… until a new phase in my life will start. July 16th is the official start of my summer vacation, which means it’s the official end to my current job and the beginning of a new chapter at the new job. Now officially my contract ends July 31st and my new one starts on August 1st, but to me July 13th will be the last day of work as an English teacher to become an English teacher trainer! In the mean time though, the next four weeks may be the last ones, but it’s not as if I will be able to sit back and relax any time soon. Here’s what’s yet to come!
This picture couldn’t be more apt to describe the next couple of weeks. At least, I hope it is. Apart from resits, exams and paper writing (and thus a chuckload of work) I am sincerely looking forward to my last couple of weeks at my current job. Simply because I have so many semi-work and non-work related social activities coming up.
First up on Thursday I will be having a high tea with my English colleagues and a week later I will be having dinner with some former English colleagues. There there are not one, not two, but THREE work-related outings. I will be on a sailing boat in Friesland for one day with my fellow freshmen year colleagues, will have a dinner with my NEW colleagues and there is also the yearly ‘uitje’ with the entire Academy. If that wasn’t enough, I will be meeting friends, go to birthday parties, see one or two concerts and I will celebrate my own birthday too.
I am especially looking forward to meeting my new colleagues and I also have a date planned where I actually go to my new job to be introduced to my new working environment. So I am excited about that. I am also looking forward to the dinner with my ex-colleagues. We had one too last year and this year there will be 1 or 2 people more. So I’m sure that will be fun. It will just be great to catch up and hear what everyone has been up to in the past year. And I of course am looking forward to celebrating my own birthday (it’s July 6th in case you’re wondering) as well as my 10 year anniversary for living in Leiden.
But of course there is still plenty of work to be done. Currently I am working on getting through a pile of a little over 60 exams (oh joy!) and I am also polishing up my Social Media paper so I can hand it in. Then there’s oral resits this coming week, more written resits the week after that and the week after that, you’ve guessed it, more resits. Luckily I won’t have to do all of them by myself as we tend to divide up the work evenly amongst the team. So it all depends on how many students sign up for these resits, how busy we’ll be.
On top of that, I am also working on the paper I will be presenting in Berlin in August. So when I’m not grading papers and presentations, I will be reading papers, trying to analyze my data some more and turn all of that into a cohesive and comprehensible presentation. I hope to have that done by the end of this month, or at least before my birthday so I can go on vacation without having to worry about any of it.
Anyway: here is to a busy yet hopefully fun time. What will you be up to these coming weeks? Let me know in a comment below!