time to get her stuff ready and waited right next to me while i was finishing my class. i felt rushed and couldn't even answer my students' questions at the end. how rude. she'd better not do that again!

teaching 2 hours, tomorrow, will be tough. i've never liked that, and we have so much to cover i don't know how i'll do it.

odd stuff

there are tons of weird things at my university. one is that the course numbers do no mean anything. usually, 100-level courses are to be taken first, and then 200, and 300 and 400-level courses are for junior and senior undergraduates... and 500-level courses and above are for graduate students... but here, freshmen can take geography 690 their first year of school, and then the next course in the sequence could be geography 248. oddest thing in the world. numbers are assigned completely randomly.

another strange thing is the "service departments" that they have. the regular departments offer minors and majors, and you can graduate with a degree in information technology management, for example. but then they have 13 (THIRTEEN) service departments that offer course but not degrees! one of them is english! others are maths, history, psychology, geography, computer science, physics, etc. these departments only offer courses to students from other departments. for example a student in arts and contemporary studies has some options, like french or history or english options, and then they take courses in the french or history or english department. so basically, these service departments are seen as "secondary," and way less important than other, "real" departments, which means less money, less space, less respect, less power, etc. oddest thing in the world.

another strange thing is that they have "prerequisite" courses, like everyone else in the world, but they also have "antirequisite" courses, which means that if you take, say english 423 you cannot also take english 863 and vice-versa. which means that some courses are basically the same, which sounds like a waste of resources to me... except when you remember that there are between 60 and 150 students PER SECTION in those classes... i don't know why they wouldn't simply have different sections of the same course, but then maybe it's because the teachers who will teach those sections want to do their own stuff... oddest thing in the world.

these 60 to 150 students per section is another odd thing. they have the most complicated (dis)organisation of teaching assistants, marking assistants (we don't give GRADES here, we give MARKS), and other assistants whose names i can't remember (those who assist with exams, etc.). they have scientific formulas that take into account the number of students per sections, the number of assignments, the number of credit hours, the number of textbooks used, the number of sections, and the age of the teachers (nah, i'm kidding on that last one) and then they're given a certain number of hours when they can use assistants for certain things. so they don't have a system like in the us, where graduate students become teaching assistants and teach hundreds of students on their own so that there can be more sections of the same course with fewer students in each section. craziest thing in the world!

and THEN, teachers who can have assistants must actually post their job offers online through a special system, and people from our university but also from other universities and the community can apply for the position and the teachers have to read tons of CVs and interview the potential assistants and hire them and that's another big mess because some are our own students but some are not. the reason why few of the assistants are actually our own students is because less than 2% of our student population are graduate students and few teachers want to hire undergraduate assistants. craziest thing in the world!

ok, last one for tonight: in the us, people say "bilingual" as bye-lin-gwal, in 3 syllables, but here, in canada, they say bi-lin-giu-al, in 4 syllables. haha! funniest thing in the world!

back from the dead

hi all, i'm back, i couldn't not write about my new job!

ohhh goodness, i have so much to write!

this is going to be a public blog for a few months/weeks and then i'll make it private and i'll give access to only those who want it because it's going to be too hard not to give up any details about my new job and my new life.

for now, i'm going to the vet.

see ya here very soon :)