Back to School

So last Monday I started working at my new job as a teacher at the Lauder-Reut School in the Jewish Quarter in Bucharest. It's a small private school with classes from Pre-K through 12th grade. It's a bilingual school with students starting English in kindergarten and many students completing the BEC in 11th grade. While classes don't start until the 16th, we teachers have two weeks of prep before marching into the classrooms. For me it's been a lot of meetings, paperwork, and planning. It's also been a lot of getting to know the teachers I will be working with and getting familiar with the institutional culture. So far it's been a lot of fun.

I've been assigned to teach three sets of classes in the high school this year. I'll be teaching Business English to 9th,10th, and 11th graders, British and American Culture and Civ to the 11th and 12th graders, and I'll also be teaching 12th grade Lit. It's been really interesting creating the syllabuses for these classes and bouncing ideas off the other teachers who have experiences with these subjects. Because these classes are in the high school, where standards are a bit looser, I have a lot of freedom when it comes to what I'll be doing with the students. I've already completed the semesterly plans for most of the classes, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how things will go once the students show up.

In other news, my girlfriend left for a weeklong business training in Austin, Texas yesterday morning which is pretty awesome. It's her first time in the States, and I can't wait to hear her impressions of it. Meanwhile, I took the weekend to just chill out on my own for a bit here. I looked up some information about language schools that offer Romanian classes, tried out the Japanese place around the corner from my house, and installed Skyrim to see what all the fuss is about. Later I think I might call up some friends and go down the the board game cafe that opened up just down the street and play some Settlers of Caatan.