Well, our penultimate week at school was busy and the last is upon us. We've decided to reward ourselves for 35 years of teaching by showing the To Kill a Mockingbird multiple academy award winning movie to our classes this week. Despite this, we still can't bring ourselves to total frivolity: a serious worksheet accompanies the viewing with areas for the kids to compare and contrast the ideas and themes with incidents in our recent insipid tome, Farewell to Manzanar. Even in our last teaching flourish, we're making sure the kiddies think and learn (with a little help from Gregory Peck)!
Our flight was cancelled and our tiny luxurious window of a week after school finishes, to pack and clean, has completely disappeared. This has meant re-planning our timetable of attack. Our landlords have agreed to clean up big items that we're not shipping: pretty much all the furniture and definitely all the appliances, but we can't possibly leave them all the "small stuff" we're not bringing. Anyone who has lived somewhere for nearly two decades will appreciate the accumulated material: when you start digging into wardrobes, shelves and cupboards it becomes very apparent that some gentle culling along the way might have been more suitable than leaving it all till now!
Luckily, Cass did some major editing of our files a while back so this was a job not on our list (thankfully). Taiwan being the recycling capital of the world has helped us as well, as there is a depot not too far from our apartment. I've transported electrical chords, old phones, fluorescent globes, glass jars and tonnes of books there in the last couple of days. I've also got rid of old vacuum cleaners and all the cat paraphernalia, including litter boxes and baskets, both soft and hard. That's not to mention the linen, pillows, sheets and assorted non-recyclables that we've packed and carted. I must have looked quite the sight: precariously balancing various bags of detritus in the well of the trusty motor-scooter, Blackie, as I weaved up the main highway en route to the garbage/recycling depot on multiple trips over a number of hours!
Cass slaved over sorting and packing at home while I trundled huge packs of stuff up to the depot. Our third floor walk-up didn't help either! The books were the killer: so many and oh, so heavy. We both use Kindles almost exclusively these days...how still, so many books?! We've ear-marked tasks to do over the afternoons this week, but we need to make a master list to tick off the essentials as we go along. We've realized this is like a regular house move on speed: a country move and whole life shut-down in a foreign language...there are easier tasks we've undertaken over the years!
Our delightful and diligent kids continue to impress us right till the very end. We finally let them know our intentions on Friday and they were very sweet: mostly shock and questions of "why?" greeted us: they variously thought we were too young or too dedicated to be stopping: I even had someone who asked me if it was their bad behavior that had forced our decision! It was a "laugh out loud" moment: if they only knew what we used to deal with...
This week should be busy and a little frantic: we'll endeavour to circumvent both of these feelings by methodically attacking our many remainning tasks with purpose and method: wish us luck!
Photos: our 10 classes this year.