PLANS
Can't wait for Carnival which is meant to be mental. It's Carnival at the end of the month and we're going to Olinda. It's meant to be the best place in Brazil for Carnival. It's non-stop party for 4 days solid, 24 hours a day, apparently they keep going on alcohol alone but I can't see how.
We are paying 50 quid each to rent some house in Olinda with some students from the school. There are going to be 20 of us and we also get free booze thrown in for that! Booze costs so little: that Cana stuff (made from sugar cane I believe) which they all drink, is about 50p a litre and twice the strength of vodka!!!

THE NITTY GRITTY
I'm pretty sure teaching is cool but I'm not definite yet, this week has been crazy, my course was so crap it really didn't prepare me at all for the reality of teaching here.
Brazilian kids are so lively though it's wicked! I played my Jeopardy game and split the class into three teams and gave them all a different buzzer, the Sports Team were 'What a goal', the Politicians had, 'I beg to differ' and the Film Stars had 'God damn it', It was really funny. They were all screaming and the noise was deafening with 'God damn it, Teacher!' Its cool I get called Teach and Teacher by the kids.
The kids are all really young as well, which was surprising. In my Adult 4 class the average age is 14-15 and the Teens class is about 11-12. I've been so unprepared this week and had to come in every day at about 9am to plan. Lessons start at either 2 or 3 each day and finish at 9 at night.
Overall the lessons all went pretty well this week. I've got about 80+ students of pre-intermediate, upper elementary levels and the vast majority of them are 10-14 years old. There are a couple of classes where they are older but not much. I'm definitely gonna do some planning today: I've been doing 12 hour days this week planning all morning and teaching in the afternoon/evening, not that well organised.
Realise how awful the course was in preparing me to actually teach: the theory was ok and it pointed me in the right direction. On the course I taught a maximum of three people and now I've been teaching 45 a day and having 15-20 kids who are ready to lose concentration at a moment's notice is a bit more tricky. What is good though, is that most of my groups are of a similar level, hence I can 'trial and improve' my lessons over the days so the later groups get a better delivery than the first but that should even itself out over a couple of weeks.

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