I went to Garrison today. I went to bed late, and woke up later, walked to the metro and just missed the bus I was planning on riding, and rather than improvising, like I have in the past (and failed miserably) I made the very smart decision just to ride the Metro to the closest stop, and I got there right on time. I proudly turned in my letter of permission, and walked up to Mr. Abdulluah's room.
He has twenty seven students, and knows how to command the classroom. The kids listened and were attentive to him. There was awesome learning and it was great to be in an elementary classroom for the morning. They were doing sounds or vowels, and Mr. Abdulluah was instructing the students to become fluent in reading by doing a little competitive game. He put a overhead up with a random list of different vowel suffixes i.e. uck, ank, ing, in, up, with a total of sixty of them, and then he challenged the students to read them as fast and as correctly as they could. It was fascinating. There were students at every level, some almost competing with Mr. Abdulluah's score of 26 seconds. A girl named Reina got thirty one seconds, Ayana got 33 seconds. He joked that he was going to have me read the words and break all the records, but I never went, which was fine.
The students did all this instead of going to the library, because the librarian wasn't there, and the sub arrived late. Their next activity of the day was P.E., which Mr. Abdulluah and I walked down to the gym/cafeteria with them, but then went back up to the classroom to grade papers and listen to npr. I graded a set of twenty-seven math tests about rounding. So they grade according to numbers now. 4 is the best. 1 is the worst. Go figure.
I had lunch in the teacher's lounge, and had a great talk with two of the ladies that were in there eating lunch at the same time as me. Of course I had to explain myself, saying I was a volunteer doing an internship, not a student teacher, and that I was from Ohio (I said ,"Yep" and one of the ladies laughed and said, "Where you from? I haven't heard 'yep' in a long time, you must be from somewhere country")
After lunch, the kids had to take Theme Tests, which were preparing them for standardized tests. (which are horrid). Mr. Abdulluah had a new student that was from Sweden. Her name was Chloe and she spoke only French (I think she might also speak Swedish, but they didn't identify that). Mr. Abdulluah asked me to go work with her to get her to start with some English. The only words I know in French are how to say French in french, I know how to say "hello" and a rather formal way to say "how are you?" but I worked with her, showing her pictures and asking her to say the word "en francois" and then I would say it in English. We did the alphabet, and some scattered nouns, and so when I decided to try to teach Chloe some verbs, I started enthusiastically doing them. "Sitting" on my "butom" (french for butt, I'm supposing), walking, running, dancing, jumping, each one I would say in English and she would say in French. It was really interesing to me how much the english language is harsher in the sounds of words than the French language. I tried to learn a little bit of French as I went, but nothing really stuck. I think I'm past that gluing stage, unfortunately, and so now I have to apply a lot more pressure to make things stick.
There were several little girls in the class who were loving on me the entire time I was there. They would come and hug me and lean their head on my shoulder and it was so great. I love kids. They all wanted to do what I do (I was skipping steps on the way up the stairs, and they were talking behind me. "she's skipping stairs!" "I want to skip stairs!"). Chloe and I went back into the classroom for choice time (after Mr. Abdulluah came in and told me that they were having choice time (aka indoor recess) I attempted to navigate through some flash cards to attempt to tell her what we were going to do, but for the life of me I didn't know what 'to play' was in French, and my Spanish wasn't helping at all. I found a picture of a girl and a boy and a doll, but I don't think I got the message across. I declared that I was going to have Jess teach me some French verbs when I got home so I could communicate with her.)
After choice time, he went in to Math, and went over the tests. When I was grading them, I noticed that most of the time, the questions that were missed were because they didn't read the directions. Oh woe is the one who doesn't read the directions.
After Math the day was basically over. There was a multiplication bee and a spelling bee. Then the day was over, and Mr. Abdulluah got out some treats to give to the class, but only after he read through the list of names of people who had disrupted class that day, who were disqualified from getting a treat. It was a pretty awesome reward, I think.
I took the Metro home, and just chilled for the rest of the day. I got TWO care packages! One from West Clinton MYF (awesome. Thanks guys!) and one from a small group at Ridgeway Mennonite (which was completely awesome). It was so ironic, though. I gave up sweets for Lent, and I'm a vegetarian, so the Ramen noodles and sweet things involved in the gifts were much appreciated by my housemates. . . :)
Volleyball was frustrating. I was on a team of all men, for one thing, but one of them is crazy competitive (which normally I don't mind, but it was bothering me to no end on Tuesday), and I just felt like every single thing I did was criticized. We had won our first games, but after that, we had a couple of losses and it felt like our team was falling apart. But then we started pulling it together, everybody started working with everybody. I started talking back-- [:)]--something that I needed to do, and I felt like I was doing a lot better at the game.
No comments:
Post a Comment