I'm here!

Well, I thought that I would share some of my early adventures. To start, everything takes time here. You first have to find out who can give you what you want, then you have to physically tract that person down and then wait for them to get you what you want. Hence it taking me 3 days to get the internet. Which is strange because I have an internet antenna on my roof.

I'm living in a 2 bedroom quarter-plex. I have a fellow new teacher living next door (from Newfoundland) and a couple living under me (also from Newfoundland). In fact all the white teachers at the school are from Newfoundland (13 in total), except for one from Saskatchewan and another from the Miramachi. Everyone is nice and willing to do anything for you.

The people in town are nice in general, except that everyone recognizes me as the new teacher. Yesterday I had a crowd of kids at the window pointing at me and saying, "look it's the new teacher!" Then they sat and watched me for 20 minutes as I continued to set up my classroom. Yes, I have my own classroom, and I'll have a homeroom. I've been told that I'm teaching Sec. 5 English, Sec. 4 History and new to me sec 1 and 2 visual art. I'm looking forward to the term, especially now that I don't have to teach econ. The down side it that the province give the kids provincial exams that are worth 40%, unless their is a discrepancy of more than 10% between class grade and test grade- then they take the test grade alone. I was told that history is the class that give most difficulty. 14 of 14 failed first term. and only 9 of 12 passed 2nd term. And they need the class to graduate. So part of me feel like I'm teaching to the test. The same thing in English, but the test is on reading comprehension. And for a lot of the students, English is a second or third language. But my hopes are high and my fingers are crossed that all of my students make the grade (60%).

Today, I had another visitor to my window. A big chocolate lab. He was cute and whining. There are dogs everywhere. I'm resisting the urge to ask if I'm aloud one. It's one more thing to bring home. Speaking of which, it cost an arm and a leg to ship my stuff up. Air canada charged me 230$ for my bags, then in Sept Iles I had to pay 7% per kg over 20kg. That was over 400$.

Okay, now on to some of the pics.
This is my stairwell.













Living room... I hope this is working.









Kitchen...




















And a bad pic of my bedroom. I'll try to get pics of my classroom tomorrow.