It's February!!

The weather here in KL hasn't been too hot lately and so we've enjoyed having the doors open in the evening and no A/C. We're also enjoying having a new BBC entertainment channel to watch which gives us an alternative to all the American programs. Talking of the weather, I'm sure you would have heard that we've had some pretty bad flooding lately too but luckily not here in KL. One of my ELCs had his house flooded in Kota Tinggi, a town in Johor, not too far from Singapore. There were some photos in the paper recently so I'll include some of those as we don't have any of us this time.



January's dead. That's one month of the 'new' year down. So what have we achieved? Ron has managed to keep his head above water in the new job: only just at times! Half of my English Language Coordinators are running a new Early Literacy Programme that we put together at the end of last year. It runs for eight weeks and requires them to go into several schools and work with the year 1 teachers one day a week with selected classes and then the teachers are supposed to continue the programme during the week. We devised a pre-test which they have all done and then they started the training. The ministry decided to do a similar thing in Bahasa Malaysia, but as far as we knew were only doing it in two states and only with selected low achieving schools. Our guys stayed away from those so as not to cause any confusion. Unfortunately the ministry thought it would be a good idea to administer their pre-test to all year one pupils and set a whole week aside to do it! Hence our trainers were told no training for that week. Bugger! That upset the very tight schedule didn't it. And of course I got lots of e-mails and phone calls asking what do we do now? The other problem was that they decided to use the results to reorganise the classes! So the trainers went back the next week to find lots of new students who hadn't been tested by us and had missed a week's lessons. We had hoped to be finished by the mid-term break, including the post-test, but won't be now. And how am I going to write the results up?

Jan has been suffering from computer blues these past few weeks. Her newly acquired F-Tech laptop had an internal haemorrage and was in for repair for seven working days! No spare. Not a hapy Jan. Got it back last Tuesday morning and just got it all sorted when it did it again Wed evening!! Double Bugger! She now has permission to go and buy a new one so is currently researching what to buy.

Oh well, Friday we got some good news. Jan & I are going to a CfBT conference in the UK in June! It's a week's conference but we can take some leave before so that made us feel a bit better. We've been checking out hotels in London and what shows might be on then. Have to make the most of the time, eh?!

Keep up the good work D&K. The apple pie and cheesecake looked good.