Monday, Tuesday, & Wednesday

This is Ack, the friendly gecko who scared me last night, I was not expecting to see him on our bathroom wall.

August 28, 2006

There are days that start out good and there are days when you wonder why on earth you didn’t take the time to rest the weekend before or why you had the bright idea of being a teacher. But thankfully those days only happen like once or twice a week…but today I wanted to just scream really loudly at my students…When I ask them to be quiet when walking to the gym, I am not asking them to cut off their right arm or left leg…I just want them to be quiet…I want them to respect me, to respect my wishes and just to listen. But they couldn’t listen this morning…
A typical Monday morning, tired teacher and tired students, teacher that is short on patience, but trying to be cheerful. Students that don’t really want to listen to teacher and would rather do what THEY want to do. Which meant running down to the gym and back, being really loud in class, talking during lunch (a big no, no when you only have 15 minutes to eat), sleeping during important classes like social studies and bible…and generally doing the opposite of what teacher wants.
So by the time my day was over, I was in one of those moods again. The mood that means in your mind the last thing that you want to do for the next three hours is grading an entire stack of assignments. But first we had staff meeting and then the elementary teachers had to stay behind and work on their opening report (the fun of that). After that Joan, Marla and I sat down and watched around 2 ½ hours of Sex and the City which actually sunk me into a worse mood…so when I went down to the work room with Becky I told her that if anyone in the workroom asked me to smile I was going to throw something at them (something heavier then my grading pen) Once I got into the work room I sat down next to Gene, I took out my grading and my CD player…told him not to ask and entered my own little world. Two hours later I exited my small world that I had been living in for the past few hours and connected my computer to the internet and talked to friends back in the states for the next two hours…or more. I worked on my blog and chatted with friends, sent e-mails and was starting to get happy…I stayed up until 1 a.m. Perhaps not the smartest thing to do, but I was happy when I climbed the stairs to my apartment…which for me was a big thing.

August 29, 2006

You know when you are away from home there are things that you start eating because they remind you of home. At home I am not a fan of peanuts, but for some reason I have been having this huge craving for peanuts, not any type of peanuts, but Honey Roasted Peanuts…As Becky and I often said, it is like being pregnant (although we aren’t), we are craving the weirdest things, things that in the states we would never eat.
Today was better then yesterday. Which was really all that mattered, we had worship and sang songs and did Father Abraham (yet again, the new “favorite” of my class, that and who’s the King of the Jungle) Then Mrs. McGuire stopped in to take a look at my class. And my class were little angels…I was shocked. They are NEVER that good. All too soon it was recess time, I told my class that if they walked quietly down to the gym and back I would give them back their afternoon recess…it worked like a charm and they got their afternoon recess.
Now I don’t know what happens at 11:00, but it appears that around that time my students turn off the listening switch in their brains and go crazy. I spent most of my lunch trying to tell them to sit down or stop talking or turn around and eat their lunch that it took me some time to eat my own lunch, but since I am on duty for afternoon recess I have to be done quickly so I can watch the field during lunch recess. The afternoon went down hill after that, and I would rather not talk about it.
When I got back to my apartment in the afternoon I told Marla that I was going to take a quick cat nap…and it felt so good to sleep. Then I dragged myself out of bed and told myself to grade my student’s work and enter the grades…and eat…but once I started working Marla and I decided to go and take a walk around the track. We have both noticed that there are some really “hot” American and Austrian guys that go running on the track, so while we walk around the track we would look for them. But they are usually not around while we are on the track. But it is incentive to get us out of our apartment and exercise.
So I have stayed up sorta late again, but not too late…I got to talk to one of my friends and well that was fun. But only wireless has been us up of late (grrr…) so yeah writing people hasn’t been the easiest, hence why I have a blog. Well anyway that was Tuesday.

