What a day. Today I had 5 EFL (now called “ESOL”) pupils at the school. The first showed up dopey as usual, and the second one, the Spanish boy, was rather uncooperative and irritable. He just wanted to get the work done, instead of trying to get it done to the best of his ability. Needless to say trying to get him to formulate a written opinion on the value of soaps was hopeless. To get away from that task, I tried practising Speaking, and gave him two pictures to compare, but again there was no effort. Finally, more or less fed up, I passed him the magazine, said “YOU pick two pictures to compare and give an opinion on”. He found one of Barcelona and another of some theme park and gave slightly better effort. When I tried to get him to elaborate on life in Spain, he drifted into this tirade about how it was better than England, the food was better, the weather was better and all that. Later I found out some boys had been complaining about having sausages and cereal served for breakfast, and how they were sick of it. Maybe that’s got something to do with it?

Later on one of the younger boys came for his lesson in tears. He had been bullied in class so I took some notes and reported the incident to the assistant head and the form tutor.

Today on the way to the school I was running late, so I just kept pedalling and got there in 7 minutes instead of the usual 15. It was slightly slower on the way back, but that was my warm up prior to my run. I did 3 laps of a 1.5 km circuit; 7:15, then 6:50, and then 9:00ish (I didn’t really bother about the last lap).

Felt tired and a little strange afterward – maybe I’m getting a bit of a flu, or maybe it’s got something to do with the fact I didn’t have any proper lunch and just snacked on biscuits all day. I must get out of the habit of watching Everybody Loves Raymond before going for work, or maybe just getting up earlier.

Some bicep curls tonight after the washing up and practising for tomorrow’s audition.