Day 38: A Shower of Compliments, and Little Victories

Yesterday, after my last class of adult students, the students stayed behind to comment on how healthy I looked. They were really impressed with how much weight I had lost and started looking with frowns at their own guts. I reminded them I still have a spare tire for a compact car and need to keep working on it. Just like me to blow off compliments. I take criticism to heart, but I blow off compliments. Something wrong there.

I woke and spent most of last night with a sore throat, but it died down considerably during my workout today. J-ropes were a hodgepodge, but my side crunches were much better because they did not follow V-sits today. I still fit the whale on the beach metaphor, but I felt better about it and actually had the energy to twist during the exercise. All that said, my best exercise today was the tricep dip. The last two sets fell three reps short, but the second set was amazing. I actually felt my triceps wanting to work and not wanting to quit. They didn't want to just shut down like before. It was so great!

In other news, I finally finished the homework I was assigned after the English Teacher's Training Seminar I attended on June 14th, 2009. In the end, it was an eleven page document consisting of four individual reports and a bibiliograpy. I learned alot of things during the exercise, but I am glad it is done so I can get back to my novel. I mailed the report to the sponsoring organization this morning before my workout. Yay!

Also, yesterday marked the first day of teaching the students who complained about my lesson quality last week, feedback that sent me into a downward spiral for a few days. And, you know what I did. I worked to give them the best lesson ever with some time consuming homework for them to do! I had to go against a number of things I've learned about meeting English as a Foreign Language student needs (e.g. communicative tasks, high student talk time with low instructor talk time, etc), but what the students want, the students get. And, to be honest, this "new" lesson execution method is a lot less preparation than my usual methods, which is fine by me. Although, now that I think about it, since I had to talk more than usual in this lesson, this method was likely responsible for my sore throat last night and this morning. Oh well, no pain, no gain.

More tomorrow,

Sean