Week 2 of teaching and the adventures continue

So yeah, this is at the top of Twin Falls, and I jumped off of it...got video of it too...20 t0 25 foot drop, very exciting.

August 21, 2006

Hey all, I successfully finished school today. I mean it went so well I was amazed. I decided to do something a little different in my classroom. First off yesterday (Sunday) I reorganized my room, rearranging the desks and shelves and the one lone bench. I put every student in the boy girl format and separated the girls that always would talk. I put the bad students in the front and the well behaved ones in the back. Then I put two long desks in the back of the classroom where I decided that I would split up my class into three groups and work with each group for 15 minutes during the longer classes (like Reading and Math) And you know it worked really well, I was surprised. The ones that weren’t working with me were busy working on Busy Books (who ever came up with the idea of busy books was a total genius) anyway my teacher’s aid helped those students while I worked with the other students and things worked out great in the morning.
Now when morning recess came along I made it clear to my students that I wanted it to be quiet as we walked down to the gym, no pushing or shoving, no looking into the windows of other classrooms as we walked by and to stay to the far left (towards the field and away from the windows). And I told them that if they did they would loose their afternoon recess, you know how much kids love recess. So that was the plan. Now you would think that it wouldn’t be all that hard to do, but I seem to have been mistaken. As usual half of my students were quiet and the other half did everything that I told them not to. So I took away the recess for the entire class. When 1:15 rolled around all my students had their heads down on their desks and were quiet for the most part. (That 15 minutes was the longest time ever) For some reason one of my kids decided to make animal noises while they had their heads down, since I didn’t know who it was I kept giving out warnings and when it wouldn’t stop I took five minutes away from my classes P.E. time in the morning…they wouldn’t stop so what else could I do?
Lunch was good except for some reason my students can not get ready in time and since they only have 15 minutes to eat it makes things harder. This week I have lunch off (which is very nice, I can usually get a few things done during that time, like finish eating) so my class usually doesn’t get done with lunch until late and then they are really loud and I can’t get them to calm down enough to line up before they go outside for the half an hour lunch recess (we are always the last class out). After lunch recess is story time and after story time is Language, Spelling, and Handwriting (each of those are 15 minute segments) and during that time I work with the class as a whole. I practically give them the answers, but as usual there will be at least two students that seem to go to their happy place when I am going over the worksheet with them. And when that happens I will usually hear as soon as I finish explaining “Teacher I don’t know what to do.” At which point I tell them “I just explained it, you were suppose to be following along.” And although I should be very strict and say “Too bad for you, you should have been listening, I usually will call those lost students over and work with them and help them understand…let’s just say that my patience gets stretched quickly.
Bible is just coloring worksheets; all the books that they have here are way over my student’s heads…I wish that I had some of the books that Mrs. Mason used when we were in grade school or even now for that matter. So yeah mom if you could get a hold of her in some way that would be great. J So while they are coloring I am reading to them and my voice is usually about gone after the 30 minutes. And then we have social studies. We are working on a project called “all by myself and with my friends” and we started working on it last week and we are still working on the same project, I don’t know how I am ever going to get them caught up to this weeks lesson plans. We are getting far behind.
Social Studies is the last subject of the day, but it always takes some time to get the students to clean up their desks and pack up their backpacks and then get them to sit back down and wait for the clock to say 3:00. And when that happens I am so happy to be free as my kids walk (well really run) out the door.
Today was shopping day, the ship came in yesterday and that is like a big thing here. Because that means fresh produce and more choices and that is great cause like the boat only comes like every month or so…I don’t really know (Kelli how often does the boat come?) Anyway it is a big deal, you would only understand if you were stuck on an island and all of your food comes by boat, so mail comes by plan and food comes by boat. Fascinating isn’t it. Shopping was the same as normal, I enjoyed it but I was thinking of all the stuff that I needed to be doing instead of shopping, but I am done now and so I can write you and eat, I haven’t eaten supper yet…cause I wanted to get my grading done and I am done, but now I am rather hungry. So maybe I should go and eat. This week will be better then last week, cause I am more in the groove for teaching, so I don’t hate it anymore, I just dislike it at times…hate is a very strong word, so I shouldn’t say it much. Well it is 8pm and I am going to go so that I can eat and go to bed at 9:30 so that I can get up at 5a.m. so that I can have a long God time. I need that time so that I will survive the day and have the patience to get through my day. So all of you I love you and miss you…and snail mail would be great! The internet is down five days out of seven, so snail mail is important to me J Please write!

