Christmas & New Years in the Land of the Morning Calm…

This was touch and go for a while.   I changed my mind again and again.  In the end I decided to keep put. It was a tough decision, but I figure it’s better the devil you know.   I know some people who got great placements and others who have not had fun to say the least.  My placement isn’t perfect but I wouldn’t characterize it as bad.  The biggest difficulty is having so many different teaching partners.  I’m generally on my own as far as lesson plans are concerned.  I preferred my original setup where my partner and I made our lessons together and taught together.    I’m actually quite nervous about my second year.  The last time I extended my contract, the second year turned out to be much tougher.  Anyways the trick is to try and keep nothing but good thoughts and half-full glasses going forward.

Gone Christmas eve shopping:
I didn’t get paid until Dec 24th last month, so the bulk of my shopping was done last minute.  It was still a very successful Christmas.  The shopping highlight was the gift wrapping.  I paid, and oh how I paid to have five gifts wrapped for K.  They did a very nice job, and at the end the wrapper wrote the total on paper for me.  I should have been sitting down; 68,000W, about $60 cad.  There’s a lesson learned here, always ask how much before getting something done.

Written the never-ending story:
Actually it’s the Master’s application.  Everything is finished except the bloody statement of purpose.  The literary equivalent of a nice colonoscopy.   I’ve never been terribly good at writing this sort of thing. If I was given a choice of confessing to a crime I didn’t commit or writing a CV, odds are I’d wind up in jail.   Hopefully sometime this weekend I’ll work up the courage to do it.

Conducted open class at the elementary school:
A lot of work went into this.  Usually these are done co-operatively, teachers discuss what activities to do, and how they should be done.  This time however, my partner saddled me with just about everything, I scripted the lesson plan, set up the extra materials and PPT, he also left it to me to edit the video afterwards.  The class went decently overall, but I don’t feel comfortable enough with this one to put it online.  To be honest, I’ve grown somewhat disenchanted with my elementary work.  The students are really great and I do enjoy teaching them a lot,  but at the same time I feel isolated.  My partners seem to be under the impression that I’m the teacher and they are the police and occasionally translators.

prepping ‘Vacation Classes’:
I didn’t get any camps this time around, but I do have some special vacation classes to teach.  I’ve been up and down the web looking for game-based activities for my students.  Tentatively I settled on the following for middle school:  A winter-themed lesson;  A map-making lesson; How to play cribbage lesson; A cooking lesson (choose a dish – write a recipe);  Cooking demo + movie and eat what we made.  I’m hoping the students will enjoy it as it is going to be very heavy on preparation.  I also have some elementary classes as well. In this case, the students are supposed to do some self-study using materials from our new shiny state of the art classroom.  I’ve got one group of fifteen to manage for three hours twice next week so I figure I’ll probably set up stations and break them up into three groups of five and rotate the students to a new station every 30-40 minutes.  I’ll also try to set up some kind of review activity for each station.  It’s been my experience that the students do better at this sort of thing when they know they have a goal to work towards.  Overall I had 36 classes between the two schools, but thanks to some snowy weather ten of my classes were cancelled.

Overall 2009 was a good year.  Far better than 2008.  Let’s hope 2010 is even better.