*poke poke* ah, still alive and kicking I see...

Gargh, so the bug that prevents me from updating for ages and ages has once again struck again. I've been flung head on into all sorts of predicaments whilst this blog has basically been held at a stand-still for the past couple of months. My bad entirely.　ごめん！許して！对不起！请原谅我!

So what has Kylie been up to, besides being a stereotypical anti-social teenager (disregarding the fact that she's no longer a teenager anymore, of course)?

Weeell...for the most part she's been kept busy with uni, field placements, assessments, teaching practicums and loads of worrying for her tutoring kids who refuse to submit to her (reasonable) demands.

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Practicum

I'm pretty hyped up about the upcoming couple of months though. For one thing, my first teaching pract for Japanese starts next Monday, which is as scary as it is exciting I suppose. I've been posted out to the western suburbs which is quite far from where I live, meaning I either take 2~3 hours by public transport, or I get my non-existent driving skills polished enough between now and Monday to be able to handle the 40 odd minute drive down there.

Being the nervous driver that I am, I have been trying to convince myself that public transport is feasible (it isn't) which is why after much deliberation, Mum and Dad finally decided that they'd have to force me to be an independent driver at some point and that this would be a good opportunity to do just that. Luckily for me, Chris had the day off work so we went driving today down (up?) to the western suburbs and back to try to get a feel for the roads. I still think I'm not going to manage by myself, but I don't really have much of a choice since Dad's leaving for Hong Kong to go soccering again in Hong Kong, Macau and Zhong Shan on Sunday meaning I have no one to rely on to drive me there except myself come Monday morning.

The only good thing about all these transport worries is that I haven't had the chance to freak out about teaching yet, although the chuckles I've been getting out of the other teachers at the school about whether they had scared me off teaching yet, is a slight worry...


The knowledge that I'm completely doomed will probably sink in sometime over the next couple of days when I'm standing in front of the class and regretting not listening to Mum and Dad when they kept insisting I go into Speech Pathology (a nice, safe and slightly less stressful profession, I'm sure) rather than the somewhat less glamorous profession of teaching. I don't believe I'll be another Mr Keating to these kids but I'm hoping that they won't trash my lessons out without really giving them a chance.

Anyway, here's to being optimistic! Yay!

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Korea

Straight after I finish my practicum month, I'm jetting off to Seoul, Korea from 5th December till 23rd December, for two and a half weeks! :D

I'll be team teaching with some other Education students from USYD at the Myongji English College (which is right next to their university, apparently) and spending the time with a host family, which is all very new and exciting to me as I've never really gone overseas with anyone other than my parents and going with the uni and home staying will definitely be an eye-opener for me. I'll need to start planning lessons for the 2 weeks, but for the time being, that's not on my priority list, the practicum is.

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ELTF and Japan

And not long after I come back from Korea, I'm off to Japan from 30th December till 23rd January :D!

This is because earlier on in the year, I applied for the Endeavour Language Teacher Fellowship (ELTF for short), one of only a handful of scholarship/fellowship programmes out there for Australian language teachers, thinking it'd be wonderful to get accepted into a program that trains up your Japanese whilst you're actually in the country but not really expecting much of it since they were looking for applicants nationwide and my application wasn't all that stunning, plus I was applying for Japanese, which I'm guessing, was probably quite popular amongst the applicants for the pre-service teachers' programmes (there are four language programmes offered this year for: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Indonesian).

Anyway, the point is, I wasn't expecting this at all, and it's quite a pleasant surprise, even more pleasant after I read through the information pack we were all sent and discovered that almost everything, including airfares, accommodation and language tuition fees, are paid for by the Australian Government...so thank you all for your tax monies :D!.

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Anyway, less procrastinating, more work for me. That's all for the time being!I still have five assessments to finish off by Sunday.