Greetings, everyone. I have been pretty busy in the last month or so and that shows in my barren blog.
I will be posting shortly about the new courses and challenges, but also about the possitive news regarding work.
This is my entry to 
Have you ever worked (at your job) on the weekend? Explain what you like or do not like about it and why.
This is an example of what my computer screen looks like on an average weekend. Editorial work, class planning, and downloading audio-visual materials for face-to-face and online classes.
As a teacher, you can swear all you want that you will not use your weekend/family time for unpaid work, but that's just a futile fight. Even if you manage to oraganize your work load to reduce weekend extra work, there will always be a friend, family or colleague who will require some job-related support and you can't refuse to help. At least I can't (That was actually going to be my weekend engagement post some weekends ago, but I was too busy to work on that one too).
I've been teaching for twenty six years now and working on weekends has always been part of the package. Even when I taught at college, when we had a summer break to share with family and friends, I always found myself busy with work even on weekends.
Now that I teach at a language institute, weekends are our students' most required schedules. Most of them study or work and Saturdays are about the only day they can spare for language courses.
Summer time is now my busiest time of the year, so I am resigned to busy weekends. Planning takes most of any teacher's free time, but it has its recompense when classes flow and students progress in their learning process.
Unfortunatelly, we still need to leave some record of students progress in the form of tests and those tests, even with Google Docs and other tools' help still take some of your time, especially on the weekends. Given the technological limitations we still have, we cannot always rely on objective e-testing and paper testing is still used. The kinds of tests you can apply via Google docs, etc have certain limitations and may not accurately measure students language proficiency, so additional work is needed if we want to do that part of the process well.
Working on weekends suck most of the time, but teaching, like some other disciplines require constant practice, researching, and testing. We do a lot or trial and error and any good results are ususally thanks to those unpaid weekend hours.
