No running today.

I'm supposed to be running the Stockholm Half-Marathon in one hour.  I was all registered and trained and ready to go, and then what happened last Sunday?  I came down with an evil case of babysittee-kid-acquired flu that hit me like a ton of bricks....fever, sore throat, dizzy, achy...which settled nicely into my respiratory system over the past few days and turned into a hacking cough and runny nose.   I missed the training that I was supposed to finish last weekend so now I think it would be really stupid to attempt running the longest distance of my life.  With the beginning of school it seems like everyone on Värmdö has been coming down with some form of sickness, but I'm still going to try running the half-marathon distance on my own once I'm feeling up to it.

In better news, over the past couple of weeks I began svenska för invändare (Swedish for immigrants, or SFI) classes.  Luckily I tested out after the first week and was moved ahead to svenska som andra språk (Swedish as a second language) which is closer to the junior-high level.  I was glad to skip over SFI as I had heard some horror stories of how painfully slow it could be.  During the week that I was in class we spent a good amount of time being told to sit in the library and quietly "study," with no real structure or lesson plans aside from a few websites with grammar and vocabulary quizzes.  In order to practice speaking Swedish we were told to talk to each other...which felt pretty limited and frustrating, sitting there speaking broken Swedish with other students whose Swedish was even worse than mine.  I can imagine it'd be difficult to teach a group of people from different education levels and backgrounds, and some of the students were really trying hard, but my last straw was the day we were in the computer lab and it took AN HOUR for everyone to correctly login to the computers (after we had just been given our computer logins and passwords earlier in the day).  The teacher even had to say at one point, "Don't click the X at the top of your screen or everything will disappear." Bye bye, SFI!

So, the new classes I'm in are a little faster and the students seem to be more motivated to actually learn.  I'm also taking a high-school level general science course online, which is fun for the science dork in me and great for learning new vocabulary.

Finally, in addition to my part-time babysitting job, I was hired as a modersmål lärare (native language teacher) to teach weekly after-school classes in English.  The Swedish school system provides supplemental education for any kids who speak a language other than Swedish in their homes.  I'll have a group of nine kids aged 6-12 every Wednesday afternoon so it'll be interesting to come up with age-appropriate lessons and activities for them.  Most of the kids were born in Sweden and have one English-speaking parent, so their Swedish is better than their English...hmmm, maybe they should be the ones teaching me?