It snowed last night and today. Above is the view from our living room. There was even more snow in Bad Münstereifel (where my school is). It looked very picturesque, so I’ll try to take photos tomorrow.

Tomorrow will be my last day at the school because my teacher training is ending on Saturday. I can’t believe it’s been two years already! Today was my last lesson with my favourite sixth-graders, and we were all sad to say goodbye. It will be even harder tomorrow when it’s time to say goodbye to the colleagues… but we’re having a little farewell party.

On Monday I’m going to start my new job. I got the offer last Friday, phoned the school on Monday and went there to sign the contract on Tuesday. The school is near Koblenz, about 80 km south of Bonn. The drive there is a bit longer than I wish it would be, but at least I’ve got a job, and the school seems to be very good. It’s not a full-time job, which means I only get paid half the usual wages, but the advantage is that I only have three days of school a week. I’ve heard that the first year of teaching full-time is very hard; I hope that the transition from training to working full-time will be easier this way. For now, I’ve only got a contract for the next six months until the summer holidays, but it should be easy to get a full-time job once the new school year starts in August.

Space Flight

Atlantic Monthly: Columbia’s Last Flight and Newsday: Columbia’s Final Minutes are two articles about the Columbia disaster on February 1st, 2003.

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Reading

There are a lot of links to interesting book blogs in this article at scotsman.com: Comfort of strangers.

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