Let's Get Brainwashed.

I'm a little sad that now I will only be able to post at the end of the day a blog entry. Over the weekend, I was in and out of my hotel room, and able to post little snippets of stuff. I was "at work" from 9am until 7pm here today, and it was a long day. I was an assistant for about 30 minutes: I wrote down everyone's expectations for the class on the board. They have these dry erase boards here that have small printers connected to them. Apparently, whatever you write (or draw, heh heh) on the board can be printed on a piece of paper. Amazing! I didn't get to try it, though. So as we went around the room and people introduced themselves, they also had to mention their expectations for the class. So I wrote them down. It was a little difficult, because there are 30 people from about 25 different countries, so some of them do not have the best skills in English pronunciation, so I had to consolidate what they said into a short phrase on the board - right in front of everyone. They seemed to be very interested in my transcriptions, especially since I had a squeaky marker. It was very distracting, I thought.

The other slightly sad thing to me is that now I am separate from the students. Whereas in the past, I was one of them, today was the official demarcation of me from them. I sit in the back, at a table with the other teachers. I was introduced to the group today as an observer and assistant to the teachers. At lunch, though, I got to sit with them.

It is so interesting here. Hearing about other cultures, particularly their work habits, parts of their everyday schedule - I love it. We had an interesting lunch - it was a Chinese restaurant in the basement of the tower we have our class in. Then we went to a restaurant on the 1st floor after class for a welcome party. Again, I sat with the other instructors.

Tomorrow we go on 2 tours. That's the whole day! It should be interesting. I don't know if we can take pictures. Wednesday is when my assignment really begins. Today was just an overview of a bunch of stuff. Wednesday is the real deal.

Labels: brainwash, training