August 22, 2006

Well today was one of those days when Emily lost her patience right early on in the morning. Now it would be easier to teach these kids if they listened to what I told them. But they don’t, instead they do what they want and wonder why on earth I got upset at them and had to yell at them to get my voice heard. Now you would think that if one takes away enough recesses that it might sink in that they are doing something wrong. Obviously I was wrong; now what I ask for them to do when we are walking to recess is to 1. Walk quietly (no talking) 2. No pushing 3. Hold hands (they hold hands in a line and walk down the hall) 4. Do not walk next to other classroom windows (they have this bad habit of looking into other classroom windows and yell or talk to those inside…other teachers don’t like it, really distracting). Now that is all that I ask. Four little things, only four, you would think this wouldn’t be hard…but they talk loudly as they walk towards the gym, they push and shove, they will unlink and run to the windows and look in…talking to those that are inside. Which is exactly what I told them not to do like 80 times before we go out and before we go back in. so when they disobey me they get time taken away (5 minutes per thing they do wrong) so usually by the time we get to the gym or get back to the classroom their afternoon recess has been taken away. Which is exactly what happened today, I couldn’t believe that it would happen again, but then again with my class it is totally possible.
This afternoon it was like the listening switch was turned off and the not listening switch was turned on. By the time school was out I was sick of hearing “teacher! Teacher! I don’t get it!” “Teacher what are you doing?” “T-E-A-C-H-E-R! C-A-N I GO P-E-E?!” we hear that line so much that the teachers once in their own apartments will just randomly say “I have to pee really bad” our kid’s speech is starting to rub off on us. It is suppose to be the other way around, the things we tell our kids will rub off on them, but I think that is yet another thing that we underestimated.
After school it was decided that we (the girls) should go out to eat. But for once I didn’t want to do, honestly my day had been really long and the last thing that I wanted to do was be in a group of people, and more importantly I just wanted me time. I wanted to be able to write Tim and to write you all. I just wanted some alone time. And honestly it was really nice, I was able to write three pages on Tim’s letter and I have been writing you all, and I got to have a nice quiet supper and I didn’t have to pay for it and it was just nice. Also it is like 9:00p.m. and I can go to bed because I finished all of my work around 6:30 p.m. and going to bed early is like finding gold in Maryland. So I am off to bed J

August 23, 2006

Hey all,
Today was a slightly better day, I decided to try something a little different in class, like for reading I added spelling and phonics, so that with each group I did three different things with them…so I taught each subject three times…so by the time I was done with “reading” I had already taught something (well lets see spelling 3 times, phonics 3 times, reading 3 times) nine times…and yeah by the time I get done I’m like no more neigh I say neigh! Yeah it does get to you after a while. Math went really quick because all they had to do was count the objects and write down the answer on the blank, but they still missed a lot of work, I really don’t know why…we did it together and well you would think that they would get a one hundred percent, but that is just wishful thinking.
So yeah the most common questions that I get during the morning is “When is recess?” “Can we go play?” “What are we doing?” “What are you doing now?” Once lunch is over, the next question I get is “When do we go home?” at that point there is still like 2 hours left until school is out and their brains have shut off and they are working on battery power and most likely most of them will fall asleep while I am talking to them.
Today was library day, so we went to the library and looked at books, I started looking for books that I would be able to read to my students. After I found them I found a book called “Life among the Samurai” and something about the name clicked in my mind. I remembered Tim telling me once that if he could have picked a time period to have lived in he would have wanted to live in ancient Japan during the time of the Samurai. Now I didn’t know what was so great about it except that Tim has studied martial arts, and well likes it and all. So I decided to check out the book and read some of it for myself…I would just like to say that there is nothing about that time period that is awesome. I mean it was a gross and horrible time period and the group of people were um not really that nice, the stuff that they did (gross!) and I haven’t even read the book yet, I just looked at the pictures. But they were good at fighting (since that appears to be the class that it was) but I hope that martial arts is the only thing that he likes about that time period.
Anyway after the library things went rather slow and when school got out I got to make lesson plans (the most funniest thing to do ever) it took about two hours to complete and after that Marla and I went back to the apartment and I started grading papers (oh boy) but I am done now, finished about 45 minutes ago it is about 9:00 and I am going to bed! I like going to bed early and getting up early, so I am going to say bye to you all right now, talk to you later. J