August 30, 2006

You know that you have read too much Dr. Suess when you find yourself talking and thinking in rhymes. Now in our school library we have a great abundance of Dr. Suess books…and I find myself reading them to my kids. Because well the books are fun to read and the kids like to see the pictures and well they are just the best. But this afternoon when I went back to my apartment to get my CD’s and drop off my backpack before heading back to my classroom (rather Marla’s classroom) to work on lesson plans for next week. I found myself thinking and talking in rhymes. I was like “Oh no! it is happening again” Kristin when you read this you will understand, for I know that this has certainly happened before…when we read that huge Dr. Suess book…oh and I read them “And to think I saw it on Mulberry Street” As I recall that is one of your favorites.
Now about today, it is amazing how much you can stuff into your student’s brains before 11:00, and how good you can make them by telling them that they will get coins in the jar if they do what teacher says. Now the coins in the jar is how I tell who has been good and who has been bad. If they have been bad, there are a precious few coins in the jar, but if they have been good, the bottom of the jar is filled with coins. The point? Well if they fill the rather large jar they get a surprise the week that they do. It makes them be good if I tell them that they are going to get a surprise. But after 11:00 I really have to try to keep them good. By 11:00 they are hungry, after lunch and lunch recess they are then tired and want to sleep…after afternoon recess they have no thought in paying attention anymore…but as I told one friend I can’t push more into their little brains by lunch time…it is just impossible after you have taught reading, spelling, phonics, and math…they can’t keep it all in. So the afternoons are usually challenging. Which is usually why I have zero patience left for my students by the time I write this blog, but each day usually gets better.
Today was going great until I drank ice tea, now it was hot out and I was thirsty and my roommate offered me some and I was like “that sounds nice” you see the problem that I have when I drink things with large amounts of caffeine is that my system is not used to it so I will get a splitting headache in no time flat and usually with those headaches I get extremely hyper. But this time I just got the splitting headache, I felt like if I stood to long I was going to fall over and crash to the floor (which happens to be concrete, not the best thing to land on) so I tried to do things with my kids that didn’t involve too much work on my part. So this afternoon was called “let’s do a bible worksheet for the next hour and thirty minutes!” and somehow it worked…maybe it was because I had to repeat the directions about 40 times, but it took just the right amount of time.
After school I walked past Mark’s room down to Marla’s room. We were going to do lesson plans for next week. This is now a tradition that we have, every Wednesday afternoon we head to each other’s classroom with our books and filled out lesson plans…mine are always more detailed so it takes me longer to finish…Once we finished that we headed back to the apartment. Once I entered in my grades into my computer I realized that I was done with all that I needed to do. “My goodness!” thought I “What am I going to do with all of this free time?” Marla and I decided to watch a movie…(even though we aren’t suppose to) we watched Mr. and Mrs. Smith…a good movie…after the movie we ate some of Joan’s good cooking and talked with Alex who had been invited over for supper by Joan. (Alex is the youngest out of all the SM’s…only 19 years old)
Then after supper I went down with Becky to her classroom, I was going to work on my blog, but there were too many people in the workroom so I joined Becky and offered to sweep her classroom…when I did that I noticed that she was under a pile of homework papers, not yet graded. SO I offered to help her, she was rather surprised, but I insisted on helping. We finished at 12a.m. and then headed back to our apartment.
Now people in the states have cats to keep away mice and rodents, here we have geckos to keep away random annoying bugs. Now the geckos rang from tiny to small to big in our apartments. We have Tiny, JJ, Junior, Oscar, Killer, Big boy (who actually isn’t a gecko, but a normal lizard), Baby girl (who is huge), and Ack…Now Ack got his name by scaring the living day lights out of me last night when I walked into the bathroom to brush my teeth. He is a rather large gecko, about three to four inches long and thicker then someone’s thumb. And I do not like sharing the bathroom with a gecko that big, no matter how much I like geckos, that was certainly pushing it. But then again it was midnight...I shouldn't have been up in the first place.