Camp!

Thanks everyone for your words of support last week. My feelings about teaching have been really up and down the past week or so (especially with the bad cold I had) and you guys made me feel better. :) (Of course, then I went online to our company's teachers' forum and everyone was bitching about a million different things... I just wanted to ask "Does anybody actually LIKE working here?")

Anyway. We arrived at camp yesterday afternoon. The place is amazing! It's in an old Soviet sanatorium where the party members got to go rest. Our rooms are small, but really nice. We each get our own bathrooms. The place is huge and it's really easy to get lost in. Apparently in the summer it's completely filled with kids, but now we only have ~150. The counselors are amazing; I don't know how they do it. They're with the kids all the time except during their lessons (only 1 and a half hours a day). Most of them don't know any English, so it's a really good opportunity to practice my Russian. Only one of the other teachers knows much Russian at all, and his is fairly limited, so I'm kind of the group's unofficial translator.

I was told the food was not that great, and for lunch that's certainly true. But breakfast and dinner are amazing! Breakfast was fried eggs, and cold & hot cereal, and lots of juices, and dried fruits, and omlets, and syrniki (little tasty cheese things), and smoked salmon, and crepes... it was so good. The main courses for dinner are pretty boring (basically pasta and bland sauce plus some sort of meat thing) but they have a full spread of Russian salads that were really great. I would get so fat if I stayed here a long time-- we also have afternoon tea and nightly milk & cookies. (There is also chocolate butter to put on your cookies-- I am not even kidding).

I had hoped to take a lot of pictures of the place, but the batteries in my camera are dead and I don't even know if Russia has AA batteries. The other American here doesn't have any, and I don't know if they use them in Britain. I'll see what I can find.

My kids are pretty great so far-- way more well behaved than I was afraid they would be. Even my youngest group was quiet! I haven't had my teens yet, so we'll see how that goes. My intermediate group know quite a lot, and my youngest group don't know much at all, so I can't use the same materials as much as I would have liked. The one thing that I'm worried about is that I was told that I'll have my informal and formal observations this week. Which isn't really fair, as most people have been teaching ~6 weeks before they have the formal observation. Also I won't have had the kids as long, and they'll be wound up since it's camp, and there's no book to follow. Also I won't be able to take my lesson plans to the workshop and get help with them, or have the resources normally available. Normally I'd think that they'd cut me some slack because of these things, but since they didn't pass my roommate (who now has to either go home or go teach in a small town) I'm thinking they really want to get rid of some teachers and it would be so easy to fail me this week. I'm trying to kiss a bit of ass and make myself super useful so that the camp director will go easy on me, but she's the type where it's really hard to tell whether she likes me or not. Wish me luck!