Every weekend we eat food from the United States. My mother in law sent us instant boxed food, like macaroni and cheese, and rice+flavor in a bag, just add water and butter and get your 500% daily allowance of MSG. It always seems to happen that by Sunday, there is so little food left, it just makes sense to make a box of mac and cheese to feed everyone instead, and then this "instant food" becomes so much easier to eat. Either I can wait 1.5 hours for beans to pressure cook, or I can eat fully processed food in 20 minutes or less! What a deal! I'm not sure why I don't buy the Brasilian versions of this type of food, perhaps because we have less of it, and probably also in part because it's SO expensive (imagine paying $10 for frozen lasanga). I never remember having this problem in the States, that I would go into the kitchen for a quick bite and there was nothing to eat that I didn't have to cook in some way other than fruit. Try as I might, I cannot remember what it was that I ate in times like this. Maybe I just went to Jimmy John's.

Ju knows English! Not just signs, it seems. He knows "put away" and "sit down" and things like that, but he has now shown that he knows and remembers associations with pictures, in both English and Portuguese. In a book about animals, I showed him a very tiny picture of a cat, telling him it was a GATA, since he says this all the time anyway. The following day he was looking at the same book and pointed to the picture and said "gata." Today, while he was looking at the same book, and I asked him "where's the kitty" he pointed to the cat! Somewhere in there are neuron pathways being reinforced!

The whole situation with school is just too far gone to update properly. I am still teaching, will continue to do so, and probably won't be compensated for my time fairly. But it is fun, and I am enjoying it, and I hope next year we will have a human for an administrator, instead of someone who just says things without thinking about the consequences. I already have my hopes up for our new principal, who is one of the nicest administrative heads I have ever met.

Same old school politics bullshit, different year. Same administrators, hmmmm, I wonder if this is a pattern.

School started today, and yesterday it is sprung on me that I will be teaching what they are calling and "ESL" course to the G4 students during the hour that they used to have Portuguese, but now will not because the administrators want a full immersion program for the EC. So, after having 5 days to prep my G3 classroom as an assistant, I now was given about 18 hours to prep to teach a course that has never been taught, never existed before, with no direction or objectives other than "Use only English." Needless to say I was a tad stressed. Besides the fact that they didn't have a clear answer on what they would be paying me to play teacher in the afternoon, other than a "compensational stipend" which I actually think would be illegal in my case, since I qualify as a Brasilian.

Today, no answers still, and as of this afternoon it's possible I will only teach 3 days a week and the other two will be Portuguese. But no news other than that. Should I half ass it. Should I do nothing since they evidently won't pay me anyway? Why does nothing function like it's supposed to?