First Day of Teaching Over

It’s Monday night and I have survived my first day of teaching.

Barely.

I had prepared for doom and it… wasn’t too far off. Better than I was expecting, but still pretty bad. One of the main problems is that my home group (the group of about seven to eight kids that I’m ‘in charge of’ are kind of a super bad combination. Even my head teacher agreed, so we’ll be shuffling the kids around a little bit.

The kids are adorable, though. Some of them are sweet and nice and totally willing to play along with everything. Others… not so much. There’s this adorable little girl called Zoey and she’s sweet and everything, but she’s also a little monster who cries crocodile tears when you do something she doesn’t like. 8| Little girl, if you would behave, than I wouldn’t have had to send you to a corner, and I know you understand me.

Some of the kids have really great English! It’s surprising, we were sort of expecting everyone to be super fresh, but it’s a huge mix.

My favorite is a little smartmouth called Jason. He’s one of the older kids, maybe eight or nine? He’s got the basics down really well and he’s an avid reader. I’m not sure why I like him so much, he’s not in my group even, he’s in Nicole’s and he’s a tooootal brat, but it’s the kind of bratty I can work with. He makes fun of how I dance, he’s very insistent that I hear about every single time his classmates misbehave (which means he’s yelling ‘TEACHER, HE’S SPEAKING CHINESE’ at me every two seconds), and he’s got the attention span of a goldfish. But I likes him a lot, I cannot tell you why.

Poor Bryndi was a bit of a silly-head and wore a nice dress and high heels, she had blisters by the time we finished teaching. We actually didn’t teach every single rotation, due to some scheduling slip-ups. We took a picture of our ‘survived the first day’ look. We survived! And I still adore being called teacher.

I ended up getting almost sick at dinner, I’m not sure why. I think it’s because it was high tension while I was teaching and then we went straight to dinner, so I wasn’t settled. I didn’t eat a lot and I just felt gross… Meh.

After dinner, we headed back to the apartments…. You know what’s really funny is that the other teacher and caretakers encourage the kids greeting us, so when a class passes us, the teachers all have the kids chant ‘Hello, Teacher!’. It’s so cute. ♥

I crashed once we got into our rooms. I was just SO TIRED, it was insane. I slept for about an hour and woke up like I’d been hit by a semi. To wake myself up, I went for a walk.

I think the boys (cause the dorms we’re in are only boys, as far as I can tell. Most of the school is boys, though, soooo….) think I’m crazy, because here I am, the weird American teacher, running around their space in my crazy knee high socks and my stupid shorts. So much staring, I wanted to laugh.

So that’s how the first day of teaching was! It was an adventure and I have no idea how I’m going to make this work for the next four months… but we’ll just have to make it work. It’d help if we actually had a proper supply closet, but we don’t seem to have a third of the things that the last ILP team supposedly left us. Ah well.

Anywho! Congrats to the Athens Branch for becoming a Ward. I’m really sad I couldn’t be there, but I heard it was pretty awesome! ^___^ And it’s a little belated, but congrats Kaelyn for finally teething, I know your mommy is super happy with that.

Anything else?

Oh, Val. My teachers want to know when your baby is due in June. 8D I totes cannot remember.