School Lately

Well, to start off, the Thanksgiving presentation thing was about as much of a disaster as I thought it would be—half my students came with a costume and half didn’t, just about all of them forgot their lines, they skipped like a whole page of the play, and, worst of all, Squanto was a no-show. Hahaha. How can you have a first Thanksgiving play without Squanto? It’s actually kind of hilarious to think about it now. I would do soooo many things differently if I could do it over again—for instance, doing the play with just a couple students who wanted to (seconds before he was supposed to go on, one of the pilgrims was like, “awww meees do we really have to do this?”). Haha. On the other hand, the essays I had the tenth graders read about people in the school they were thankful for (a teacher, administrator, janitor, cafeteria leader, etc.) went over really, really well. I was wishing I had had the twelfth graders do that too. Oh well.

And speaking of doing things over again, I would probably do about 10834823498 things differently if I could start the year over again (give or take a billion), starting with telling people I have a VERY serious bf back home (of course, then I would miss out on the 11^th graders’ daily poems to me—the most recent being “If I had to choose between my life and you, I would choose my life, because my life is you.” Bahahaha wooooow…if he spent half as much time on his homework as he did on his poetry he might actually be passing my class…). Anyway, though, I would do so many things differently. I guess that’s to be expected as a first-year teacher though, even though I feel like I should have known better having studied education. For instance, I would institute some rules on day 1. Not that I didn’t go over rules on day 1, but I never really handed them out or posted them on the wall or anything. It’s just so different because I have 9 40-minute class periods a day and how was I supposed to know that my seventh graders act like fourth graders?! (Not that I’m making excuses for myself, because class rules are preeetty basic.) So I’ve decided I’m going to institute some hard core rules—for seventh grade, anyway. I was debating doing it now, but considering we only have two and a half weeks till Christmas (and that last week is really just practice for the Christmas program), I decided I’m just going to continue with my random and somewhat inconsistent punishments for behaviors that my students have never really been told by me that they can’t do. However, I couldn’t wait till after Christmas to institute some quiz and test rules, because the cheating is just getting completely out of hand. I couldn’t handle it anymore—I was catching two or three students on any given day. So I created some quiz and test rules, put them on a poster, and went over them with all my students. Then I gave them a mini-quiz (with what I thought were ridiculous questions), with questions like:

1.       There is only one person still working on his quiz. What should I do?

a.      Go over to him and look at his answers to the quiz to see if he’s almost done.

b.      Go up and beg Miss Erickson to check the quizzes—just my quiz! Only one! Come on! Just mine! Please!

c.       Continue to work on other homework silently at my desk.

d.      Walk around the room and talk to my friends about the party this weekend.

e.      Yell, “Pucha! Apurate and finish your quiz!”

So my students were cracking up because they thought the possible answers were absolutely hilarious—but the most hilarious part for me is that there were a couple of questions that they honestly weren’t sure about. Also hilarious was that as the students were reading some of the bad, ridiculous answers, they were like, “Hey I do that!” No kidding. Now stop, por favor.

So I had them read these quiz rules and sign it and give it back to me, and their behavior has actually gotten shockingly better during quizzes. (I also gave them a new seating chart for quizzes, which has also helped immensely, because now they don’t argue with me when I tell them to move because they know that’s where they have to sit!) I haven’t caught anyone cheating in several days…although some of their quiz grades have gotten worse. And today I had quizzes in all of my classes (which I won’t do again, because it’s too much grading and having to watch students like a hawk all day to make sure they don’t cheat), and miracle of miracles, I didn’t give anyone a zero or catch anyone cheating. Really, that is incredible. Also, I met one of the eighth graders’ grandmas who works at the bookstore, and the eighth grader told me the next day: “Yeah, I told my grandma that you were good but that bad thing is that you don’t let us copy.” Success. The one thing that still drives me up the wall is that they can’t seem to be quiet after they are done, or when there is like one person left working on the quiz. I’ve realized it’s because they’ve never had to before—I go into another teacher’s class during a quiz and people are talking, or the teacher is grading the students’ quizzes with students hovered around them and other students still at their desks talking and working on their quiz! It’s craziness. But I’ve started giving them word searches or other stuff to work on after their quiz, and that has helped sooo much. Seventh through ninth graders just can’t seem to understand the whole “find something else to work on silently when you’re done,” so I guess I’ll just have to give them something to do.

Anyway. The highlight and funniest part of my day (besides not catching anyone cheating and watching my basketball team attempt to do lay-ups) was finding a snake in the classroom during eighth grade English today. Sort of a weird highlight of the day I guess, but it was absolutely hilarious. So I’m about ready to hand out their quiz and suddenly one of my students starts flipping out and I see a snake crawling out from behind the file cabinet. It wasn’t that big—I mean, bigger than a gardner, but not that big—but of course everyone FREEEEEAAAKED…especially since the class is all girls except for two boys. It was absolutely hilarious…I was pretty much dying…and then I called the science teacher in to take care of it.

Well, what else? I guess I haven’t even written about Thanksgiving…I had the best weekend in Tegus! Maybe Justin will write about this in more detail (ahem, Justin, get back on the blog), but to give you the short version: Thursday we went over to one of the other teachers’ houses all day, which was really nice—she made us a bunch of food (and like normal food like banana bread!) and we played scattegories and bananagrams with her and her kids (they are some of Justin’s students). Then we had a big Thanksgiving dinner with all the other American teachers—there are like 20 of us—from all the Vida Abundante schools in Honduras (there are 6 schools). So it was nice to see them all again (I had met them all at the beginning of August when we all arrived, but hadn’t seen them since then). We had the dinner at the Pastor’s house who founded all the schools, so it was super nice. And they made the best apple crisp I’ve ever had in my entire life (sorry, Dad, it’s better than yours). Friday we went to visit Valle de Angeles (a touristy town I’ve been to several times) with the group, and Saturday Justin and I ditched the group because they were going to La Tigra (which is a hiking spot that Justin and I had already been to before), and went to the pool/hot tub instead at a hotel in Tegus. It was soooo ideal. So it was a great weekend—and I got to take several normal, hot showers, which I didn’t realize how much I had missed!