Most of my teaching is 1:1 which means I can book students from week to week. The upside is that I can slot these students into free spaces in my schedule, like a jigsaw puzzle. The downside is that I don’t have a good overview of my week until the end of Friday the previous week.
I also have approximately 16 groups of 4 – 8 students each. Some groups are weekly, some are fortnightly (a word which I believe is not used in the US?), and each course usually lasts 12 sessions. The advantage of these groups is that they can be booked into my schedule way in advance because they are fixed. The disadvantage is that it takes so long to write all these bookings into my calendar in advance. I also often forget the exact times for each group at the beginning of the course, because I can have up to ten groups beginning in the same week.
You can see my solution for this below. I just bunged washi and stickers on each page to remind me not to book anything at those approximate times, and wrote some times on a page at the front of my planner. Once I remember those I can throw the paper away. I am not tidy and I am not a natural decorator, but it is very functional and works for me.
Hello, we have such a word in German – “vierzehntaeglich”.
Cheers,
Franz
I am always amazed that you can run your life out of a personal size planner. I tried for ages. With an A5, I can have everything in one place.
You are correct. Fortnightly is not used in the US. We have to use more words to express the same concept – “every two weeks” or “every other week.”
I am wishing for an A5 at the moment. With BIG rings. I have settled for a small notebook as a complement to the planner. I like the word fortnightly. I find biweekly to be so confusing because it can meet both twice a week AND once every two weeks. I am not sure what the point of that is…
English is so weird. I’d say bi monthly for the ‘every other week’ and bi weekly for twice a week. Despite the fact the the exact numbers on every other week won’t always make it exactly twice in every month… ugh. My brain hurts.
It’s odd that we retain fortnight, a contraction of ‘fourteen night’ but not the similarly-archaic se’enight – ‘seven night’ – for a week. And I know we have the word ‘week’ but there are times when context is your only clue as to whether ‘this week’ means the working, five-day week that ends Friday or within seven days. And yet we have more direct (and therefore redundant) synonyms than any other language. I’m sure this makes sense to somebody, but not me.
This is extremely interesting Ray – I had never heard of se’enight!