Big squeeze

It's been a loooooooooooooong week. Students started back in serious last Tuesday and we're adjusting to that. Olwen's life is taken up with colourful files, bits of materials and students' names.

My own is how I'm going to squeeze seven different courses into a 5 day week. The problem is that the more classes you have to teach, the less time you have for preparation, but you really need to do more preparation because you have more classes to teach. The nasty twist is that two "New Preps" are included, which are courses that you haven't taught before - sounded great when you agreed to do them six months ago but now require an awful amount of work.

There are three courses to teach in the classroom, but only two each day: Church history, New Testament background and John's writings; then there are three groups doing similar material but by correspondence to validate their previous studies; and there are groups of final years working on their dissertations. The class material is fascinating including Alexander the Great, the Jewish-Roman wars, and the best bits of church history. And spending 32 one and half hour classes on John to a captive audience of young people is any preachers dream.

Olwen's class is a practical workshop which is a type of advanced playdough, but without the advanced bit.

We're in mid summer now, which is good apart from the viral illnesses that hot weather brings. Neighbours on either side of us, Jim and Nancy, are suffering and bed ridden. Last week´s paper reported that the city's murder rate is the lowest for 25 years and that we're the worst city in the country for road accidents. One of the chief causes being drivers getting distracted by looking at pretty girls.

Photo: Jesus Christ has the solution to your problems: message on the side of a house near our church