Two things are exhausting me at the moment: the heat and the emotional roller coaster. The trouble with being on the roller coaster is that when I descend into the lows I expect them to last forever. I came back from Addis on a bit of a high, full of ideas and inspired to push forward with teachers and the college. The high rapidly turned into a low on Monday. The apathy and passivity in college can be very infectious, and it can be so difficult getting anything done that the college can feel like an energy vacuum. Tuesday wasn’t much better and left me wanting to pack it all in and go home. Today, Wednesday, started off the same way until my colleague Meleshew arrived from Addis and we were able to do some planning for the next few days together. Once I had something to get on with my energy level and motivation started to pick up. Since the conference, and partly because of what I learned about effective professional development while preparing for my session on training, I’ve had some ideas about how to work with the Gondar teachers more effectively. I think we should work intensively with teachers in one cluster of schools until they are able to independently implement sustainable improvements, and then move on to another cluster while continuing to provide support to the first. This way we don’t spread our effort, and therefore effect, too thinly. However, my colleagues are not going to like it. Disagreement I can handle, in fact I can enjoy it as it leads to a dialogue about the best way forward. Unfortunately, the tendency here is to simply agree, or even to say what you think the other person wants to hear, instead of voicing your concerns. I know Meleshew is not quite happy about how I am using what was the Pedagogical Resource Centre as a training room, but she will not say anything to me about it. However, one of the conference sessions called “From Vision to Plan” was very useful and has given me some specific ideas on how to plan collaboratively with my colleagues for next year. We really need to explore our roles again and I need to be better at helping Meleshew to identify what she can get on with without waiting for me to assign tasks to her.