In the UK, there is a grocery store called "Tesco" and they deliver groceries for approximately 3-6pounds (depending on peak times, etc.) Last weekend, I was so busy at Ale and Cider festivals plus spending most of Sunday at the school that I decided it would make sense for me to just have my groceries delivered that week. Who has time to go grocery shopping when everything closes at 6pm? Well...this was a mistake. Other people teaching at my school had done this and had good experiences. However, my groceries never showed up. When I ordered my groceries I gave them my cell phone number incase there was an issue but all day I got no phone call. I went home that night and started lesson planning waiting for 6pm to come when my groceries should be delivered. Nothing. After an hour and a half I tried calling their hotline, but as most numbers in the UK--it was a number that my cell provider did not allow calls to because it costs so much to make the call that no one would have enough minutes to do so. Finally, I tried calling my an online account and was able to get through. After waiting on hold, they figured out that the payment never went through (the money was there, it was just a transaction issue) so the driver never came with my groceries. This would have been nice to know earlier, so I could have tried to get groceries. Instead, I spent the rest of the week making due with scrap ends of food because I had no time to get to a store again. Needless to say, this weekend, I will be making the effort to walk to the store and pick up what I need.
I did however get my hair cut this week. Nothing drastic, just a shape up. It was getting too long and knotting all the time. The hairdresser was a new place so they were offering discounts and the hair cut was good. My hair loves me a little bit more now.
On Friday, the History department (minus a few) and a few other random members of staff at the school set out for the night on a pub crawl in Angel. Angel is in London, and it was great! The pubs all had great outdoor spaces and the streets were beautiful. The more I travel outside of Luton the more I want to travel outside Luton. If I end up staying another year, I think I will be moving to another city and taking a train into the city. There are some beautiful cities/towns nearby.
The school I teach at does "Learning Walks". This is when upper management staff of the school essentially come observe your classroom for a bit during a lesson and make notes on strengths/weaknesses and following school policies, etc. I had my first learning walk on Friday. It was a unique lesson to walk into---a Year 10 class doing coursework. This means that they were all spending the entire 1 hour lesson working on templates/rough drafts of their large writing piece. The person who did the "Learning Walk" passes their comments and observations down to your faculty leader and if there are any major concerns, etc then you know about them. As mine was on Friday, there has not been time for any discussion about it afterwards but my faculty leader did say that overall I was doing a good job :) Positive reinforcement is always nice, especially when everything at the school is so new to me--not just the teaching but all the new British school systems and policies.
Future endeavours? I plan on hitting up Oxford soon and in a few weeks I will be in Liverpool with some family and then off to Ireland for a week to see my friend from Trent and Queens-Theresa. I can't wait !
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