I have had a busy weekend! Right after work began the 4th annual conference held at ACS (my school American Community Schools of Athens) focusing on differentiated learning. On Friday evenng I attended 2 seminars - one about gifted children and the other about autistic children. In photo: me, Lorna, Alex and James
Saturday there were 4 seminars to attend (each 1.5 hours long). The first was about the AD/HD child, then Tools for Literacy - all done from the computer, after lunch I went to Multisensory Approach to Support Learning and finally how to help the gifted and talented student in the
classroom. The speakers were mostly from the US and the whole conference was quite an eye opener for the multitude of things a teacher can do. Of course, with lacking technology and 25 students and no aide the possible seems impossible right now. Maybe next year will be better!
I befriended these three Americans who came to the conference from Doha, Qatar and we headed out for dinner after the conference on Saturday night. They were staying at a hotel in Ominia downtown Athens. We initially started our journey in a taxi but traffic was unbelieveable because the major road to go downtown was blocked off due to protests/demonstrations so we decided to take the metro - along with everyone else in Athens! When we finally arrived at Ominia station we noticed that roads were also blocked off and right where their hotel was were 2 huge blue police buses with bars on their windows, police everywhere wearing gas masks and had their plastic shields. We quickly pivoted and began walking back to the metro. We heard lots of people yelling, a large explosion and saw a lot of smoke. I was shocked on how many people were trying to get a good look at what was going on. I later found out it was a protest from the immigrants in Athens. It does take them forever to obtain legal papers to live here and of course the system is chaotic. So we got back on the metro and ended up practically where we got o
n the metro to begin with and 2 hours from leaving ACS we were in safe Kolonaki eating dinner outside!
n the metro to begin with and 2 hours from leaving ACS we were in safe Kolonaki eating dinner outside!It is always great to meet others from other schools. I certainly learned a lot about living in Doha and I can say I will probably never live there. There are so many more different rules and seems extremely hot! But never say never!
In photo: Dwain, Colin, Kyle, George
Today (Sunday) Dwain and Miah, their friend Kyle, Kate picked me up to head to the beach! It was a beautiful day 80s, slight breeze - it takes us about 40 minutes to get there. About 15 minutes after we arrived so did some of our othe
r friends - Sarah, her husband and the twin one year old boys with Colin and Sue! We laid out, read, swam around - played frisbee in the water.
r friends - Sarah, her husband and the twin one year old boys with Colin and Sue! We laid out, read, swam around - played frisbee in the water.
Left photo: Miah
Right photo: Miah, Kate, Dwain, Kyle
Now I am trying to motivate myself to make dinner and mark papers.
Happy Mother's Day to my mom and all my friends who are moms!
1 comment:
Hi there, just so you know, the square is called Omonia, and there were several protests on Saturday. One was pro-immigrant, one was anti-immigrant, one was a sit-in to protest squalor conditions.
It's much more complicated than "immigrants taking forever to get papers," in fact Greek laws make it very difficult for any non-EU citizen (including Americans) to obtain them at all.
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