Sept 24 2013

Tuesday!

My busy day with four classes. I had planned for us to head out in time for breakfast before 8.

But I woke up a little too early and had the worst night of sleeping since I’ve gotten here, so I crawled back under my blanket and changed my mind. We left an hour later than we originally planned, which suited us perfectly fine!

Oh, and shortly after we did get up, this guy across the street at one of the shops was putting off fireworks or something. More like little sticks of dynamite. We might be 9 floors up but that doesn’t do much of a thing at all. It was super loud, and all that went up in the sky was smoke. But it was kind of funny and intriguing to watch, and since I was already out of bed, I didn’t mind it too much. I just wish I had some idea why the heck that was happening…

Anyways, we got to the school and planned our lessons. I’ve really got to start putting down a system, and I think it’s slowly beginning to evolve. It’s sure taken it’s time but something is coming together and that’s the important thing! Anyways, I planned out a piece or two for my craziest class, and headed off to teach.

They’re getting a hang of my system, which is very good, thank goodness. It didn’t go too badly over. They were good enough to have time for a “DVD” today, so I let them pull up their video file on the computer and they watched this short cartoon clip of some dog. However, it was only 3 minutes long and I accidentally said yes to it with ten minutes still to go… so I let them watch a second one, but turned it off after that, and tried to review a few things really fast. By then, obviously, I had lost control which sucked but luckily class was coming to an end and within another minute, I was waving my way out of there!

Katie and I went to lunch for a bit, and then she headed out before it started sprinkling. I still had 3 hours till my next class but didn’t want to walk to and from, so I stuck around my office and read and goofed on the internet for a bit. I tried preparing for a bit more as well, for my next three classes.

I definitely need to prepare some more.

I think it’s my Grade 4 class, where there’s this boy and girl who always want to control the PowerPoint slides, and will share the chair and power through a few little fights. But I let them; it doesn’t really concern me too much. They’re well behaved, so they deserve it.

It was with this class that I ran out of things to do, and kept fiddling around with my extra slides to keep the kids busy and thinking and let time run out on us. The class finally ended, though, so that was good.

Afterwards, I taught Grade 5 which ended up getting out of hand. They did average with their behavior- but I repeated a game Katie had done with them, I figured it would be somewhat easy to use a game they already understood and change part of it.

It took a few tries, however, to explain the trick- we were doing Opposites, which was a bit much for some of them at first. I felt very bad! But if they’d been properly listening they would have got it all- it just took longer, that’s all. They started getting into the game.

And too much into the game. I made the mistake of letting two bigger boys go at it at the same time. They didn’t even know what work to look for, but they took to shoving each other- I couldn’t even pull them off. I had at least two kids attempt to tear them apart which didn’t help. Then I had two girls come up and say it was a good game, but with bad parts, and so we decided the game had to stop.

Otherwise, it had gone all right. There were only a few more minutes after that, so we reviewed the words one last time just as the bell was ringing, so that wasn’t too bad. I grabbed my things, hurried back to the office and then walked back next store to my final class of the day.

Eager bunch, these Grade 3 kids! They had some turtles and fish in some small containers which kept them pretty fascinated throughout class. However, they did pretty bad with my grading system. It took them a while to understand it, but by then it was about too late. This was a bit easier to handle- this is the class where I only follow through the book, and usually as class begins I peak through their book to make sure I’m in a close area of what they might be doing, and that’s what we do. I put in the CD to let them listen to something- it usually gathers their attention- and we do a few of the little worksheets.

They’re very, very eager to show me what they’ve done- and to show it to me again and again. It’s a little hectic, so I need to find a way to… not curb their enthusiasm, but help the class as a whole to control it a little better, I suppose. I had one of my troublemakers trying to drag me over to his desk to show me his workbook, while I was talking to one of the kids, and that bothered me a bit but we worked it out all right.

By that time, it was just after 5 PM and there was rain! A good amount of it, too! So Katie texted me that she wasn’t going to bother with dinner at the school and that we should just get noodle bowls next door to our place on my way home. So, home I went! I stopped at the bakery for food, and met Katie at the little shop next door and we headed up.

The electricity was off again, though the elevator was working. This meant we couldn’t have hot water, which was a bother. We got changed into our silly Chinese pajamas, and read until the sun set shortly after. So we fiddled with Katie’s ukulele and chatted for a while until the electricity came back on.

We laughed over Monty Python, ate our dinner and ice cream, and are closing with our books and journals. Quite a busy day!