Since when is it September?

I went into school on Monday and talked with the dean of academic affairs about random stuff, so now I'm at least moderately informed about what my life will be like for the next 10 months. I'm actually only teaching on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, but Monday and Friday I also have to work in the English Village. I managed to save Wednesday, despite the dean trying to convince me that I should come in on Wednesdays to tutor him in English. I'm not technically obligated to tutor him or anything, but they were so nice to me that I didn't really know how to refuse. At least I got it switched to a day when I have to go to the school anyway, so I will have a sweet day of freedom every other Wednesday (when we don't have Fulbright meetings). Delicious!

Besides my random tutoring session, I'm also supposed to be teaching 4 classes independently that I'm supposed to be designing myself - 2 for teachers, 2 for students. Two of them are actually during my lunch hour, which the dean felt really bad about, but I don't care that much because we have almost 2 hours for lunch, and I'll only be teaching for half of it. I was a little bit worried about what I was going to teach in those classes, but then I talked to Patty and she was like ehhh we'll figure it out as you go along and now I feel better about it. I might have devoted a whole lot of time today to making beautiful posters for my classroom. Hooray!

This morning was also the first run-through of the English Village...we spent a lot of time on Tuesday putting together all of the games and materials that we needed, and today we had a class come through and try some of them out, supervised by a teacher. The teacher's job was to report back to the Bureau of Education, who apparently was feeling fairly skeptical of the way that we wanted to run the English Village. Fortunately, it turned out pretty well, perhaps because we had 3 ETAs running a section instead of the 1 that we'll have when we do it for real. We still have to make a lot of revisions, but for now I'm just glad that it's OVER.

Tomorrow afternoon we are all going to Taipei! There will be a conference for all of the Fulbrights in Taiwan - not just us English teachers, but also the people with research grants and whatnot. They sent us the schedule, and it looks packed full of activities that we already did during our own orientation. I feel like this might be poor planning, and we're all going to have to sit through a zillion presentations about things that we're already really familiar with. At least it should be fun to be in Taipei and meet the other Fulbrights!