Waiting For School to Open

It has been an odd week. We have been watching the building take shape and anticipating the Open House this Sunday, September 3. The building is beautiful, but there are still many things to do for everything to be ready. Brenda and I have not been able to get into our classrooms in the middle school-high school wing. The classrooms are not completely finished and there is not much furniture at the moment. The whole school needs to be cleaned from the construction dust and dirt. The work goes on day and night and there is an army of workers, but there is still much to do. The grounds, walkways and field still need a lot of work to make them safe. Nevertheless, when the school opens tomorrow, I am sure it will look magnificent - banners and plants are already appearing.

In the midst of all this construction work, we teachers are feeling somewhat forgotten. Actually, I feel that our presence has been more of a hindrance to the construction than a help. Despite this, we have been in the building everyday, trying to get ready. We had a day of Macintosh training and two days with Bruce and Marjorie, two education supervisors from District 16, Miramichi. District 16 provides our curriculum support, so they were here to make presentations on the Smartboards and the Library. Our school is very high tech; every classroom has a projector and Smartboard and all the teachers have Mac laptops. Brenda is the proud possessor of both a Mac laptop and a cell phone. She has been busy creating presentations and documents for her classes.

Fortunately, we have moved in from Tuanli (say Twarli), the suburb where we were living on the campus of Beijing Concord College. The daily commute was taking about 3 hours, so the move to a modern hotel next door to the school was a relief for all. Unfortunately, however, there is no Internet on our floor in the hotel and the Internet connection in the school is not completely installed and is unreliable. Also, our apartments in the residence on campus are not completely finished. They are very close to being completed and we have been watching the work carefully. They now have most of the furniture in so you can get a clear idea that they will be very comfortable, but they still have to pass the plumbing and gas inspections. So it has been an interesting week and next week promises to be even more interesting as we try to open in a building that will most likely be incomplete. Wish us luck!
First Published September 2, 2006