It`s crazy how a short winter holiday can mess up a routine. Take this blog for example; I barely wrote anything for it since mid December. But still, I have been pretty busy: many family related stuff during the break, new projects with my schools... I even started to develop a little business idea. I don`t know if it will become a reality but I won`t know until I try.
xkcd.com
It`s something that also affect the students in Canada. Usually, they don`t really have any school work to do during the holidays (2 weeks for Christmas, one or two weeks for spring break, two months for summer!). The students are often not even rested after these holidays since they usually party and stay up late when they don`t have school to attend the next day. When they are back in class, it usually takes at least a week to get things started again and have the students work like they did before the break. After the summer break though, you can expect almost a month for the students to get going and be adapted to their new classes.
In Japan, I feel like it`s quite different. I know they have work to do pretty much all the time and some of them even show up at school during holidays. Since I don`t teach the same students daily, I can`t really tell how long it takes for them to be back to their routines after coming back from a holiday but I would be ready to put money on the fact that it doesn`t take very long. At least, that it takes them less time than the Canadian students.
There could be another debate about the Japanese students being overworked or not, but from my experience, I think it really depends on what school they are attending and their level of commitment.
That`s it for now. I`m just getting back to it slowly ;) . Hopefully, I`ll manage to come up with interesting stuff before next month. Until then, you can watch a video of my daughter playing guitar :p .
Hi all!
I just wanted to write a quick post to wish you all a very happy new year 2011! I hope that it will be filled with new discoveries and that life will keep sending us (good) surprises!
Also, I started a new blog for my students. I will write a little post every friday to (hopefully) motivate them to read some stuff in English that is not a textbook.
If you want to see what it's like, you can find it here, here, here and here.
I have many cool projects in the making for 2011 and I might need some JET contributions... I'll let you know in time...
