June 12, 2011

  • Routine, routine...

    Tomorrow is the first day of summer school. I'm actually quite looking forward to it (hopefully that won't all change when I've met the class!), but I am approaching tonight with a sense of dread. I am so completely fixed in a very different sleeping routine from the one I need to have for the next 2 weeks (and in fact probably the next 11 weeks really). Last night I was still awake at 2.45am, not for want of trying to sleep earlier. If I am still awake at that time tonight, it will be very bad news for getting up approximately 4 hours earlier than I have been for the past couple of months... 

    Last year I was used to leaving the house at 7am to start work at 7.55am. This year the earliest starts I've ever had have been lessons at 9am, mostly on Saturdays, oddly enough. It's quite hard to get into any sort of routine in this job because the timetable changes from day to day and week to week, so one day  will have a lesson at 10am, the next not until 3pm. The only fairly constant thing all year has been finishing at 8 or 9pm. It's the only thing I don't really like about the job, because not having a routine means getting into bad habits when it comes to eating and, as is hugely apparent now, sleeping.  Really I should have always just stuck to a routine regardless of when I actually had to be up, but I like lie-ins and so whenever the opportunity has arisen, I've taken it! Then of course if you sleep in late, you don't get tired until later, so it becomes a vicious circle! Plus now I don't have to climb 98 steps to get home every day and am not going swimming etc (which would be another difficult thing to fit in to this "routine"...), I'm less active too which is bad news all round! 

    At the beginning of the year we had a lot of group courses, and as everything was quite new it all took much longer to prepare, so I was working much longer hours. Things have been more relaxed recently, especially as all the groups tailed off. So, over the past couple of months I have fixed my "routine" in a terrible one of getting home somewhere between 8.30pm and 9.30pm, eating (hate eating late) and then watching TV, reading, doing whatever I need to do, and ending up being up late. So, I've started sleeping later and later, until just recently I seem to have fixed it so that I can't sleep before 2am. It's been okay up until now because I can sleep in late (haven't had many lessons before midday for a while) except on Saturdays and Sundays, and so I've been getting enough sleep (probably too much in fact) and just working a later shift type thing. 

    From tomorrow, however, I need to leave the house at 8am, meaning I'll need to get up before 7am, which is going to be a nightmare if I don't get to sleep until 3am! Summer school is also of course more tiring and intense than other teaching, so I'm not really looking forward to tomorrow from that point of view! I suppose it won't take long to get into the routine, and hopefully I'll be so exhausted by tomorrow evening that I'll fall asleep early!! Then the challenge will be keeping to that routine even in the 2 weeks that follow when I could slip back into lazy lie-ins, as after that I have 6 weeks of even earlier starts (waking up the kids 2 mornings a week, ie. being completely up and dressed for 7.30am!). Eek! (Why did I sign up for this?!).  (Obviously I have had other jobs for long periods of time where I have managed to get up at 6am or similar every day, so it's not that that's the problem, it's just switching routines so quickly and frequently...). 

    Anyway, not long to go til UK time now. I have to say I'm quite looking forward to it! Dulwich is clearly going to be very hard work, but I hope also quite fun, and at the end of the day I'm only really doing it for the experience...
    I've sorted out my 2 weeks in Taize now too. I suppose I managed to get into the routine then of getting up for morning prayer at 8.15am every day and it never takes too long, so I'll just have to hope it's all ok from tomorrow on!!

    All the other groups have finished now (had a lovely evening out with my upper-intermediate group on Friday, pictured below) and only a few one-to-one students remain, so I am basically doing the mornings at summer school and then one or two lessons a day (finishing somewhere between 4.30pm and 7.30pm each day), with nothing on Saturdays any more so the novelty of a full weekend. It's amazing what a difference having 2 full days off makes! That's another thing I won't have in Dulwich as it's a 6 day working week (although 1 day is taking the kids on trips, how hard can that be... ;) ). I won't know whether I'm working Saturday or Sunday until I arrive, and it will probably change on a week to week basis. That's a shame as if I had Sundays off regularly I could get quite a good Anglican fix I'm sure! Either way I hope to visit my brother, sister-in law and baby nephew on my day off whenever I'm allowed! 
    To be honest though, I'm not sure how much "free time" I'll have - starting to get slightly worried about the planning (like, when do we plan?!! I won't even know what sort of groups I'm teaching until I arrive on July 9th for the induction, and we start on July 10th!), the observations (twice by the Director of Studies and once by the British Council), the uniform, the hours... pretty much everything really!! But I did really enjoy doing the summer schools last year, and I have really enjoyed teaching all year, and since it's combining the two, I think I'll be okay. At least the groups change every couple of weeks too... you don't have to put up with any little terrors for too long winky