Thursday, August 16, 2007

Exhaustion!!!

We have reached 3:40 PM, which under normal circumstances would mean the school day is over, but today means we have to keep a bunch of wiped-out kids in the room until the assembly, when we have to keep them still for about two hours of hymns, speeches, and plaque presentations. I have them doing their math homework now, but that'll be done soon and I have no idea what will happen next. I don't think this afternoon was planned with child psychology in mind. Or teacher psychology, actually.

A good day but with some things to be concerned about. If a class has a non-Asian kid in it, that kid (at least today) always appears to be on the edge of things, which is not going to be okay at all in the long run and isn't good in the short run either. The sixth grade is... shall we say, high-energy? Welcome to hormone-ville. And it's so hard to teach a class when half the kids are looking at you like, "I have no idea what you just said to me." Except they're probably thinking it in Korean.

Anyway, tomorrow should be yet another very interesting day. And at least I'll probably get to teach it on a full night's sleep - yesterday I was so nervous that I probably slept three hours.

2 comments:

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Bearess said...

I taught sixth grade. It's a challenge. Only I taught it in English. Well, mostly. I mean, I was teaching Latin, but we all know no one speaks that. So it was English.

Hands-on activities. That's the key. Oh, and don't forget the whole "kinetic learning" thing. Just because they're twitching, squirming, flailing and tapping, that doesn't mean they're not learning. It may mean no one in their vicinity could possibly learn anything, but it doesn't mean they themselves are not learning.

Good luck balancing that one.