What A Week! - New and Returning Faculty Unite

Glenn (L) and all Senior Admins

 Wow!  What a week it has been!  It started on Monday morning at the Salvation Army.  Yep at the Salvation Army – I think this was the only place that could accommodate the 300+ faculty and staff from all three campuses!  We were given breakfast and coffee and some time to mingle.  Then we sat in the auditorium for Glenn’s welcome speech.  Glenn is the head of the school and a super nice, warm, and caring individual.  He and his wife met every single new person at the airport – that was 57 new faculty members and about 40 different trips to the airport.

What an empowering speech he made.  It consisted of metaphors, video clips, humor, guest speakers and a wardrobe change!  His platform presentation was about 3 hours long but it really didn’t seem that long.  (Although I was freezing – that A/C (Air-Con) really gets cold!)  Glenn’s speech was articulated with fluency, confidence and relative substance.  He never referred to notes.

His genuine appreciation of all our hard work as teachers and his knowledge of part of the reason for moving to Singapore is for the travel opportunities it provides, he embraced this.  What a complete 360 from the head of school speech I listened to 3 years ago.

After his uplifting anecdotes and humorous ways presented to us, I felt I had made a wonderful decision in moving to not only Singapore but to the Canadian International School.

We were then bussed back to our campuses and were put to work!   

Tuesday was Singapore’s 46^th Birthday (see blog).  

 And then came Wednesday!

Wednesday, it was the meet and greet with the parents and students and teachers!  Of my 22 students, I had the opportunity to meet 18 of them.  Now this is an international class!  I have 11 girls and 11 boys!  Yeah!  Most students in these international schools are considered TCK – third Culture Kids – ““A third culture kid is a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside their parents’ culture. .”  http://www.tckworld.com/ 

My students come from… well that is also hard to actually determine… let’s just say my students hold the following passports from …. USA, UK, Korea, Denmark, Australia, Singapore, Philippines, Canada, Brazil, Denmark, Thailand and Japan!

With this stated, 5 of my students attend ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages).  While these children are learning English, my other students learn French and Mandarin, both.

my buddy - Zoe and me

For the rest of the week, we had a lot of meetings and some time to continue in preparing for the next week.  I still need some more time in classroom, so I will be hopping over to school later today (Saturday).  I am ok with that, I would rather be overly-prepared than not prepared!

Thursday, my new cleaning lady came and cleaned my house – how nice is that!  She even irons… I will wait for the next time she comes!  I had my lead teacher, whom is also new and is married to my parents’ friends’ son… come over for wine and cheese.  That was super fun!

Friday, after school we had our last school sponsored dinner!  It was at a restaurant near my neighborhood.  It was for all faculty and staff and their families!  How generous, eh?  (However, this time alcoholic beverages were not included!)

So what a week, eh?

my good friend Dorthe and me