This week has been a bit uneventful. I have been pleased with the progress my grade 2 class have been making, we start a new project next week and we have another observation to look forward to. I changed one of the displays to work of the week and each week I am going to put a copy of each students best work from the week, which may have just created more work for me to do, but I think it would be good for the kids to see their best work on display.
Grade 4 have been doing well as well, they are so well behaved compared to the grade 2 class (who I am constantly telling to stop talking when they are supposed to be working). It is a good balance really, if only I didn’t have 39 books to mark every day!
I have been really tired this week and just gone home and had an early night after school, I just seem to be exhausted every day by lunchtime. Luckily it is only another week until we get 4 days off, and technically it’s only a 4 day week next week as we have sports day on the Friday and can go home at lunchtime, hooray! But the best news is that Matt will be here on Wednesday!
On Thursday we had a real drama getting his visa. I had left school early as I had to wait at home for maintenance to come and fix my toilet which was leaking into the apartment downstairs. They came, flushed my toilet and then told me that they had “fixed” the problem. Maintenance really is a joke here, I bet they have to come out again soon to actually fix it. Anyway, I was at home and I got a phone call from Matt (which never happens to my mobile, it’s just far to expensive so I knew something was wrong) Matt was at the visa office and they wouldn’t accept the letter of invitation that my colleague had sent without a residence permit. Now at this point it was 4.30pm, teachers are usually at the gate waiting for this time as that is when we can clock out, so I knew there wouldn’t be many teachers left at the school. To add to this, we were under a time limit as to get the same day visa we only had an hour to get it sorted. My friend didn’t have her passport on her so I had to phone round to see if anyone else was left at the school that could help and luckily one of my friends was still there and went looking for a Chinese teacher that we could ask to send a new letter of invitation and a photocopy of their residents permit. There was one Chinese teacher left but she didn’t have her card with her and couldn’t remember her number so my friend had to go looking for someone else. The vice principal was still at the school and gave permission for us to get a photocopy of the residents permit from my friend who had written the letter of invitation, but then when I spoke to Matt I was told that the letter needed to be signed, which of course it wasn’t as it had been emailed to me. We were back to square one! My friend couldn’t do it as her passport, like mine, was at the visa office getting extended. The vice principal said we could use her info so she wrote and signed a new letter of invitation and we got a copy of her details. I spoke to Matt again for the visa office’s fax number, turns out the visa office don’t have a fax! They asked if we could scan the documents and send it to them, but we only have one scanner in the school which was currently not working! the odds were really stacked against us and by this point we only had 20 minutes left before the deadline. I was then told that we could take a photo of the letter of invitation, the vice principals passport and visa and send it to them and that would be accepted. Luckily, my friend had her phone that she could take a photo of these documents and then send it by email to me and I could then email it to the visa office. I did this and Matt said that it had been accepted, but after the same day visa deadline, so his passport was going to be posted back to him instead. Pretty stressful hour to be honest! It was so frustrating because if I had only been at the school, I could have sorted it, but as I was at home I had my friend on the end of my Chinese phone talking her through what needed doing and Matt on the end of my English phone talking me through what he needed and I am emailing invitation letters as well. I was so grateful for my friend, who had stayed an hour after school to help, that I bought her a bottle of wine today as a thank you.
It seems that quite a few of the teachers had had a rough week so after school we went out for dinner and a few drinks and to chill out after a long week at work. Hooray for the weekend!
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