August 24, 2006

Well right now Raz and Cable are in our apartment, Joan gave them a cooking lesson (well Raz got the lesson, Cable cleaned the fish). It was actually very funny, 1st off our apartment “play fights” we argue and laugh and yell at each other and then start cracking up…so Raz and Joan were “fighting” and he asked us how on earth we could stand it ever day, I piped up and said “We’re used to it” (I was meaning that we do it all the time) he was like “Oh that was mean, that is it! You are off the ‘good’ list” by then I was dying of laughter and trying to hide my face behind the papers that I was grading (I had quite a stack). I wondered “was I ever on the good list?” From there we just started to joke and “fight” and laugh. I feel very much more on the healthy side, laughter is good for you right? When it was time to eat Marla and I declined the offer to eat the orange fish (complete with head and tail). Both of us like fish, but we had A) eaten already and B) Fish makes us both sick when we eat it. Besides I didn’t want to eat something that was looking at me while I ate it. Cable was in charge of saying grace and near the end of his prayer he said “and please help us not to get sick or be poisoned by Joan’s cooking” (Raz, Joan, Marla, and myself were snickering during the prayer and burst out laughing as soon as he said amen.) He was very confused at why we were all laughing, but once we told him he claimed that he had said something totally different. Which made all of us laugh all the more. As Joan, Raz and Cable ate I continued to grade my papers and enter the grades into the grade book and then into my computer. But it took quite some time to do, I was laughing so much that my stomach started to hurt.
Well Raz asked me if I liked it here, like if it was all that I imagined. I told him yes and he said that he predicted that there were lots of SM’s that weren’t going to make it. So we have just been talking and laughing and talking some more. It has been really nice, I mean there are times when you are so ready to come home, but yet you do like it here, and having people over makes it like 20 times easier to go on another 9 months.
Cable and Raz bicker quite a lot…and as they got ready to go, Joan insisted that they take the curry and the fish back to their apartment, Cable wanted to put the left-over fish on a plate…Raz told him to put the fish in the tinfoil that he had, but Cable said the plate would be better…and so they argued about that fact for three minutes until Raz handed Cable the fish rapped in tinfoil. Then the task of putting the curry into containers, now Raz new that the curry would fit into a medium size container and a very small container, on the other hand Cable thought that they needed a very large container. So then that argument started and I just sat there and laughed. Raz won again, but then someone had to take the food back to their apartment…Raz wanted Cable to and Cable wanted Raz to. Both of them had all of their stuff in the teacher’s work room, but in the end Cable won the fight and Raz was on his way back to his apartment with his food…then us girls cleaned up the kitchen and enjoyed our evening.
Now about today, it went well to an extent. I mean worship was a lot of fun and I got my kids to laugh. I sang to them Halalala-a-la-lu-ya and they all laughed and we had a lot of fun. And a lot of things went well, but my first graders aren’t used to being in school until 3pm, in kindergarten they got out of school at 12:00. So in the afternoon they are usually very tired and it is hard to teach them anything. But they were pretty good today, I can’t say anything bad about them, there were some kids that missed 12 minutes of recess for the entire day. I mean you would think that they would learn not to act up and all when they see check marks getting put next to their names. But they don’t seem to notice, must help that they don’t know how to read. But well I am going to go because I have been laughing too much. But I all miss ya. Bye.

August 25, 2006

It is Friday! Hallelujah! But today was one of those days, you know where the kids are really, really good during worship, like we had a lot of fun we sang Who’s the King of the Jungle, Father Abraham, Jesus Love is a Bubbling Over, My God Loves Me, The Clapping Version of Jesus Loves Me…and others that I can’t remember…I told them the story of Copper and Buffy wanting into the house and how my parents would squirt her with the spray bottle and how persistent she was…I told them God is that persistent with us, he will not give up no matter how we try to push him away…I have to come up with worship talks for my kids and I am starting to run out of ideas. But half way through worship I could see that my students were going to be a handful that day…and they were…they wouldn’t listen even when I started writing names on the board…I didn’t shout at them all morning long…not until the afternoon when I surprised myself and screamed at them…well I didn’t scream out more then one word…like you couldn’t even hear yourself think…I yelled out “Quiet!” and the room was dead silent. I lectured them on what I expected of them and told them that they were in the 1st grade now and that they shouldn’t act this way. So basically if you really want to tell how bad that they were…on Monday the entire class will miss 20 minutes of their first recess (which is only 30 minutes long) and then between 8 other students they have 34 minutes between them. So yeah listening on Friday was not something that they were able to do easily. Which made my day rather long…but no matter how awful my class was in the classroom recess was something to behold.
Now the favorite thing to do during recess is to take empty water bottles and stomp on them…then you stand on them and your friends pull you around the gym and to be honest you get going pretty fast and sometimes the one getting pulled might lose his or her balance and wipe out on the gym floor…now when that happens some other student comes running up to me or some other teacher and says “Teacher, Teacher! Someone is crying! Over there!” now they say over there and don’t usually point so you are left to look through this mass of running and screaming students until you find the injured one. So the first student that I had to go and pick up from the floor…had been sliding around on those plastic bottles, lost his balance and hit the floor with the back of his head. I took him over to sit by me, I check the back of his head to make sure that he wasn’t bleeding, then I wiped away his tears, then I talked to him and made sure that he was o.k. Soon he went on his way…running back to those that had made him fall in the first place. About five minutes later, one of my students by the name of Denzel ran up to me and said “teacher, teacher, come quick _______ is crying” So he pointed yet again into the crowd of children grabbed my hand and pulled me to the student. Now I recognized the kid holding the back of his head and sobbing (he is usually running around the gym hitting his buddies with his slippers…side note: slippers are flip flops)…anyway I knew that he was a tough kid and it had to be something really big to make him cry. Now once I got an idea of what happened (sobbing children are hard to understand, so it thow they got hurt out of). Denzel grabbed my hand again and started dragging me over towards the stairs to show me “who did it” and the little boy who had been hurt hung onto my other hand. At the stairs Denzel pointed out “who had done it” and I looked straight at a little girl who was swinging on the stairs looking very innocent…(I was like this little girl made this tough boy cry) so I asked her “Did you hit him?” she said “Yes” I asked “Why?” She stated “Because he wouldn’t share.” With that I took the little boy to sit by Maggie (One of the 2nd grade teachers) while I took the naughty little girl to Mr. B…she came back crying. But what did she expect; she hit a little boy as hard as she could on the back of his neck to make him share with her, did she really think that she would get away without seeing Mr. B? Apparently.

