Tempus fugit was definitely the catchphrase for this week at Inkreadable. Generally, I manage my schedules pretty well, but with the extra prep needed for Vicente at English Center, it feels like I’m spending most of my time working on his lessons. It also feels like he’s not really progressing as much as he could be. And with time flying through our package, I feel like he has unreasonable expectations for what he should be learning in 20 hours. I can do my best, but as Brenda says, we are like doctors, and some people can’t be fixed. The difficulty that Vicente presents, is mitigated somewhat by the other students that I have. Mirella, HsinWei, and Jochem are pretty easy. Mirella wants pronunciation and that’s easy because it’s just reading and forcing her to make sounds that are difficult. So I don’t do as much work. HsinWei is also easy because what he wants his conversation and so I usually prepare some questions for him. I also found a great IELTS site that I can use for speaking exercises with him. We will see how that works later this evening.
Freek is on hiatus until September because of Covid concerns, and Claudia has decided to take a break because she is moving house and is too busy to take lessons. At least English lessons. She’s busy studying for her Dutch citizenship exam. So that frees up a little bit of time later on in August. September seems to be growing to be quite busy. It looks like I’ll be doing a lot of English Center online teaching while I’m on “vacation”.
On Wednesday this week I had a meeting of another sort with the English Center. They would like me to do some writing for them for their blog. On Thursday, I spent my Writers Group to leave writing a blog post only to be told by Brenda that it sounded like too much of a sales pitch. So I tried again on Friday evening and this blog posts seem to go down better. I wrote a sort of checklist asking customers whether they are ready for the business English challenge. We’ll see how it goes over with Brenda and the rest of the team at the English Center. What I struggle with is the length of blog posts because my own blog posts are quite short and what I’m seeing is that people usually write 2000 to 2500 words on a blog post. I find that funny because I don’t have the attention span to read that long of an article myself. I did try to do some expanding of the article that I wrote, but it was only about 750 words or so. I’ve also noticed that people place how long it takes to read a blogto the post at the top. And I am no good judge of that because I am an extremely fast reader. We will have to see how all of this plays out.
That will dovetail nicely with the fact that Sander is back on my schedule, as is Ordhran for Greek, and Karolina as well. George and Jerry never showed up for class on Wednesday this past week, and it turned out that they went on a day trip so we spent Sunday talking about that.
In other news, the neurologist has released me from his care as my brain is stable. I’m quite happy about that news and have asked my sister for the biggest most expensive glass of rose champagne we can find on the island of Crete in August. What I am not so happy about, is the loss of my reading vision in my right eye post cataract surgery. While I understand that there were no promises made, I did not expect such a big difference between my left eye and my right eye. My left eye has turned into my reading eye, and my right eye has turned into my distance eye. To say that I am unhappy with these turn of events is an understatement. I did not want to have to wear reading glasses post cataract surgery. As I told Jasper’s mom, I will do what I need to do with regard to reading glasses or otherwise, be it a glass with no refraction in the left and lens correction the right or just reading with my left eye. But I’m also allowed to have all the feelings with it. I’m allowed to be angry and I’m allowed to think that this is not cool.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always, there’s more to come.
Inkreadable 