Taxing

Day one on the job and I had very little time to prepare for my first lesson.  

The school offers boxed teaching plans, all laid out in perfectly organized binders with colour coded levels that correspond to the various sections, but following the British method, and having to use odd phrases like:  “we shall go to the cinema later.” etc... is a little dull, so i quickly searched for something under the same prescribed theme -  vacations -  and ripped a small paragraph from someone’s blog about a vacation gone wrong.  

I didn’t give the text too much thought and subsequently spent my first lesson explaining words like honeymooning, spontaneous, jaunt and shanties.  Basically every other word was an exercise in itself.  Finally at the end of the lesson, I asked them how they were feeling and a women looked down at the sheet, raised her head and with wide eyes said: “ummmmmm taxing”  - one of the many words we’d gone over earlier.  It did make us laugh though, and I was proud that she’d made that connection.