Long Holiday Weekend

It doesn't feel like a real long holiday weekend coming up, for some reason. In the last two weeks, our school has been tied up with AP examinations for registered students. Unfortunately, not all the schedules for every student is the same depending on what they were registered to write; so for days when there were very few students not in exams, the classes were canceled. So there has been at least one day that I did not teach any classes. Instead, I had to invigilate these 3.5 hour marathons of student BO.

Then there was that day last week when the weather warmed up to above 20 degrees, and the uncontrollable apartment heating was still ON. Jorghnassen and I were melting in the apartment, even with the windows wide open and ceiling fans tornado-ing noisily away into the night. He would check the thermostat often during those sweltering days and proclaim the temperature in approximate terms: "It's around 90 degrees." I'm no imperialist-unit type, so I will assume that means "stupid hot."

Anyway, last week I woke up at 1 pm on a day when I had class that started at 12:45 pm, completely drenched in sweat and realizing no one and nothing had bothered to wake me up. (You'd think the school would call, but by that point no one realized how messy the week's schedules were becoming.) Also, realize that this means I had to have slept through 4 alarms. I stumbled about, blindly through the heat ripples in the air looking for my cell phone that failed to wake me up through three of those alarms. I called the school to tell the secretary that I was not feeling well at all (due to the misery of the apartment heat) thus I would not be going to class, to which she kind of kept a professional phone voice and informed me that it would be taken care of (while she more or less stifled a laugh since I had told her the day before how uncomfortable the apartment was becoming).

That afternoon, we bought a fan. Canadian Tire is getting cheaper with their bonus money. >_<

It's been two weeks and I haven't seen some of these students in class for many days at a time so it doesn't feel like a holiday at all. For what else does a holiday mean to a teacher but some time to take a break from your students? (No, it never means that you don't have any work because any teacher knows that we have pooploads of corrections and preparations to do at any point in time in and out of the year. Part time work my butt.)