11 days and counting...

....until I´m back in Pennsylvania for the holidays! It´s starting to feel a bit like Christmas here in Valladolid, mostly because the days are getting shorter. It gets dark just before 6 pm here now. People have been putting up Christmas decorations and blinking lights all over town. At UNO, maintenance put up a bunch of lights in the conical shape of a tree and a manger scene at the entrance to the university, and in the office, we have a little, fake Christmas tree which adds a nice, festive touch. Next week we´re going to have an office dinner and we´ll do a Secret Santa gift exchange which should be fun.
Things sure are much quieter at UNO without the students. It´s been pretty easy to get work done, so that has been good. Other good news is that I submitted the grades for all three of my classes yesterday and today I finished making the extraordinarios - the exams that students who failed the course must take if they are to continue on in their studies without having to repeat it next year. A few of my students did fail - mostly the ones who missed class too much! Overall, though, my students did well and I am glad to be done with all that grading. Here´s an example of something I included on an exam to assess students´ knowledge of vocabulary for family members:Of course, there´s tons of end-of-semester stuff that keeps coming up: documents, files, emails, self-evaluations, etc. Not to mention, yesterday I e-mailed every single student their grade, and for some unknown reason, there was a completely horrendous computer glitch, causing all the emails to be returned to me!! I am frustrated because I told my students I would send them all their grades on Monday (and I DID, but fate stepped in and now I´ll have to do it all over again. Ugh, just when I felt like I was getting somewhere). We got notification today that we are still not able to use the university´s email system to mail externally and they are trying to fix it, and we should try to send them again later. Pero así es la vida...
Other news is that for three hours a day, for four days next week, my supervisor, Miguel, and I will be teaching basic English to a group of police officers from Valladolid. I guess the course could be called Law Enforcement English! It should be quite interesting (though I did not expect to be teaching during that last week, let alone doing something so different from what I normally do at UNO). It will be more work, for sure, but it will also be something very interesting and unique on the old resume.

The sun is starting to set now, so I´ll wrap it up here...stay tuned for my upcoming TOP 10 lists!