"You're indispensible to this school, Daniel." So spoke Hanson, an elementary student with a penchant for learning a word and then using it on everyone. The sentiment was strangely timed: I was about to head back to the office to print off a few more documents to prepare for my interview at another school.

"Thank you, Hanson. You're so kind." The interview, early tomorrow morning, has hardly rippled me yet. But it may lurk in my dreams tonight. I'll be sitting before three interviewers, all whom I expect to give me a testing time. And so they should if I were an interviewer, I'd insist on troubling applicants so much that they'd all thought they'd failed, just so that we can know that there was some questions that pushed them to the exact lines of what they think they are and what they might in fact be. I'm sometimes scared about the discrepancy between what I think I am and what I really am.

If it comes to be that I leave my school, I'll be sad and I might not be the only one. Perhaps one of the keys to my motivation to teaching is that I believe that I subconsciously buy into the progress of all of my students. It makes it easy to spend time with them when you are sometimes just as dedicated to their progress as they are. But at the same time, I have this connection with between fifty to one hundred students; to leave them feels like leaving the job undone and letting them down at the same time. I'm taking some solace in the fact that several of the longer term students with whom I've established a great teaching rapport are nearing the ends of their contracts too.

The summer rains descended on Southern China, drowning many and cleansing the land. In the cities though, it was just a damp period of weeks: washing doesn't dry; you can enjoy days without sweating yourself silly before one even goes through the front door in the morning and; mosquitoes feed. Of course, there is still the daily maximum near 30 degrees but at least the temperature can drop to 25. Needless to say, that relief has ended and we're back in the sauna again.

I'm also two days away from being in the Philippines. This is after a lightning whip around Zhuhai and Macau two weeks ago. Life is not going to let up anytime soon.