This week, dear reader, taught me about resilience and the ability to fake it till you make it. It was an eventful week, on a couple of different fronts. I don’t much talk about personal things that don’t relate to teaching or writing on this blog, with the exception of maybe showing some pictures of where I go on vacation. But this week, the drama was not centered around me, but around my neighbor. I was falling asleep on Wednesday evening this week, when there was a knock on my door. It was not, however, a dark and stormy night. It was just dark.
I opened the door to find my next-door neighbor Geraldine literally gushing. With blood. It appeared that she had cut herself pretty badly. I took a look and realized that she had probably cut her tendon. I know the signs, having experienced a similar (though less complicated), injury myself. And so it proved. The Dutch healthcare system is pretty good, but you really do need to advocate for yourself on a level that is a bit different from America. Here in the Netherlands, you have to know your body really well and if you want to get anything like a referral, you really need to know why you need it. In emergency medicine, you don’t go to the emergency room. You call your doctor first and they make you an appointment at the ER. We did this but I noticed the process was quite long. It took a good 25 minutes to actually talk to the doctors office so that she could get us the appointment at the ER. Once we went there it was the same as the US. We waited, and waited, and waited. And then I waited by myself. And then, of course, Geraldine came and we waited some more. Long story short, it was 3 1/2 hours to get diagnosed and get a cast and go home to go to bed only to be back at the ER at eight o’clock Thursday morning. At another hospital across the city. Geraldine managed to get the hospital to let her stay for the day and it was a good thing because her surgery happened at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. I felt a little guilty leaving her but I couldn’t actually cancel teaching. Here’s where it gets interesting. I am a pretty decent teacher on three hours of sleep. You see, I was panicking because I hadn’t finished lesson for Thursday thinking that I would wake up in the morning on Thursday and get it done. But I was not expecting to have to wake up and go to the hospital. So my timing was off. I did get up and I did manage to finish the lesson and I think I gave a pretty good one. As a bonus, my first aid skills were praised by hospital staff which was great. So if this teaching thing doesn’t work out I can always go to medical school. Or the military.
In teaching news, the Conversation Playground contacted me for doing a week of Boot Camp in October, but as ever I’m not sure that that will turn into anything but it’s good to keep hope alive. In addition, word-of-mouth seems to be working for me a little bit which was unexpected. The mom of the boy that I teach Greek to told one of the mothers of his classmates that I also teach English and we have a trial lesson next week. You’ll, of course, know more when I know more. It seems that they have a little bit of English but not nearly enough as they have just moved to Ireland from Germany. Another VIPKid waits in the wings, to finish his last 20 lessons, with VIPKid, and I don’t expect to see him until his winter break as his school schedule is busy. Once those are done, he becomes a private student. With no Felix or Anton on the schedule, I can offer weekday lessons to current students. I have also setup a Preply profile and plan on doing their on boarding process this week. I am struggling with creating content to teach verb tenses and their use to my TEC student as well. SHe confuses their use and I am struggling to figure out how to help with that. I think I am going to have to find someone to consult.
The writing group has morphed once again, from a dinner group, to a board game group. We have played some obscure games like Sheriff of Nottingham and Dixit, to name a few, and we are shortly to morph once again to a Advanced Dungeons and Dragons group. This is to be at a friend’s house. He lives in Haarlem and has a tendency to start the games at 9:00 pm. This is going to be a bit of an issue for me as it still takes me about an hour to get to him. And back. Since I teach on Sundays ,I might need to convince him to start a bit earlier. We’ll have to see how that goes.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always, there is more to come.
Inkreadable 