Musings of a language teacher

Today in class we were looking at stuff to do with populations. I checked in Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com) and it says the USA has a population of about 300 million. I also checked the populations of the cities we were looking at. Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_by_population to see which cities are the biggest. Tokyo tops the list if you are looking at the wider area of the city.

If you are just looking at the city, then the top three are in India. Seoul is No 7 and Tokyo is No 10 It's hard to measure populations I guess.

You can get lots of useful information from Wikipedia, but you'll know that from your reading exam. :-)

I have finished my online course. I'm so happy. Last Saturday I had to do my last assignment which was due on midday Sunday. I decided I would get it done quickly and not spend all weekend doing it. So I did some work on Friday evening, then got up on Saturday morning and finished the assignment and emailed it to my lecturer. Hooray. Then I went to the movies to celebrate. I saw an interesting documentary about an American architect who designs very way-out buildings. His name is Frank Gehry. Have a look at one of his buildings on this link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Gehry
Then in the evening T and I had dinner at a local Thai restuarant. I always have duck when we go there.
The next day I checked my online course website and the lecturer had marked the assignment already!! You'll be happy to know I passed.

I have been a slacker. I have not written in my blog for about two weeks. That's because I went on holiday and didn't have access to a computer. Then I came back and I had to finish an assignment and then my brother came to stay, plus a friend from Melbourne is in town, and now I have another assignment I have to do. Truely!

But when I have a minute, I will write about my trip to Uluru, which was great. I'd like the new students to start keeping blogs because it's a great way to practise English AND there are other benefits. Right now I need to keep working on my assignment.

Yesterday our class launched the wiki page. Ga-Hye and Andy designed a flyer to give to all the GEAP students and I sent an email to all the teachers and staff at PCE. We got some very good feedback immediately from some of the PEP teachers. They were really impressed by the web site. I'm impressed too by all the work the students did on creating the web site.
I'm interested to know what you thought of this project. Was it useful? Was it interesting? Did you enjoy it? Did you learn anything? Would you want to do that sort of thing again? Please put your comments here.

At the weekend I planned to finish my first assignment for my course. But on Saturday I got a surprise when I went to my course website (my course is online). We had another week before we had to hand in our assignments. However, I decided to finish it so I can work on the next one. I want to be finished with my studies so I can sew and plant things in the garden and study French or Spanish. Working full-time and studying part-time is lots of work.
I think I'd like to be a language student. Is it fun, or is it a lot of work?

Today, they said it would be 34 degrees and the same tomorrow. It's crazy to be so hot in spring. Everyone is worried about the crops and gardens. I water my plants at night or early in the morning and have put mulch around them. Mulch is to stop the water drying out and to keep the roots of the plant moist.
Something has been eating my basil!! Maybe a catepiller or a snail. I don't like using poisons in the garden but I want to get rid of those pests.

I spend a lot of time at the weekend working on my assignments for my course. I have three assignments to complete in the next five weeks. I don't like the fact that all the assignments are due around the same time but once Nov 18 is passed I will have finished everything. (note that use of future perfect, you language students).
T and I went to the nursery (that's a garden shop) and we bought lots of plants. On Sunday morning I planted basil and marigolds. Basil is fantastic herb for cooking. I have bought a few different varieties. I'm looking forward to using them in cooking but the big problem is the lack of water.