August 26, 2006

Happy Sabbath! Today was a wonderful day (until we had to go to the funeral that is…but more on that later) After Church, actually around the time we were finishing lunch a small piece of gravel came flying through our door…skipping across the floor. I walked out the door and peered over the railing of the porch. There I found Mark grinning up at me…I asked “You rang?” The younger boys (also known jokingly as the hot boys) were going to walk to Twin Falls…a good 45 min to an hour walk from the school. Becky and I decided that it would be fun, Marla was sick, and Joan decided that she also wanted to go. 15 minutes later we were making our way down the road and into the jungle. The boys all ran ahead and the girls were left behind (well Gene was with the girls…and he is definitely not a girl) Now the walk to Twin Falls took a long time, we had to walk threw this grass that was past my waist and grabbed at your shoes and had these ants that crawled along the ground that would bite you as hard as they could on your toe…how do I know this? Experienced it…it hurt so bad…it was like the ant took revenge on my foot for all those who had just stepped on his home…I have a nice little red mark on my foot from that stupid ant. Have you ever sweated so much that you had droplets of sweat dripping off your nose and your chin? Just running down your face? But the funny thing is that I really don’t notice how hot it is anymore…I mean we are always out in it and so I just don’t find it so hot anymore and besides that fact that we were sweating a lot it wasn’t all that bad of a hike…even though it was really long. Now twin falls is wonderful…it is really pretty…now there are two waterfalls and we jump off the upper one (the first one that you come to) Now the boys had beaten us to the falls and when we climbed down to it we could hear them jumping in…the water there is deep, like there is no way that you can touch the bottom from any height that you jump. The part that you jump off of is anywhere between 20 to 25 ft high. I was the second to last girl to jump, we waited until there was only 15 minutes left (Jon does that sound familiar?) Anyway I jumped and I have video of me jumping…the fall was so long (actually I hit the water in less than 2 seconds) I was starting to wonder, as I dropped, if I would ever hit the water…but I did…and felt the impact of hitting the water in a more or less sitting position (the fall was so long that I wasn’t as straight as I should have been when I hit the water) because of that by the time I started to swim up to the surface I had done a complete flip underwater. The current tried to pull me off the next drop off (which is the second waterfall) but I am a lifeguard after all and I didn’t have any problem swimming to the rocks where I could sit with the other girls and watch the boys jump in. The boys were crazy…they were jumping off and doing front flips and back flips and diving in and all of that stuff…surprised that no one got hurt. But it was so much fun, Mr. B. came and picked us up and that saved a lot of walking time (which was a good thing) cause we had to get ready to go to a funeral…it was so boring…I mean everything was in Pohnpeian (Kelli how do you spell that?) So we sat there from 7 till 9:30 trying to stay awake…and it was so boring…like I said before…my little mind wandered and I was so tired, I still am…I’m just up writing you all, It was a good experience, but I hope that we don’t have to stay out late for every Saturday night, cause it is so getting old.
Anyway tomorrow Mr. B. is taking us to the ruins, which will be fun and I can’t wait. But I really think that I should get and sleep a few hours…we leave at 9 o’clock tomorrow morning and I would like to be in a good mood. Talk to you all later