Thursday, how could anything get worse?

School....

That is where my classroom is

view from my apartment

School, from our apartment


It is Thursday night…and my week is drawing to a close, I don’t have much to tell…because I just want to forget all about this week and last week too…but I can’t cause I have to be CHEERFUL cause I am a missionary and I should tell about how everything is going great and about how wonderful things are and how great everything went this week and how much I LOVE teaching and that I just want to do this the rest of my life. Isn’t that what missionaries are suppose to say when they are telling people about their week? Well I’ve got news for you, I HATE teaching…and I really dislike small children…which I should have known before I got out here…but no…I loved my campers and the kids that I worked with at Mt. Aetna…but it is very different when you are their teacher…
I want them to be able to do small but simple things…like being quiet in line or shutting up long enough for teacher to get her patience back or to learn how to sit correctly in their chairs and why I want them to keep their slippers on at all times and how big of a deal it is to keep the classroom trash free…I mean is that so much to ask? I spent my entire week yelling at my kids…telling them not to do this or that…to listen to me and to stay seated when I am talking…but that doesn’t work any more. They do not respect me, not even my aid. We can both scream at them, but they are not scared of us anymore…I wanted to cry so many times today in class…but teachers don’t cry…now do they? We aren’t suppose to let our students see that they are getting to us…when we are angry we need to count to ten and then address the issue…if we must cry, we need to do so behind closed doors…but to be honest, I have fallen and I can’t get up, my kids rule the class at the moment…and I don’t know how to fix it. I am just too tired and weak to get back up, they know that I have nothing to throw at them, they know that they will not go to the principal’s office…or go and stand in the corner anymore…because their teacher…their once strong teacher has taken one too many knocks these last two weeks and can’t get up from the ground…her knees are skinned, her elbows are raw, there are tears in her eyes…and all she can see written in the dirt is FAILURE.
O.k. maybe saying “failure” is taking it too far…but to be honest that is how I feel at the moment…I have hit rock bottom…I have slid down that slippery slope and now I am on my knees looking up and wondering how on earth I am going to get back up to the top…how am I going to fix what has fallen to pieces? How am I going to restore order? What am I going to have to do? I mean I have this like way crazy idea…that could work…but I would have to start from square one…kinda like the painting I was doing in painting I…I was doing something totally different and then I just went wild with it and changed things and well wasn’t scared of the change…I suppose I should do what JR once told me when I was working on the ropes course…to stare my fear in the face and laugh at it…Because I don’t really think that my kids have learned anything these last nine weeks…they might have learned how to get yelled at by teacher…or how to upset their teacher…but what of meaning have they learned? Anything? I am ashamed to say that I think I have failed them as a teacher…I haven’t held up (ohhh big gecko on the wall, nice and fat) to what I came to do…I have gotten tired…tired of teaching the same thing over and over again…bored with the letters and the sounds that those letters make…
Today the father of little Kota told me that his son couldn’t tell or understand the sound “th” like in “they” or “that” which was one of their spelling words…or the rather silent “e” at the end of “have” or “cave” and I said something to the extent of “we will work on that” but will we? I mean that is like the most boring thing ever…I hate working on sounds and that sort of stuff…but is something that I hate…keeping my kids from learning? And is that something really important in the big picture? If they don’t know the sounds how are they going to learn how to read? And reading is very important…I can’t read everything to them for the rest of the school year…I will go crazy. I know that there are things that I hate…things that totally bore me…things that make me so restless…let me tell ya I would so rather be teaching kids how to swim for four hours and then life guarding (which can be really boring) for the rest of the day…then to teach in a classroom…the walls often feel like they are closing in on me…and oh I hate that! I really just love the outdoors too much…
O.k. so I have this really crazy idea…but to make it work I am going to need like 5 packets of construction paper, mats to sit on, a lot of packing tape…and time…of which I don’t have much of…I really wonder if this would really work…I guess only time will tell…right…
We are going camping this weekend…and it suppose to rain (surprise, surprise) so I am sure that I will have something to tell…sorry that this entry wasn’t that uplifting…but this week has been awful…I do not want it to repeat…like EVER!