First Real Day of School

Early to bed. Early to rise. I am by no means a morning person and when I am reminded of the early bird getting the worm the only thing I can think of is why was the worm out so early to begin with? Two days in a row of getting up at 7 o'clock has made me slightly irritable but that will pass once I get back in the groove of school hours instead of my ridiculous amounts of sleeping in I have been doing…Trying to make up for lost time during PST, when I only woke up past 9 o'clock on a handful of occasions the entire two months.

Up by 7:00 and at school by 8:30. However, my first class was 2nd grade which I will not be teaching so I merely sat in the back of the class and spoke my American English when called upon by my partner teacher. The second graders were sort of frightening with their eery ability to sit simply in their chairs, not moving, not talking, just listening. Im going to assume this was a freak occurrence having to do with the fact that this was the first day of classes and that in a few weeks they will soon start to resemble an American class of 2nd graders. Otherwise my other classes acted in a way that was very typical for their age level. The next two classes after the 2nd were tenth grade and other than looking older than 15 they were not much different from what I expected. I had a break during the fourth period and planned my lesson for the 8th grade and 11th grade then. Probably the closest I have ever planned a lesson to the time I planned to teach it. Remarkably, even though the lessons were planned on the spot they worked out well and the school day was over before I knew it. My favorite part from these lessons is that almost all of the 8th grade students labeled themselves as 'Early Birds' since our lesson was about being an early bird or a night owl. Tn the tenth grade we talked about goals and when my tenth grade class 'grows up' half of them will become doctors, while the other half will be teachers, two or three want to be athletes but were open to the possibility of being a doctor or teacher if being an athlete doesnt work out.

My partner teacher made sure put me in the front of the class and tell the students to ask me any questions they wanted as long as it was in English…However none of the students from any of the classes felt comfortable enough with their English to hazard a oral response. I simply informed them I was from America. Pointed where in America on a map. Said I was 22 years old and that I had studied History and Geography for 4 years at university. (Even though technically I was a Social Studies Education major I felt like history and geography were words they were better able to understand.)

Now I am free for the weekend until Sunday when my partner teacher and I will meet to plan for Monday's lesson. Again I have 2 classes of 10th grade which I already have plans for, so we should only have to make plans for the 6th and 7th grade classes we will be teaching.