i love my gay dead son (or, long post about teaching)
i think i know why people become teachers. before i give a test i always have a review session. for various reasons, the majority of the students rarely study for tests, so this way i know they atleast looked at their notes for 45 minutes. the session is usually a game, the brain competition (it sounds better in portuguese, aliteration), bar trivia style. they make teams of 4, i read a question, they have 1 minute to write down the answer and hand it in, i talk about the concept and then if they have the right answer they get a point. they seem to like it. mostly cause i give the winning team stickers. so this upcoming test is about the diegestive system, and i wanted to make sure they get the differance between the digestive tube and the auxilary (?) organs. so one of my questions was "what do you call the form of the food stuffs when they are in the liver?" almost every class got it wrong. i had answers ranging from bile (close), blood (less close) to feces (nope). which was, of course, fustrating because the very last lesson we had wrapped up the difference between the two parts of the system. but in one class i know that at least one student could get it right, because he did the wrapping up for me in that class. so after i read the question i watched in anticipation as the kids ripped through their notebooks looking for anything that was close to the liver in the notes. i was paying close attention to the one kid (sits in the front, definition of guileless, really anxious to learn) and i litturally saw the light bulb go off in his head. the second he realized what was wrong with the question his whole face changed. he looked up from his notebook at me, saw that i was staring at him, which confirmed for him what he was thinking, punch the kid sitting next to him on the shoulder and whispered to the people in his group what the scene was. that, right there, the face change when a kid figures something out, that's why people teach. i dig. if it happened more often, or if i was better at making it happen more often, i could see myself having a very difficult time leaving this gig. but no worries. i'll be home in december.
oh my GOD! the man sitting at the other computer's phone just rang. his ring was a woman singing "hey, your phone is ringing. HEY, your phone is ringiiing".
in other news, planning for our replacement group is well underway. i have many more trips to the capital to do before the new volunteers get here, but that really just translates to hot showers. there are a lot of changes again this year. the neatest one is that we'll probably get to meet the people that will replace us. the new group will get to visit their site before actually moving up there. so we'll show them around...um...the school and the water pump, and get to sell them all our crap. woot.
924 minutes of one tree hill we watched in about 2.5 weeks. it is perhaps the worst show i have ever been that excited to watch. every minutes was bitter sweet. after the final episode we had to watch 2 episodes of arrested development just to purge ourselves.
science fair update. started with about 12 kids. then it was 6. then it was 5. a final, 3 students will complete projects (teacher, it's just to hard. yes, welcome to life). but that's convinient for me, cause i get to take 3 students to the national one, so everybody wins! but the 3 projects are all really good ones, and i think that they will actually have a shot when we go to nationals. it makes me think of science olympiad. except now i'm fatty patty! ha!
oh my GOD! the man sitting at the other computer's phone just rang. his ring was a woman singing "hey, your phone is ringing. HEY, your phone is ringiiing".
in other news, planning for our replacement group is well underway. i have many more trips to the capital to do before the new volunteers get here, but that really just translates to hot showers. there are a lot of changes again this year. the neatest one is that we'll probably get to meet the people that will replace us. the new group will get to visit their site before actually moving up there. so we'll show them around...um...the school and the water pump, and get to sell them all our crap. woot.
924 minutes of one tree hill we watched in about 2.5 weeks. it is perhaps the worst show i have ever been that excited to watch. every minutes was bitter sweet. after the final episode we had to watch 2 episodes of arrested development just to purge ourselves.
science fair update. started with about 12 kids. then it was 6. then it was 5. a final, 3 students will complete projects (teacher, it's just to hard. yes, welcome to life). but that's convinient for me, cause i get to take 3 students to the national one, so everybody wins! but the 3 projects are all really good ones, and i think that they will actually have a shot when we go to nationals. it makes me think of science olympiad. except now i'm fatty patty! ha!