Friday morning, getting ready for a big weekend!
Alright, no running today, tomorrow morning I’ll do my usual route, then Sunday it’s time for my first long run in Italy, what a way to end January!!!
And seriously, look at where my month started and where it’s ending, this is crazy, right? I’m loving it though. Before I had spent that time in the hospital, I would have never been able to put all this together. I was way too comfortable, even though I was in misery. Overweight, smoking, taking terrible care of myself. Sometimes I suppose, it takes a terrible tragedy to get us moving. To make us realize that life is more than just going from one day to the next doing what you feel you must to pay the bills, and hope you have a little enjoyment out of some diversions now and then.
That’s something I talked about in one of my adult conversation classes this week. Conversation classes, I should explain, are extra classes students can take where a teacher directs a conversation in the target language to help the students get a more natural speaking voice in the target language. That is the goal of all language learning, have the students speaking, listening, reading and writing in as close to a native way as possible. Well, my conversation class on Wednesday night asked me why I was here, why I moved away from the New York Tri-state area? (They didn’t say Tri-state, they don’t know what that is) My answer was simple, while I enjoyed the people at many of my jobs, while I had friends and family, I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing. I felt trapped, I felt like I wasn’t doing anything worthwhile. I was just going from job to job, just trying to make ends meet. I’ve said before, that I don’t think that is a good way to live, and with January done, I can say, while I’ve had financial and logistical problems, while I’ve had some disappointments, and I do miss my friends and family, I was right.
My students really enjoy my classes, one of them wrote on the desk last night (the staff pointed it out to me this morning) “Chris sis un buon” which is Neapolitan dialect for “Chris is good”. Yay me!
But more than that, when I teach something, that moment when I realize the students have understood the lesson and have actually learned something new, it’s an amazing feeling! What a rush I got last night when one girl in my Juniors class understood how to turn the past simple negative. She was struggling so much I stopped the class and focused on her, and when she realized how to do it, it was just too cool for school! I hope I have many more experiences like that, and I hope the kids keep enjoying my lessons. What a great adventure I have started, I can’t wait to see where it leads!
So right now I’m going to try and get the Circumvesuviana train schedule loaded into google maps to help me, and my fellow teachers and various area ex-pats out with transportation. Wish me luck! Have fun, keep running, and remember; If Gil can run then so can you!
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